Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England 9781442696426

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COLONIAL VIRTUE: THE MOBILITY OF TEMPERANCE IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

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KASEY EVANS

Colonial Virtue The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4359-8

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetablebased inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Evans, Kasey, 1976– Colonial virtue : the mobility of temperance in Renaissance England / Kasey Evans. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4359-8 1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. Temperance – England – History. 3. Temperance – Great Britain – Colonies – History. 4. Literature and society – Great Britain – Colonies – History. 5. Temperance in literature. I. Title. PR428.M63E93 2012

820.9'353

C2011-906381-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

In memory of Janet Adelman

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Contents

Acknowledgments Illustrations

Introduction 1

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Temperance’s Renaissance Transformations Aristotle in Renaissance England 15 Temperance in Renaissance Iconography Temperance and Colonialism 44

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PART I: TEMPERANCE EXPLORES AMERICA 2

Edmund Spenser’s ‘Blood Guiltie’ Temperance

63

Guyon’s Guilty Hands 68 What Guyon Disdains 77 Mourning the Tempest 86 3

Intemperance and ‘Weak Remembrance’ in The Tempest 94 The Brain – Washed and Rewritten 98 Lords of Weak Remembrance 102 Of Cannibals, White Cannibals, and Liars Making the Old World New 117

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Contents

PART II: TEMPERANCE COLONIZES AMERICA 4

John Donne, Christopher Brooke, and Temperate Revenge in 1622 Jamestown 127 Donne and the Post-posement of ‘Temporall Gayne’ Christopher Brooke’s ‘Temperate Change’ 145

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Globalizing Temperance in Seventeenth-Century Economics 160 Good for the Head, Evil for the Neck: The Body Politic Smokes Tobacco 166 ‘The Guts Do Carry the Belly’: Gerard Malynes 173 Coffee, Chocolate, and Efficiency in the New World 183 Conclusion 201

Coda

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Notes

209

Works Cited Index

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Acknowledgments

There are innumerable ways in which the author of this book fails to exemplify its titular virtue. Intemperate gratitude is one of her favourites. Northwestern University has provided generous material and intellectual support throughout this project. I am grateful to the University Research Grants Committee, which granted a publication subvention, and to the Department of English, which offered additional support for image rights and reproductions. For such rights and reproductions, I thank the Bibliothe`que Municipale de Rouen; the Bibliothe`que Nationale de France; the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford; the Montre´al Muse´e des Beaux Arts; the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; SCALA / Art Resource, New York; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. I am particularly grateful to Tony Kaufmann at Abaris Books, Connecticut, for his kind assistance with additional reproductions and research. Chapter 2 is reprinted with permission from SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 49, no. 1 (Winter 2009). My thanks to the editors for their support of my work at an earlier stage. For invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this material, I am grateful to audiences at the Chicago Renaissance Seminar, the Northwestern Early Modern Colloquium, and the summer 2010 symposium of the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies. I extend sincere thanks to Suzanne Rancourt at the University of Toronto Press for her consistent advocacy of this project, and to Barb Porter for coaxing the manuscript (and its author) through the publication process. I am also grateful to Margaret Burgess for meticulous editing, and to the two anonymous readers who provided invaluable encouragement and suggestions for revision.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to a community of talented friends and colleagues who inspire and sustain from afar, including J.K. Barrett, Krista Duttenhaver, Jenny Mann, and Travis Williams. Coleman Hutchison breaks the mold, as an interlocutor and a friend; the book and I are all the better for his interventions. My enduring thanks to Hunt Howell, always my implied reader, and gracious enough not to resent me for it. Thank you to my wonderful colleagues at Northwestern for advice and support of every imaginable kind. I think with particular gratitude of Jay Grossman, John Keene, Mary Kinzie, and Jules Law, who have offered material and moral support at crucial moments. Henry Binford and Carl Smith have provided mentorship, friendship, and inspiration, and I am grateful to them both. My early modern colleagues in the English department – Jeffrey Masten, Regina Schwartz, Laurie Shannon, Wendy Wall, and Will West – are unceasingly generous, engaged, and constructive, and I am enriched by their company, intellectual and otherwise. Jeff Masten and Wendy Wall in particular have gone above and beyond the call of duty as mentors, readers, colleagues, and friends; I thank them with all my heart. Special thanks to the faculty Breakfast Club – Katy Breen, John Alba Cutler, Nick Davis, Rebecca Johnson, Evan Mwangi, Susie Phillips, Emily Rohrbach, Viv Soni, Helen Thompson, and Ivy Wilson. No thanks would be adequate for Nick Davis, Susie Phillips, and Helen Thompson, who are brilliant in every sense of that word. I am grateful to my graduate mentors Kevis Goodman and Lorna Hutson, whose examples and advice continue to sustain me. I lack the words to thank Albert Ascoli, and not only because I have forgotten all of my Italian. Mio maestro e autore! Grazie. My beloved advisor Janet Adelman died in the spring of 2010, as I worked to complete this project. I dedicate this book to her memory, with love. Thank you to Dan Maloney, who helps me to be a better reader and a better person. Thank you to Drew Evans and Greg Evans, for being there in every way that matters. Thank you to Shon Doseck, for the long way home. And thank you to my parents, for teaching me how to read.

Illustrations

Figure 1: Temperance with sword and bridle; Giotto di Bondone; Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy; 1306 (Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York; reproduced by permission of Art Resource, New York) 23 Figure 2: Temperance with two vessels; Andrea da Firenze and Leonardo de’ Molinari da Besozzo; Chiesa di S. Giovanni a Carbonara, Naples; begun 1427 (photography by Luciano Romano; Scala / Art Resource, New York; reproduced by permission of Art Resource, New York) 25 Figure 3: Temperance with two vessels, from the Series of the Seven Virtues; Georges Reverdy (Gaspar Reverdino); Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 31, Italian Artists of the Sixteenth Century, entry no. 31 (482) (reproduced by permission of Abaris Books, Connecticut) 26 Figure 4: Temperance with hourglass, from the Virtues of Good Government; Ambrogio Lorenzetti; Palazzo Pubblico, Siena; c. 1338–40, repaired 1350s (reproduced by permission of Scala / Art Resource, New York) 28 Figure 5: Temperance with hourglass, from the Nine Virtues; Cornelis Massys; The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 18, German Masters of the Sixteenth Century, entry no. 43 (111) (reproduced by permission of Abaris Books, Connecticut) 29 Figure 6: Temperance in the new iconography, from Formula vitae honestae: De quattuor virtutibus cardinalibus; Pseudo-Seneca (Martin of Braga); ms. fr. 9186, fol. 304r; fifteenth century (reproduced by permission of the Bibliothe`que nationale de France) 31

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Figure 7: Temperance in the new iconography, Ethiques, politique et e´conomiques; Nicole Oresme, translating Aristotle; ms. fr. 927, I 2, fol. 17v; 1453–4 (photography by Thierry Ascencio-Parvy; Collections of the Bibliothe`que Municipale de Rouen; reproduced by permission of the Bibliothe`que Municipale de Rouen) 32 Figure 8: Temperance as clock-keeper; Epıˆtre d’Othe´a, ms. Laud Misc. 570, fol. 28v; Christine de Pisan; 1450 (reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries) 34 Figure 9: Temperance in the new iconography; Livre des quatre Vertus Cardinaulx, ms. Laud Misc. 570, fol. 16r (reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries) 36 Figure 10: ‘Temperantia,’ The Seven Virtues; Pieter Bruegel; c. 1559; The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 56, Netherlandish Artists, no. 70 (reproduced by permission of Abaris Books, Connecticut) 38 Figure 11: Accoutrements of temperance, in ‘Still Life with Flagon, Glass, Jug, and Bridle’; Jan Torrentius; 1614 (reproduced by permission of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) 40 Figure 12: Allegory of Marital Fidelity; Jan miense Molenaer; 1633 (photography by Katherine Wetzel; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; The Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Collection; reproduced by permission of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts) 42 Figure 13: Dido; Andrea Mantegna; Tempera and gold on linen canvas; c. 1500 (photography by Christine Guest; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; purchase, John W. Tempest Fund; reproduced by permission of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) 105 Figure 14: Hours of the Virgin, Pierpont Morgan ms M.390, f. 45r (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910; reproduced by permission of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) 113 Figure 15: Depiction of an Englishman; Andrew Boorde; The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge; Bodleian 56 Art. Seld., B4r; c. 1562 (reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries) 118

COLONIAL VIRTUE: THE MOBILITY OF TEMPERANCE IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

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Introduction

In the notorious conclusion to book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, destroys the Bower of Bliss in a ‘tempest of . . . wrathfulnesse.’1 Punning on the knight’s nominal virtue, this meteorological event represents at least a challenge to, if not an outright repudiation of, Guyon’s allegorical identity. Underlying both ‘temperance’ and ‘tempest’ is the Latin tempus, but these English terms trade in distinct varieties of time. The English ‘temperance’ comes from the Latin temperantia, or moderation. As the present participle of the verb temperare, to moderate, temperantia was the word used by Cicero to translate the cardinal virtue that Plato and Aristotle called sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη), meaning ‘soundmindedness, prudence, moderation, sobriety, self-control.’2 The Latin temperare, in turn, derives from the Latin noun tempus, meaning time (OED s.v. ‘temper,’ v.). As I will discuss at greater length in chapter 1, this temporal legacy of temperance becomes especially important in the European Renaissance,3 when representations of the virtue begin to emphasize first the postponement of the passions over time, and subsequently, by extension, the industrious control of time itself. ‘Tempest,’ on the other hand, relies on a different conception of time. Like ‘temperance,’ the Latin equivalent of ‘tempest’ (tempesta) is derived from tempus; but in English, the temporal resonances of ‘tempest’ imply neither patient delay nor human sovereignty. From the fourteenth century onward, ‘tempest’ signifies both ‘a time, a period, an occasion’ (OED 4) and ‘a violent commotion or disturbance; a tumult, rush; agitation, perturbation; calamity, misfortune, trouble’ (OED 2a and b). ‘Tempest’ is thus the English equivalent of the Latin

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occasio or the Greek kairos (καιρός): the climactic moment of passionate crisis and action. While ‘temperance’ entails the management of the tempus or chronos, the undifferentiated dilatory time of endurance, the ‘tempest’ represents the decisive time of choice, action, and realization, the seizure of a moment that will not pass by again.4 The conclusion to book 2 serves as an ideal place to begin this study of temperance in part because of the ambiguity and paradox it seems to enfold. Spenserians disagree about where to locate the failure or crisis engendered by this episode, which displaces an anticipated and decisive victory over the avatars of intemperance. Does crisis lie in the knight himself, who fails to uphold his eponymous virtue, or rather in the fallen reader who balks at temperance’s rigorous and unrelenting exercise?5 In my reading, though – and in appreciation of the discursive richness of temperance, which this book is dedicated to exploring – Guyon’s paradoxical, tempestuous destruction of the Bower is an incisive representation of the semantic capaciousness that temperance achieves in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literary, philosophical, and political discourse. This period bears witness to temperance’s discursive and conceptual mobility, and to its acquisition of a rich array of connotations and implications over the course of its migrations. The dissonance of Guyon’s ‘tempest’ therefore attests neither to a lapse in character nor to a failure of readerly rigour, but instead to an expansion of the concept itself into uncharted and challenging territory. The second reason for this episode’s privileged, epigraphic position in this book concerns the geographical specificity of the Bower. As the critical canon has acknowledged since the early days of New Historicism, the challenges of the Bower are not merely cognitive but political; just so, the mobility of temperance is not merely discursive but geographic. Prompted by the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, three decades of Spenserians have concurred that the Bower – whatever its aesthetic, allegorical, and metapoetic implications – is also the ‘faery’ equivalent of an English colony in Ireland and/or the Americas.6 Like the tension between tempest and temperance, the colonial context makes Guyon’s destruction of the Bower an apt introduction to this project, which investigates temperance’s dissemination and extension into texts that reflect on the theory and practice of New World colonialism. The ‘mobility of temperance’ that concerns me here, that is to say, is, first: the term’s own migration into new discursive and geographic spaces; and second: the colonial migrations carried on in the name of temperance – the

Introduction

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imaginative and literal mobility it enables by providing an ethical rationale for England’s New World colonial ventures. Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss represents a compelling consolidation of precisely these concerns. In the colonial context, Guyon’s ‘tempest’ – conduct that would ostensibly violate the mandates of temperance in its classical conception – nevertheless falls under the purview of that very virtue, which migrates during the English Renaissance from the province of the self-disciplining individual humanist into the public arena of political and cultural ambition, competition, and conquest. The project of this book is to document such migrations, tracing temperance’s rhetorical, political, and geographical mobility from the scholarly discourses of classical and humanistic Europe into the political and economic vocabularies of the nascent British Empire – that is to say, the virtue’s transatlantic mobility from England into the New World. This commitment to tracking conceptual and geographic movement demands, in turn, a dynamic methodology, which recognizes and analyses the diffusion of temperance beyond the borders of the literary canon. Colonial Virtue thus combines an interest in canonical literary works (The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s Tempest, John Donne’s sermons) with textual products less commonly subjected to this kind of close reading and discursive analysis: occasional verse (Christopher Brooke’s poem about a Powhatan attack on the Jamestown settlement, Joshua Sylvester’s verse commentary on the dangers of coffee); political tracts (King James I’s Counterblaste against Tobacco, economist Gerard Malynes’s treatises on international trade); and practical advice manuals (physician Thomas Trapham’s book on medicine in Jamaica; merchant Thomas Tryon’s polemic on dietary temperance). By taking an expansive approach both to the objects of study and to the signifying potential of this crucial virtue, Colonial Virtue aims to advance a comprehensive understanding of temperance in all of its philosophical and political dimensions, and to demonstrate the virtue’s pivotal role in shaping early modern debates over the ethics and conduct of English colonialism. It is this methodological and interpretive breadth that distinguishes Colonial Virtue from extant work on temperance in Renaissance literature and culture. Recent work by early modern scholars evinces a growing interest in the virtue of temperance as a meaningful cultural category in Renaissance England. Michael Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (1999) started the conversation by

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considering temperance in its physiological dimension: the humoral equilibrium maintained through acts of eating, drinking, and elimination. A riposte to the Foucauldian understanding of discipline as a mechanism of cultural oppression, Schoenfeldt’s book argued for temperance as a mechanism of self-fashioning – a democratic and material complement to Latinate humanistic scholarship.7 Expanding this purview to include various articulations of mediocritas, Joshua Scodel’s Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (2002) considered the strategic deployments of the middle way as an aesthetic, ethical, and political ideal in early modern culture.8 Combining erudite literary analysis with nuanced historical and political insights, Scodel argued that English Renaissance literature bears witness to a cultural preoccupation with temperance, and other forms of moderation, among the social and intellectual elite, often to ironic or subversive effect. Published almost concurrently, Mary Floyd-Wilson’s English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (2003) examined theories of climate, geography, race, and humoral temperament – discourses she collectively terms ‘geohumoralism’ – to demonstrate the relevance of temperance to Renaissance ethnography, racial ideology, and attendant political discourses.9 Applicable not only to individual human subjects but to entire nations and regions of the world, Floyd-Wilson’s version of temperance designated an equilibrium among such diverse forces as climatological influence, geographical location, dietary composition, and cultural habit. While Schoenfeldt, Scodel, and Floyd-Wilson have drawn attention to the various resonances of temperance and its Renaissance cognates, other critics have recognized the term’s relevance to English ideology and practice in the early decades of New World colonialism and settlement. In 1986, John Gillies noticed the centrality of the virtue in early English moralizing of the Jamestown settlers, whose intemperance was blamed for their failures of health and productivity.10 A decade later, Lorna Hutson’s persuasive article ‘Chivalry for Merchants; or, Knights of Temperance in the Realms of Gold’ analysed temperance as a term used by English merchants and humanists to differentiate themselves, ethically and strategically, from the Spanish conquistadores.11 Similarly, David T. Read’s Temperate Conquest: Spenser and the Spanish New World (2000) offers a thorough and incisive reading of Spenser’s ‘Legend of Temperance’ as an apologia for England’s late entrance onto the scene of New World colonialism.12 Colonial Virtue, in turn, argues that the New World context identified by Gillies, Hutson, and Read has profound implications not only for

Introduction

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literary interpretations of Spenser and chivalric romance more generally, as their arguments show, but also for the scholarly understanding of Renaissance English political ethics. New World colonialism, I argue, is both an occasion for and, in part, a political realization of temperance in its most expansive sense: an ethical imperative on which English poets, sermonists, politicians, economists, physicians, and patriots focused their colonial ambitions and reservations. This book thus aims both to synthesize and to expand the extant body of scholarship on temperance: first by considering another, under-explored dimension of the virtue of temperance – the temporal – which increased temperance’s viability as a political and economic rationale; and second by suggesting a specific historical context – the colonial – in which temperance’s various dimensions converge, and in which the virtue achieves a privileged status as a vital term of ethical contestation. Finally, in the broadest methodological sense, Colonial Virtue aims to bridge the persistent divide between traditional philological and political postcolonial criticism. Grounded in an historically and linguistically nuanced intellectual history of temperance, the book draws on the work of such eminent scholars as E´mile Maˆle, Rosemond Tuve, Helen North, and Jacques LeGoff: exemplars of the explanatory power of historical and philological criticism.13 Simultaneously, in narrating temperance’s evolution into a touchstone for debates about New World colonialism, Colonial Virtue puts this intellectual history in conversation with postcolonial critics such as Andrew Hadfield, Willy Maley, Thomas Scanlan, and Shankar Raman.14 This book also aspires toward a methodology as expansive as its critical influences, including both literary and ‘non-literary’ texts as sites of close reading and linguistic analysis. By thus following the example of critics such as Judith Anderson, Andrea Finkelstein, and Jonathan Gil Harris, Colonial Virtue argues for the value of philological and postcolonial approaches to texts not traditionally considered part of the literary canon.15 This book thus aims not only to advance a more comprehensive understanding of a particular Renaissance virtue and its politically inflected deployments, but also to model an expansive critical perspective that speaks across scholarly subfields, textual canons, and disciplinary bounds. In Colonial Virtue, I hope to chronicle the mobility of a particular concept in Renaissance philosophical, literary, and political discourse, while facilitating, and benefiting from, the mobility of extant scholarly conversations and methodologies.

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Colonial Virtue begins by establishing a foundation in classical philosophy, philology, and iconographic history. Chapter 1, entitled ‘Temperance’s Renaissance Transformations,’ briefly surveys the place of temperance in classical Greek and Roman philosophy before turning to the conceptual transformations wrought by late medieval and early modern artists, writers, and philosophers. In readings of various artefacts of medieval and Renaissance visual culture, this introductory chapter chronicles the progressive temporalization of temperance, and, consequently, its entanglement with the values of patience, deferral, efficiency, and profitability. The chapter concludes by turning its attention to political texts concerned with colonial settlement in the New World, in which writers such as Richard Hakluyt and Richard Eburne invoke temperance, along with its subsidiary temporal values, as a warrant for English plantation and a guarantor of its success. The remainder of the book proceeds in two parts, separated by chronology and textual genre. Part 1, ‘Temperance Explores America,’ comprises two chapters that focus on canonical literary texts: chapter 2 on book 2 of The Faerie Queene, and chapter 3 on The Tempest. As I will discuss, these texts have received substantial critical attention for their exploration of the ethical implications and consequences of New World colonialism. And yet despite their clear resonances with the colonial New World, Spenser’s poem and Shakespeare’s play are not so much definitive as exploratory in their applications of temperance to the New World context. Part 1 thus considers the way in which these canonical texts extend temperance experimentally into the discursive territory of New World colonialism, and of the pre-capitalist economic practices and ideologies concurrent with early American settlement. Building on the aforementioned interest in temperance as a virtue of temporal control, these literary texts, I argue, explore temperance’s imbrication with such pre-capitalist economic concerns as efficiency, commodification, and primitive accumulation, especially as they influenced England’s early New World ventures. Published before the establishment of any English settlements in the New World, the primary texts I treat in these chapters serve as imaginative explorations of the geographic expansion, economic prosperity, and ethical quandaries that might be produced by temperance’s invocation and exercise in England’s New World endeavours. Chapter 2, ‘Edmund Spenser’s “Blood Guiltie” Temperance,’ investigates such imaginative explorations in three episodes from book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (entitled ‘The Legend of

Introduction

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Temperance’): the deaths and burials of Mortdant and Amavia at the outset of the book, the hero’s descent into the Cave of Mammon, and his destruction of the Bower of Bliss. Reading these episodes sequentially, I argue that Guyon replaces his early tendency toward affect and empathy with a rigorously mercantile version of temperance. Destroying the Bower of Bliss in the episode I describe above, I argue, Guyon evinces the affective poverty of this virtue in its newly quantitative guise. In Spenser’s view, the temporal and quantitative elements of temperance lead finally to complicity in the forced labour and primitive accumulation of New World colonialism. Temperance, in this context, comes to represent not the moderation but the abandonment of affective generosity on which mercy – both human and divine – depends. Departing from Spenser’s pun on ‘tempest’ and ‘temperance,’ chapter 3 – ‘Intemperance and “Weak Remembrance” in The Tempest’ – is grounded in two primary sources: Shakespeare’s late romance play and John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne’s Essays, a text cited verbatim in The Tempest but nowhere else in the Shakespearean oeuvre. I argue that the play uses the eponymous tempest – alongside other acts of colonial, magical, and political power – to critique New World colonialism on the grounds of its intemperance. Adducing as relevant context not only the cited passage but two Montaigne essays in their entirety – ‘On Cannibals’ and ‘On Liars’ – I combine postcolonial and comparativist approaches, arguing that the play represents acts of forgetting by its European characters as constitutive of intemperate colonial rule. Although certain kinds of merciful forgetting are requisite to the play’s comedic ending, The Tempest nevertheless registers the costs of such narrative harmony by calling attention to the intemperate erasures that facilitate this comic conclusion, which comprises a consolidation of European political and colonial power. Part 2, ‘Temperance Colonizes America,’ considers texts produced in the explicit context of England’s colonial presence in the New World. These primary texts comprise not imaginative projections about how temperance might participate in new political and economic formations, but critical evaluations of how the virtue signifies in such new contexts. Observing and manipulating temperance’s semantic flexibility, the texts considered in this section consider this virtue’s entanglement in the realities of English New World colonialism: commodity culture, militant revenge, and ethnographic racism. Part 2 includes primary texts from a variety of genres that would now qualify as ‘non-fiction,’ including sermons, elegies, health manuals,

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Colonial Virtue

and political pamphlets. While such texts constitute less traditional objects of literary analysis than epic-romance poetry and theatrical comedy, my readings aim to demonstrate that, no less than Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s, these documents continue to experiment with temperance’s broad capacity for polysemy, using that virtue both to critique and to defend England’s conduct in the New World. Part 1 traced early literary and imaginative experiments in temperance’s capacity to represent England’s hopes and fears about New World settlement; part 2, building on such precedents, considers texts that take for granted the importance of temperance for understanding, justifying, and governing England’s presence and expansion in the New World. These texts use temperance to measure the extent, the potential, and the definition of English prosperity and success in the American context. Chapter 4, ‘John Donne, Christopher Brooke, and Temperate Revenge in 1622 Jamestown,’ launches this critical venture into less canonical, but equally politically provocative, terrain. This chapter takes as its primary texts two rhetorical responses to the 22 March 1622 Powhatan attack on the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia: John Donne’s sermon ‘To the Honorable, the Virginia Company,’ delivered in November; and Christopher Brooke’s verse invective ‘A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia,’ most likely published in September of the same year. A study in contrasts, these texts illuminate the rhetorical sea change undergone by temperance during the preceding decades. Donne in fact never names temperance outright in the sermon, which is thus an unlikely candidate for inclusion in this project. But Donne, I argue, uses all of the markers of temperance discourse without using the term, inviting speculation about his careful avoidance of the virtue of temperance per se. The sermon offers one explanation for this deliberate side-stepping, I argue, in its denigration of the voracious English appetite for New World commodities. Donne hesitates to identify temperance by name because of temperance’s emergent cultural role as a publicly administered commodity, which renders it as susceptible to fetishization as the ‘trees, or druggs, or Dyes’ whose material allure distracts New World settlers from their missionary charge. Christopher Brooke, on the other hand, evinces no such compunction. An outraged, vitriolic, and racist incitement to vengeance, Brooke’s poem simultaneously advocates complete extermination of the native Americans and, bizarrely, classifies his response as an explicitly ‘temperate’ one. Reviling the settlers’ sense of ‘security’ as vulnerability, Brooke recommends a policy of preemptive violence, such that ‘fear’d danger’ prompts anticipatory

Introduction

11

violence even ‘absent anger’ or provocation. In Brooke’s poem, temperance comes to occupy the space of pre-emptive passion – a virtue not of postponement but of prolepsis. Chapter 5 turns its attention entirely away from literary productions, and toward texts produced explicitly as meditations on colonialism and its economic consequences. Entitled ‘Globalizing Temperance in Seventeenth-Century Economics,’ this chapter tests the rhetorical range of temperance’s discursive diffusion during the early decades of English colonialism. In a two-part analysis – divided by chronology, geography, and field of expertise – this chapter investigates the function of temperance in economic and medical texts, where it paradoxically names both the resistance to and the inevitability of England’s New World colonialism. The first half of the chapter considers two economic tracts produced early in the seventeenth century, exploring the invocation of temperance as an ethical ideal by which to judge the health of the body politic. James I’s famous Counterblaste to Tobacco (1603) and Gerard Malynes’s anti-usury treatise Saint George for England Allegorically Described (1601) both cite temperance in the service of economic conservatism, decrying England’s appetite for foreign luxury goods. But precisely because temperance has achieved such discursive fluency over the preceding century, I argue, such invocations are counterproductive, for temperance resonates not only in the national context, but internationally, to imply the health and vigour of a global body politic. Despite their fierce attempts to defend a protectionist agenda, both tracts yield their desire for stasis to temperance’s conceptual mobility, acquiescing to the inevitability of continued New World investment. Pursuing temperance along this trajectory of continued and increasing mobility, the second half of chapter 5 focuses on three medical manuals of the 1670s and 1680s. William Hughes, Thomas Trapham, and John Chamberlayne, writing enthusiastically about their experiences as physicians and pharmacological botanists in the New World, invoke temperance in its full discursive range to advocate English colonial settlement and primitive accumulation. Specifically, these writers praise New World commodities such as tea and chocolate as temperate substances, defining the virtue in radically mercantile terms. The temperance praised by Hughes, Trapham, and Chamberlayne is a virtue of temporal control and efficiency, important because it sustains the labour of colonial construction, plantation, and governance. Temperance in this sense opens up to the English writers yet another horizon of discovery – not

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Colonial Virtue

of new lands or botanical wonders, but of additional time, additional hours of wakefulness in which to labour. As earlier chapters showed, temperance was once adduced as an ethical justification of New World settlement. By the end of the seventeenth century, I demonstrate here, the success of the colonial settlement serves, in turn, as the criterion by which New World commodities are judged to be temperate. Temperance seems to yield its mobility to the colonial project itself; the virtue formerly invoked to defend colonialism becomes subservient to the colonial project, redefined as a mere accessory to the inevitable forward march of English colonial ambition. The conclusion to Colonial Virtue offers a brief reading of Thomas Tryon’s popular advice manual A Discourse of Temperance (1683) to provide a retrospective vantage on the heyday of temperance’s cultural and political importance. By the dawn of the ‘long eighteenth century,’ England’s commitment to New World colonialism was well established in the historical record; apologists no longer needed to rely on the unimpeachable English ideal of temperance to defend a moribund political venture. Recognizing and decrying the colonial appropriation of temperance during the preceding century, Tryon pairs his jeremiad for the decline of this ‘most excellent (though most neglected) Virtue in the World’ with a committed ideology of antiimperialism. Giving voice to an ‘East Indian Brackmanny’ and ‘an Ethiopean or Negro-Slave’ in fictional dialogues with European colonists, Tryon reassigns temperance to the colonized subjects rather than the European colonizers, and attempts to restore the virtue to what he understands to be its original, ideologically uninflected, sense. Tryon’s commentary, I suggest, serves as a valuable, historically proximate cognate for the critical perspective that I aim to provide in Colonial Virtue. His bitterly aggrieved sense of temperance’s decline serves as a useful measure of how far the virtue migrated during the first century of England’s New World colonial endeavours; his call to reinvigorate this faltering virtue testifies to the de´nouement of temperance’s colonial career. And yet: the fact that even Tryon reassigns temperance not to some other theatre of action, but to the oppressed colonized subject, suggests that temperance may yet prove to play a role in adjudicating political morality in the eighteenth century. Temperance’s career as a colonial watchword has any number of analogues in various eras of political ambition, action, and contestation. A brief survey of recent American political discourse reveals a host of terms that deserve their own rhetorical and intellectual histories: ‘globalization,’

Introduction

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‘terrorism,’ ‘national security,’ ‘stimulus,’ ‘bipartisan,’ ‘postpartisan,’ and so on. It is against terms like these – whose strategic deployment to various political ends invites suspicions of disingenuousness if not outright doublespeak – that George Orwell rails in the conclusion to ‘Politics and the English Language,’ where he identifies some of his own bugbears of euphemism and indirection (jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno). Orwell would consign these ‘worn-out and useless phrase[s] . . . into the dustbin, where [they] belong[].’ Perhaps the history of the term ‘temperance’ would satisfy Orwell’s desire for lexical housecleaning. Formerly saturated with colonial ideology, this once consequential virtue has since been leached of political consequence, retaining only a whiff of quaint and archaic morality in twentyfirst century diction. Few would disagree with Orwell that euphemistic tendencies once concealed under the cloak of temperance are well dispensed with. But by recovering the story of temperance’s rhetorical mobility, Colonial Virtue aims to expose both the motivations and the machinery of such appropriations.

1 Temperance’s Renaissance Transformations

One block from my office in the English department at Northwestern University is the Frances Willard House Museum, home and workplace of the eponymous nineteenth-century social reformer from 1865 to 1898.1 Frances E. Willard served as the president of the Evanston College for Ladies, and subsequently as the first Dean of Women at Northwestern, before committing herself to the Temperance Crusade at both the local and national levels. Co-founder and second president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Willard orated, marched, rallied, and evangelized, on a mission ‘to deliver those who are held in slavery by their own appetites and passions.’2 That description comes from an admiring letter to Willard written in 1883 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose extension of the language of slavery to the temperance movement attests to the social and political urgency attendant on the latter cause. Perceived as coterminous with abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and urban poverty reform, temperance commanded both lofty moral authority and political vitality in the nineteenth century, in devoutly Methodist Evanston, Illinois and throughout the United States. More than a century later, temperance’s fortunes seem to have declined. No longer a matter of political urgency, the virtue seems rather to have settled into the role of a quaint ideological relic. Even in Evanston, an intellectually and culturally vibrant suburb of Chicago, the Frances Willard House generates enough interest for only one semiweekly tour, held on the first and third Sunday of each month. This obsolescence might be readily ascribed to temperance’s historically vital, but by now superseded understandings of alcohol’s social and physiological effects; of evangelism’s usefulness as a tool of social

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reform; and of the universal relevance of any given institutionalized religion. To the extent that potential visitors to the Frances Willard House consider the history of temperance prior to the nineteenth century, they might assimilate the concept to simple moderation, or perhaps the Aristotelian mean – certainly among the least sexy bequests of Greco-Roman culture to the contemporary West. As my introduction suggests, though, nineteenth-century social reform and Prohibition were not the first occasions for temperance’s rise to social and political prominence. In sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury English culture, temperance became a term of enormous political, social, and ethical currency – one in whose name writers of different ideological and literary proclivities evaluated both the promise and the peril of England’s colonial ventures in the New World. Before temperance moved to the Frances Willard House, its storied history included many other migrations, both discursive – from the scholarly texts of classical and humanistic Europe into the political and economic vocabularies of the nascent British Empire – and geographic – from Continental Europe to England, and then across the Atlantic to colonial America. The chapter that follows offers an intellectual history that seeks to recover the sources and the historical conditions of temperance’s Renaissance rise to political relevance, surveying the place of temperance in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, and then turning to the conceptual transformations wrought by late medieval and early modern visual artists, writers, and philosophers. By recovering the process of temperance’s radical overdetermination in late medieval and early Renaissance texts – attending especially to the virtue’s imbrication with concepts of time and temporality – this chapter reveals temperance as a vital category of not only ethical, but also political and economic evaluation in Renaissance England. By tracing temperance’s evolution through a variety of media and discourses – statues, paintings, and raisin barrels, as well as texts from ancient philosophy, medieval theology, and Renaissance exploration – I aim to belie this virtue’s ostensible conservatism, and to reveal the political, and especially the colonial, currency it enjoyed in Renaissance Europe, too long obscured from critical attention. Aristotle in Renaissance England The philosophical and ethical primacy of the virtue of temperance predates the Renaissance by at least seventeen centuries. In the

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Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle identifies temperance with his theory of the mean, defining the virtue as the moderation of the innate human desire for ‘pleasant sensible objects,’ ‘such things as nearly everyone must share in and take pleasure in.’ ‘[I]f temperance is the best disposition concerning [such] things,’ Aristotle explains, ‘the mean state regarding the pleasant sensible objects . . . will be temperance, a mean state between profligacy and insensibility.’3 Although the Nicomachean Ethics complicates the matter – restricting the virtue to pleasures shared by animals, and relating it to corporeal health4 – this provisional definition attests to temperance’s centrality to Aristotle’s ethical philosophy, since all virtue, according to Aristotle, represents a mean (mesotes) between extremes of excess and deficiency.5 Courage is the virtuous mean between fearfulness and rashness; justice the virtuous mean between mercy and vengeance; and so on. Identified with moderation and the mesotes between extremes, temperance thus provides the foundation, for Aristotle, for all virtuous impulse and activity. Appropriately for such a philosophical postulate – but ironically given the virtue’s Renaissance transformations, as we will see – Aristotelian temperance comprises a stable and untroubled relationship between the subject and the ‘pleasant sensible objects’ s/he desires. Temperance (sophrosyne) is thereby distinguished, in the Nicomachean Ethics (VII.2), from the ancillary capacity for continence (enkrateia), a trait that, although praiseworthy, does not reach the perfection of an ethical virtue. For the temperate individual, the intellect dominates the irrational appetites entirely; indulgence in the vices is no longer tempting. The continent individual, on the other hand, continues to experience the pull of appetitive desires, but resists acting on such impulses by cleaving to rationality. Continence continues the struggle that temperance has already won. When Renaissance humanists inherit these philosophical concepts, they effect a series of revisions that not only reverse the Aristotelian binary, but further prioritize agonism, efficiency, and quantity – values that are tenuously related even to continence, in its classical instantiation, but that instead assimilate temperance to the demands of nascent mercantilism, primitive accumulation, and colonial endeavour. These additional dimensions accrue to the virtue slowly and unevenly. But even some early modern texts that appear to preserve the Aristotelian distinction between temperance and continence in fact portend the gradual transformation of this cardinal virtue. One such

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ostensibly Aristotelian text is Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, reproduced here in Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 English translation: And therfore I say unto you, that continencie may be compared to a Capitain that fighteth manlie, and though his ennemies be stronge and well appointed, yet geveth he them the overthrowe, but for al that not without much a do and daunger. But temperance free from all disquietinge, is like the Capitain that without resistance overcommeth and reigneth. And havinge in the mynde where she is, not onlie assuaged, but cleane quenched the fire of gredie desire . . . [temperance] maketh him quiet and full of rest, in everie part equall and of good proportion . . . fille[d] . . . with such a cleare caulmenesse, that he is never out of pacience: and becommeth full and wholy most obedient to reason, and readie to tourn unto her all his motions, and folow her where she lust to leade him, without anie resistance, like a tender lambe that renneth, standeth and goith alwaies by the ewes side, and moveth only as he seeth her do. This vertue therefore is most perfect, and is cheeflie requisit in Princis, bicause of it arrise manie other.6

Castiglione and his Signore Octaviano follow Aristotle in lauding temperance over continence, because it represents a more ‘perfect’ conquest of the passions, a more sophisticated state in the evolution of the rational humanistic subject, and an ethical foundation for other virtues. And yet Castiglione’s analogies betray a wistful regret about the Aristotelian hierarchy. What courtier would not prefer to be a ‘Capitain that fighteth manlie’ than a ‘tender lambe’ who dotes on the every gesture of his mother the ewe? Indeed, at the outset of the book, Castiglione’s nobles identify the very martial prowess that is identified here with continence as the ‘principall and true profession of a Courtyer,’ who ought ‘to bee knowen among other for his hardinesse.’ The courtier must excel in ‘feates of armes’ more than in ‘other qualities . . . requisite in a capitaine.’7 Despite Castiglione’s fidelity to the Aristotelian hierarchy of temperance over continence, his courtiers romanticize the heroic agonism of the perpetual rational struggle against appetitive desire – a characteristic of both classical continence and early modern ambition. A similar reversal, and a similar combination of classicism and mercantile ambition, informs the most famous Renaissance literary treatment of temperance: book 2 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Spenser dubs the second of his six epic-romantic quests ‘The Legend of

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Temperance’ rather than continence, a choice that has puzzled some Spenserians, since both the Legend’s eponymous Knight of Temperance, Guyon, and Prince Arthur, The Faerie Queene’s composite representation of the ideal sovereign, struggle and ‘fighteth manlie’ to restore and maintain this titular virtue.8 Harold L. Weatherby’s compelling explanations not only resolve that question, but also prompt further productive ones – specifically about the particular historical appeal of Aristotelian continence and its attendant struggles. Weatherby adduces two possible explanations for Spenser’s choice. First, he suggests, Spenser might have appealed not to Aristotle directly but to the Greek Church fathers who adapted him, and who – as Helen North explains – extended ‘an especially enthusiastic welcome’ to the classical conception of temperance and continence, which they ‘identified with those qualities of purity, chastity, sobriety, and self-denial that the Christians regarded as peculiarly their own.’9 As Weatherby explains, the Christian ethos of salvation through sacrifice and suffering made the active struggles of continence (enkrateia) more appealing than the equanimity of temperance (sophrosyne), but the fathers nevertheless seem to have preferred the latter term: ‘Clement, Athanasius, and others [among the Church fathers] use sophrosyne [temperance] when they seem to be describing the work of enkrateia [continence], in effect identifying sophrosyne with a specifically Christian and ascetical understanding of enkrateia.’10 The affinity for suffering and asceticism evacuates the concept of untroubled sophrosyne of interest for these early Christian theologians, who reassign the term to the praiseworthy agonism that Aristotle identified with continence. Applying Weatherby and North’s logic to early modern England specifically: the experience of religious conflict in general – as well as the particular piety of Reformation Protestantism – help to explain the appeal of a virtue of continual struggle over one of untroubled certainty. As Weatherby’s readings make clear, though, this reversal of Aristotle’s hierarchy is not driven entirely or even principally by religious motives, despite its frequent enactment in religious texts and commentary. Weatherby identifies another precedent for Spenser’s terminological revision in humanistic translations of Scripture, including Erasmus’s Latin and sixteenth-century English translations, where ‘temperance replaces continence as the standard synonym for enkrateia.’11 Weatherby adduces the example of Erasmus’s Latin translation and annotation of Titus 1:7–8. In the Geneva translation, the verses read: ‘For a Bishop must be vnreproueable, as Gods steward, not

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froward, not angry, not giuen to wine, no striker, not giuen to filthie lucre, [b]ut harberous, one that loueth goodnes, wise [sophrosyne], righteous, holy, temperate [enkrateia].’12 Erasmus renders this final list of qualities as ‘sobrium, iustum, pium, temperantem.’ Discussing Erasmus’s annotations to the translation, Weatherby explains: The burden of the annotation is to explain why [Erasmus’s] temperantem translates enkrateia more accurately than the Vulgate’s (classical) continentem, namely: Saint Paul is not referring here ‘to sensual desire alone’ but ‘to all passions – wrath, avarice, ambition, envy, fear . . . to all of these a bishop should be superior.’ From the perspective of the Ethics, that reason is surprising. We require, perhaps, a moment to realize that Erasmus is evidently substituting a quantitative distinction for Aristotle’s qualitative one – distinguishing the two virtues with respect to their inclusiveness rather than to their effectiveness. The issue for Erasmus does not seem to be whether temperance signifies the more perfect control of the passions but the control of more passions.13

The preference for Aristotelian enkrateia over Aristotelian sophrosyne, that is to say, is a preference for quantitative rather than qualitative efficacy. In assimilating classical ethics to Christian ideology, Renaissance Christian humanists wrest Aristotle’s terms away from their original significations in order to valorize Christian suffering, and to recommend an ethics of restlessness and ambition – one that aims to conquer a maximum number of vices, with maximal efficiency – over and against the quietism of Aristotle’s sophrosyne or Castiglione’s ‘tender lambe.’ Quantity and efficiency – values that will, during the Renaissance, sustain mercantilism, primitive accumulation, and English colonialism, as we will see – thus explain the early modern preference for Aristotelian enkrateia over sophrosyne. Still unexplained, though, is the early modern preference for the verbal form of Aristotelian sophrosyne. If the concept of enkrateia is more appealing to the culture of the European Renaissance, why not retain that word and its Latinate cousins – versions of continentia – as well? In fact – and this marks the chronological beginning of my argumentative intervention in this book – the particular appeal of temperantia and its Renaissance vernacular equivalents reveals the historically specific ideological force of temperance in Renaissance Europe, and especially in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The verbal forms of temperance and its cognates accomplish a sort of discursive

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conjuration, in English, calling forth vocabularies of temporality, measurement, precision, and quantity. These linguistic registers combine with the quantitative connotations of Aristotle’s enkrateia to transform the-virtue-presently-known-as-temperance into a tool and a symptom of early modern commodity and colonial cultures. English and the romance languages inherited their lexical equivalents of temperance from Cicero, who was the first to translate Aristotle’s sophrosyne as temperantia, from the Latin temperare: to divide or proportion duly, to mingle in due proportion, to combine properly; to qualify, temper; to arrange or keep in due measure or proportion, to keep within limits, to regulate, rule. As the OED explains, this etymological legacy endows temperantia with its own quantitative dimension: ‘L. temperare is generally held to be a deriv[ative] of tempus, tempor-a time or season, the proper time or season; but the sense history of both words is prehistoric and obscure.’14 While Erasmus’s rendering of enkrateia as temperantem in Titus 1:7–8 seems to hinge on the number of passions effectively subdued by the virtue, the Latin etymology implies a different quantitative character. Temperance, in this context, comprises two possible forms of temporal activity: the ability either to delay gratification of desire over time – i.e., patience or temporization; and/or temperance as the control of time itself, the virtuous subjection of time to heroic subdual. In English, early modern lyrics famously valorize both of these forms of temporal control as components of humanist mastery.15 The first appears, for example, when the allegorical Patience of Milton’s Sonnet 16 concludes, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’16 Proponents of the second form of temporal control narrate Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12 (‘nothing ’gainst Times sieth can make defence / Saue breed to braue him, when he takes thee hence’) and Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (‘[T]hough we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet . . . will make him run’).17 As the Miltonic example testifies, the first form of temporal temperance is perfectly consonant with Christian ideology about the gradual unfolding of theological history; in this sense, temperance is not a new ideal, although its cultural importance increases during and after the Protestant Reformation. The second variation, however, is as historically particular to early modern Europe as are the lyric Lotharios of Marvell’s cavalier poem. Time, in that scenario, is not a means of gradual divine revelation to be peacefully and acquiescently borne, but an antagonist, even a sexual competitor, whose relentless forward march ought not to be

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accepted but heroically resisted. Time has become not a mechanism but a character, a villain, and, in the best case scenario, an entity that can be subdued and manipulated by the heroic Renaissance humanist. And subdue time he does, at least as far as the English lexicon is concerned; the humanist’s triumph over this temporal adversary is confirmed by a novel denotation of the verb ‘to temper,’ attested only in sixteenth-century texts: ‘to regulate (a clock)’ (OED 18). The figure of the artisanal clockkeeper adjusting the timepiece emerges during this period as if to represent, metonymically, the humanistic subject whose temperance ensures his mastery over time itself. Late medieval and early Renaissance texts not concerned with the virtues or temperance per se bear witness to similarly changing attitudes toward time as an entity requiring forceful management and manipulation by the diligent humanist. In Della Famiglia (c. 1432), Leon Battista Alberti classifies time, along with the soul and the body, as a gift of nature that must be received with due gratitude and care: In order not to waste any quantity at all of something so precious, I follow this rule: I never allow myself to be idle and I avoid sleep and do not lie down unless overcome by fatigue, for it seems shameful to me to give in and be overcome without a struggle as many do who acknowledge defeat before the fight . . . I avoid sleep and idleness; I always keep busy at something . . . [A] diligent man [never] act[s] in any way but slowly . . . For a negligent man, time flies; the result is that necessity, or even his desire, will hurry him on. Then, having let the proper moment pass, he must of necessity do hurriedly and with effort what could have been done easily at the proper time . . . For this reason, my children, we must observe the proper time, distribute the tasks to be done and undertake them accordingly, and never waste an hour’s time.18

The rhetoric here is less aggressive than in Marvell’s poem; Alberti’s time is not an antagonist but a gift. And yet the passage shares with Marvell’s poem a sense of urgent responsibility and a call to energetic action. Alberti officially designates time as a ‘gift of nature’ – a designation suggestive of effortlessness, as if time, ‘not strain’d . . . droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven,’ like mercy in Portia’s famous oration.19 His own treatment of time, however, depicts it less as a gift than as a commodity with a specific exchange value: one that can be quantified; spent virtuously in ‘keep[ing] busy,’ or wasted in sleep, a slothful indulgence that must be countered with ‘the fight’ for wakeful

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productivity. Like the Castiglione passage in Hoby’s translation, Alberti’s description pays lip service to the idea of a virtue characterized by effortlessness and acquiescence, and yet valorizes the valiant, ‘manlie’ struggle against vice, indulgence, and sloth. Alberti’s commodified notion of time, and the corresponding ethical demands on the humanistic subject, bears witness to a late medieval paradigm shift in the ideology of time, famously described by Jacques Le Goff as a shift from the temps de l’e´glise to the temps du marchand. In the former paradigm, ‘time is primarily theological’ and belongs to God. ‘Consequently, divine action in its totality is so naturally connected with time that time cannot pose a problem; it is rather the necessary and natural condition of every “divine” act.’20 The temps du marchand, on the other hand, grows alongside nascent ‘commercial networks’ in Europe, which began to treat time as ‘an object of measurement . . . [and] ever more explicit regulation,’ an ‘opportunity for profit.’21 Thus objectified and submitted increasingly to human regulation, time becomes a commodity in its own right, and a site of mercantile ambition and opportunity. Temperance – the virtue conceptually derived from effortful striving against vice, and lexically associated with time per se – is thus perfectly positioned, at the intersection of humanist learning and mercantile efficiency, to contain and to articulate the new and sometimes paradoxical ethical mandates of English subjectivity, identity, and culture during a period of increasing international contact, global expansion, and colonial ambition. Temperance in Renaissance Iconography Artefacts of late medieval and early Renaissance visual culture bear witness to the ways in which this epistemic shift influences the definition of temperance, broadening its field of signification. In allegorical personifications, emblematic still lifes, and baroque portraiture, depictions of temperance in this period evolve in accordance with the virtue’s conceptual dilation. The analyses that follow, chronologically organized, advance a narrative about the expansion of temperance from its narrowly Aristotelian province into an historically specific valorization of human ingenuity and effort, especially as they inaugurate and sustain a culture of commodity production, mercantile exchange, and profit-based ambition. Traditionally, images of temperance in its Aristotelian conceptualization personify the virtue as a woman holding some combination of

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Figure 1: Temperance with sword and bridle; Giotto di Bondone; Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy; 1306 (Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, New York; reproduced by permission of Art Resource, New York)

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three attributes: the bridle, a symbol for the rational governance of the steed of the passions, an image originally derived from Plato’s Phaedrus; the sheathed sword, a symbol that combines martial heroism with the sobriety of peaceful patriotism, corresponding to Castiglione’s ‘Capitain that without resistance ouercommeth and reigneth’; and the two vessels of wine and water, which suggest both the extinguishing of the flames of passion and the dilution of inebriating desire.22 This tradition encompasses such representations as Giotto’s Temperantia from his 1306 fresco depicting the virtues (see Fig. 1). In Giotto’s grisaille, Temperantia’s well-governed body – rather than any external props, forces, or pressures – dominates the representation, suggesting the powerful autonomy of the temperate subject. Her relaxed pose – head tilted slightly to one side, right hand gesturing gently toward the hilt of the sword – reveals her freedom from immoderate passion. The bit in her mouth is barely visible, and although the sword she carries is prominent, its contours, especially near the bottom, fade into the folds of her robes, suggesting the effortlessness of her virtue. The draping over her head links Temperantia to early fourteenth-century representations of the Virgin Mary, whose holiness derives from her graceful acquiescence to a heavenly plan, her conscription into theological history as a divine vessel – an echo that underscores the gentleness and passivity of the virtue in its traditional representations. Similar postures of gentle equanimity inform other Aristotelian representations. In a monument to King Ladislas of Naples and Joan II of Navarre, fifteenth-century sculptors depict Temperance pouring wine into water to mitigate its intoxicating power (see Fig. 2). In this sculpture, Temperance’s robes drape across her body as fluidly as the water that pours from the vessel in her right hand. Her grip on the two vessels is loose and relaxed, and her expression placid; the virtue she represents is one of ease and compliance. Sixteenth-century French painter and engraver Georges Reverdy also uses the two vessels in his depiction of Temperance, along with an unusual animal addition (see Fig. 3). The camel, although it appears infrequently in iconographic representations, was understood in medieval and early modern Europe as a symbol of temperance because of its ability to endure long stretches without food and drink. As one twelfth-century Latin bestiary claims, camels ‘are good at putting up with the weariness of thirst, and indeed,

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Figure 2: Temperance with two vessels; Andrea da Firenze and Leonardo de’ Molinari da Besozzo; Chiesa di S. Giovanni a Carbonara, Naples; begun 1427 (photography by Luciano Romano; Scala / Art Resource, New York; reproduced by permission of Art Resource, New York)

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Figure 3: Temperance with two vessels, from the Series of the Seven Virtues; Georges Reverdy (Gaspar Reverdino); Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 31, Italian Artists of the Sixteenth Century, entry no. 31 (482) (reproduced by permission of Abaris Books, Connecticut)

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when the chance of drinking is given them, they fill up with enough both for the past want and for whatever lack may come in the future for a long time.’23 This camel lies tranquilly at Temperance’s feet, calmly regarding the stream of water without apparent urgency or desire. Although the Latin motto at the bottom of the engraving insists that temperance is the moderation of appetite in obedience to reason – a formulation that implies the exertion of Aristotelian continence rather than the ease of Aristotelian temperance – the virtue herself seems to perform such obedience effortlessly, unconstrained by her loose robes and her unbound hair. Like the preceding two images, Reverdy’s Temperance embodies her virtue with facility, representing temperance as a posture of calm abstention from passionate desire, rather than the agonistic struggle that Aristotle would have associated with continence. In the late 1350s, however, Temperance sacrifices some measure of equanimity when she acquires a new prop – an hourglass, in its first known depiction, courtesy of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (see Fig. 4). Like Giotto’s, Lorenzetti’s Temperance appears to enjoy a posture of repose, with her head tilted gently to the side and her hand gesturing toward her attribute. But unlike the sword that disappears into the folds of Temperance’s robes in Giotto’s fresco, the hourglass here is held prominently aloft. Its size, shape, and colour approximate that of Temperance’s own head and chest, pale above her robes; the hourglass seems almost to constitute another figural presence alongside Magnanimitas, Temperantia, and Iustitia. When Dutch engraver Cornelis Massys draws on this pictorial tradition for his representation of the virtues, he preserves the elevated position of the hourglass, in recognition of its conceptual importance to Temperance in this new iconography (see Fig. 5). Massys in fact exaggerates Temperance’s temporal dimension by adding to the image the skull, a memento mori recalling the inevitability of death and the relentless forward march of earthly time. The emblem between the figure’s breasts also appears to be a miniature death’s-head, as if to redirect the gaze of the carnally inclined viewer toward temperate, and temporally motivated, restraint. The sphere, too, serves to underscore Temperance’s temporal character, identifying her with the goddess Fortune, turning her omnipresent wheel; and with Occasion, the Latin counterpart to the Greek kairos: the climactic time of action and culmination, which must be seized precipitously, in contrast to the undifferentiated time of delay (tempus).24 Massys’s representation thus attests

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Figure 4: Temperance with hourglass, from the Virtues of Good Government; Ambrogio Lorenzetti; Palazzo Pubblico, Siena; c. 1338–40, repaired 1350s (reproduced by permission of Scala / Art Resource, New York)

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Figure 5: Temperance with hourglass, from the Nine Virtues; Cornelis Massys; The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 18, German Masters of the Sixteenth Century, entry no. 43 (111) (reproduced by permission of Abaris Books, Connecticut)

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to the persistence and even the exaggeration of temperance’s temporal aspects, long after the hourglass has given way to other technological innovations. In fact, temperance undergoes a technological revolution long prior to Massys’s depiction. Migrating from Italy into late medieval and early modern France, the allegorical figure of temperance trades the hourglass for the mechanical clock – an attribute so reliable, and so clearly derived from contemporary rather than classicizing interests, that it earns her a new art-historical classification: the ‘new’ or ‘Rouen’ iconography.25 This innovative pictorial tradition – which boasts longevity and magnitude, both textually and geographically speaking – depicts Temperance bearing an impressive array of technologically current accessories: spectacles, rowel spurs, a tower-windmill, and a mechanical clock (alongside the familiar bridle). Temperance appears in this guise, for example, in MS fr. 9186, containing Jehan de Courtecuisse’s French translation and glossing of the Pseudo-Senecan text Formula vitae honestae, also called De quattuor virtutibus, a popular conduct manual in late fifteenth-century France (see Fig. 6).26 In this example of the new iconography, Temperance has all but disappeared underneath her symbolic cabinet of wonders, a cumbersome representational burden whose unwieldiness is visible in the figure herself. Both of Temperance’s hands and feet are occupied in holding her accoutrements, and, once she runs out of proper appendages, her head is called into service as a pedestal for the clock. The bit, unlike the one in Giotto’s rendition, intrudes prominently into the depiction, obscuring part of the figure’s face. And the effortlessness of Giotto and Lorenzetti’s figures has disappeared; balanced precariously on her bench with both feet extended, Temperance sits forward and gazes into the distance, as if concentrating so as not to topple the clock from its perch. Thus encumbered and engaged, the new-iconography Temperance appears to heed Alberti’s admonitions about the value of time, which she will hoard as diligently as she does her curiosity shop of attributes. Critics marvel at this bizarre representational tradition: Maˆle remarks on the disconcerting effects of ‘un symbolisme si subtil et parfois si incompre´hensible, une pareille absence de gouˆt’ (‘such a subtle and at times incomprehensible symbolism, and such a lack of taste’);27 Lynn White, Jr on ‘the most bizarre hypertely in the history of Christian iconography’;28 and Julie Singer on the way in which the ideal of temperance ‘seems to shift away from the human/organic realm,’ such that ‘mechanical function’ displaces human reason as the foundation of the virtue.29 And yet medieval readers appear to have

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Figure 6: Temperance in the new iconography, from Formula vitae honestae: De quattuor virtutibus cardinalibus; Pseudo-Seneca (Martin of Braga); ms. fr. 9186, fol. 304r; fifteenth century (reproduced by permission of the Bibliothe`que nationale de France)

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Figure 7: Temperance in the new iconography, Ethiques, politique et e´conomiques; Nicole Oresme, translating Aristotle; ms. fr. 927, I 2, fol. 17v; 1453–4 (photography by Thierry Ascencio-Parvy; Collections of the Bibliothe`que Municipale de Rouen; reproduced by permission of the Bibliothe`que Municipale de Rouen)

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found the new Temperance neither incompre´hensible nor de´concertant, but rather worthy of wide dissemination throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe. In figure 7, a fourteenth-century engraving included in Nicole Oresme’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, Temperance appears alongside six other virtues with her clock balanced atop her head, despite the fact that neither Oresme’s translation nor his glosses acknowledges or explains these accoutrements.30 The currency and appeal of the new iconography apparently trump its irrelevance to Oresme’s text. Although Oresme does not address the new iconography in his Aristotelian translation, his other texts evince a particular interest in clocks, preceding and exceeding his interest in temperance. Oresme’s treatise Du Ciel, written in 1377 for Charles V, developed the figure of the deus artifex to depict God as a celestial clockmaker.31 This metaphor in turn affords additional cultural purchase to temperance in the new iconography, such that ‘about 1400, the originally Italian association of a timepiece with Temperantia began, in Northern France and Burgundy, to emerge as a major expression of religious devotion.’32 The explicit association between Temperance and the clock appears to have originated close to home for Oresme, with Christine de Pisan, whose father maintained a regular correspondence with the author of Du Ciel. In the Epıˆtre d’Othe´a, composed around 1400 as an instructional manual for a young nobleman, Christine collaborated with the illuminator known as the ‘Master of Christine de Pisan’ to establish an explicit link between temperance and the clock. Drawing not only on Oresme’s image of the clockmaker deus artifex, but also on other medieval precedents such as Froissart’s Orloge Amoreuse (1369) and Henry Suso’s Horlogium Sapientiae (1334), Christine and her illuminator depict Temperance as a goddess leaning down from the clouds to adjust the works of a massive mechanical timepiece, as in Laud Misc. 570 (see Fig. 8). Christine glosses the image in this way: Attrempance estoit aussi appelle de[e]sse. Et pour ce que nostre corps humain est compose de diverses choses, et doit estre attrempe, selon raison peut etre figure a l’or[lo]ge ou a plusieurs roes et mesures. Et toutefoiz ne vault rien l’orloge se il n’est attrempe. Semblablement non fait nostre corps humain se attrempance ne l’ordonne. (Temperance may also be called a goddess. And because our human body is composed of different parts, and must be tempered, thus

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Figure 8: Temperance as clock-keeper; Epıˆtre d’Othe´a, ms. Laud Misc. 570, fol. 28v; Christine de Pisan; 1450 (reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries)

Temperance’s Renaissance Transformations 35 according to reason, it may be represented by a clock, which has several wheels and weights. And just as the clock is worth nothing if not ordered, so our human body does not work if temperance does not order it.)33

Innovatively, Christine includes several unidentified feminine figures who observe Temperance in her labours, and whose presence underscores the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm delineated in Christine’s gloss. The women’s uplifted hands indicate their close attention to the goddess’s mechanical adjustments; these diligent disciples of Temperance will strive to order their bodies in the same way that their mistress harmonizes the mechanical parts of the clock. These handmaidens recur throughout the new iconography. Elsewhere in Laud Misc. 570, for example, an anonymous translation of the Livre des quatre Vertus Cardinaulx depicts Temperance with her by now familiar headpiece (see Fig. 9).34 Temperance’s handmaidens are here identified as supplementary traits, what Tuve calls ‘sub-virtues’: ‘Continence,’ ‘Clemence,’ and ‘Moderance.’ Thus identified as a particular aspect or guise of temperance, ‘Continence’ recalls and reinstates the Aristotelian hierarchy of temperance over continence. At the same time, however, the presence of the clock – connoting quantitative measurement, attempted precision, and the need for vigilant tuning to ensure what Christine calls attrempance – appropriates for temperance the continual struggle and effort of Aristotelian continence, trading on the verbal (if only obscurely etymogical) and iconographic links to tempus. In fact, the very possibility that Temperance could require the support of these handmaidens calls attention to the way in which the new iconography admits worldliness, and thus imperfection, into these nevertheless idealizing representations. Imperfection in fact inheres in Temperance’s newly acquired attributes, for in its medieval guise, the mechanical clock does not represent the perfect and perpetual self-regulation that a modern reader might suspect. Although the technology of the verge escapement theoretically creates the capacity for self-regulation, early clocks were notoriously unreliable, requiring frequent adjustment and lubrication, as Julie Singer observes: ‘The clock is a closed system that can operate independently but that requires intervention in order to function most effectively; the clockkeeper,’ like Temperance in the Othe´a depiction, ‘is at once external to the system and an integral component of its mechanical operation.’35

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Figure 9: Temperance in the new iconography; Livre des quatre Vertus Cardinaulx, ms. Laud Misc. 570, fol. 16r (reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries)

Temperance’s Renaissance Transformations 37

Paradoxically, then, the clock that makes itself felt in the new iconography as a vital attribute of temperance suggests two equal and opposite kinds of influence: on the one hand, the necessary mechanization of virtue, subjecting human passion to unyielding principles; and on the other, the need for constant human vigilance to ensure that such mechanics support rather than derail moral and ethical behaviour. The new iconography of temperance thus advances a chiastic model for the relationship between human beings and technology, positing not only what Lynn White, Jr has called the ‘virtuousness of technology,’ but also the technology of virtue: a model of morality based not on introspection and self-examination, but rather on the reflexive adoption or application of mechanical behaviours. Temperance in this model comprises the accommodation of the individual conscience to the mechanical functioning of an impersonal commodity.36 By assuming attributes representative of human effort and ingenuity,37 temperance comes to entail a commitment to technological innovation and to ‘the bourgeois ethos’ that understands human virtue and value in terms of commodity production, ownership, and exchange.38 This association of Temperance with industriousness and commodity culture continues to evolve throughout the early modern period, as in Pieter Bruegel the elder’s representation of the virtue, the original of which hangs in the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam (see Fig. 10). While the traditional iconography of temperance positioned the virtue in opposition to wrath (represented by the sheathed sword) and to gluttony or inebriation (represented by the dilution of the wine), Bruegel’s characteristically populous canvas makes his Temperance the antidote to sloth, ‘marshal[ling around her] examples of man’s useful . . . activities.’39 In her by now familiar new iconographic form, armed with bridle, eyeglasses, tower-windmill, rowel spurs, and mechanical clock, Temperance surveys clusters of figures engaged in practising the seven liberal arts (clockwise from lower left: arithmetic, music, rhetoric, astronomy, geometry, dialectic, and grammar). The arithmeticians, governed not by liturgical but by mechanically measured hours, engage in applied rather than pure mathematics: at a table, a man counts coins while consulting a text, as if calculating exchange or interest rates; hunched over a writing tablet, another man works assiduously with two columns of numbers, like a practitioner of double-entry bookkeeping; a third man cuts a property mark on a bellows. With this detail, Bruegel twists the satiric knife. The bellows, naturally, lends itself more readily to the inflammation than the

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Figure 10: ‘Temperantia,’ The Seven Virtues; Pieter Bruegel; c. 1559; The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 56, Netherlandish Artists, no. 70 (reproduced by permission of Abaris Books, Connecticut)

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tempering of the passions;40 Bruegel’s image cynically suggests that the transformation of the bellows from an incendiary into a temperate instrument depends not on its deployment, but rather on its commodification: its inscription as property, its assimilation into the ‘bourgeois ethos’ that the early modern period came to associate with temperance.41 While Bruegel’s depiction appears to have been the last hurrah of the new iconography per se, later depictions continue to endow temperance with temporal, commodified, and bourgeois significations. Early seventeenth-century Dutch painters draw on multiple chapters of temperance’s semantic history in their emblematic representations, combining the traditional emphasis on moderation of the bodily appetites with the contemporary concern for temporal efficiency. The virtue is taken up in 1614 by Jan Torrentius, a Dutch artist who spent a portion of his career in England, at the court of Charles I.42 Torrentius’s only surviving painting is a still life painted on a circular oak panel purportedly used as the lid of a raisin barrel. The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, which holds the painting as part of its permanent collection, titles the piece ‘Still Life with Flagon, Glass, Jug, and Bridle’ (see Fig. 11). The pewter vessel depicted here is a wijnkan or wine vessel, recognizable from the long spout designed to facilitate pouring from a height without spilling the contents.43 The stone water jug on the right and the cup in the middle, in which the wine and water are presumably to be combined, complete the emblematic reference to temperance; as in figures 2 and 3 above, water suggests dilution of the wine and dousing of the passions it might kindle. On either side of the wine glass appears a white clay pipe, suggesting that tobacco consumption too ought to be practised in moderation.44 The horse’s bridle and bit, also familiar from pre-Rouen representations of temperance, hang on the wall behind the vessels, engraved with the painter’s initials and the year of composition. Torrentius’s innovation on the traditional iconography of temperance takes a musical form: the sheet music underneath the wine glass, which includes notes on a treble clef and words underneath that serve both as the lyrics of the song and the inscription for the painting as a whole: ER wat buten maat bestaat / int on-maats qaat verghaat (‘If you ignore the tempo, you will succumb to untempered evil’). The Rijksmuseum offers this gloss on its own translation: ‘one should maintain a sense of proportion in life, just as in music.’ Christopher Brown explains that the musical pun, captured by the Rijksmuseum with the echo between tempo and untempered, depends on the

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Figure 11: Accoutrements of temperance, in ‘Still Life with Flagon, Glass, Jug, and Bridle’; Jan Torrentius; 1614 (reproduced by permission of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Dutch word maat, which can mean size, as applied, for example, to clothing, but also measure, as applied to music. Brown thus offers this alternative rendering: ‘That which is outside measure, or immoderate, and so immoderate behaviour, behaviour which is literally out of time in the musical sense, will perish, end up, be wrecked (as in a shipwreck) in . . . untimely, unmeasured, and so, extreme . . . bad or evil.’45 Torrentius’s painting thus bears witness to the persistence and the dissemination of temperance in its temporal sense during the later

Temperance’s Renaissance Transformations 41

Renaissance. Informed by a sense of mechanical precision and mercantile efficiency in the new iconography, temperance here brings quantitative pressure to bear on the musical arts.46 As in Bruegel’s satiric depiction of the seven liberal arts, temperance here constitutes a primary point of contact between idealized humanistic endeavour and quantitative preoccupations. Music similarly bears witness to the convergence of temperance’s ethical and commercial dimensions in another early seventeenthcentury Dutch painting, Jan miense Molenaer’s Allegory of Marital Fidelity (see Fig. 12). In P.J.J. van Thiel’s analysis, the newly espoused couple walking arm in arm at the right of this image represents the only historical personages in the painting; all of the other figures constitute emblems of temperance designed to catechize the couple in the finer points of the virtue. Upper-class representatives of what White calls the ‘bourgeois ethos,’ the married couple joins the viewer to constitute a disapproving audience for the riotously intemperate activities of the painting’s less privileged figures.47 Such negative emblems of intemperance include the pair of wrestlers, depicted in the background on the far left, representing wrath; the monkey embracing the cat in the foreground, representing unnatural lust; and the young man peering into an empty vessel behind the lute player, representing gluttony.48 To counter these represented sins, the painting emblematizes temperance itself, in the form of the man in the rear centre of the painting performing the traditional temperate gesture, pouring water into wine; and the young woman with the songbook in her lap, whose raised hand indicates that she is keeping the tempo of the music. As Jane R. Stevens observes, the raised hand – an increasingly common motif in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings depicting musical performances – might indicate not only the keeping of the tempo, but the proper melodic tuning. The upraised hand, Stevens suggests, might be a descendant of the medieval Guidonian hand: a mnemonic device designed to help musicians to sight-sing. Although the precise functioning of the Guidonian hand remains obscure, music historians suggest that it may have governed a kind of cheironomy: the practice of melodic pattern-indication through hand gesture, practised at least through the sixteenth century in continental Europe.49 In cheironomic performance, the hand of the conductor served as a text for singers to read, on which each joint of each finger corresponded to a particular note or interval. In Molenaer’s painting, the young woman who holds her hand aloft might therefore be advising her fellow musicians, the newlyweds, and the

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Figure 12: Allegory of Marital Fidelity; Jan miense Molenaer; 1633 (photography by Katherine Wetzel; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; The Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Collection; reproduced by permission of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts)

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painting’s viewers to remain temperate both by maintaining the proper tempo and by observing the proper tuning and harmonies. The mathematical precision of temperance, it seems, extends to include not only temporal but also harmonic governance. The emphasis on music as a mathematical endeavour is, of course, not an innovation contingent on temperance or on its new iconographic emphasis on quantity, measurement, and efficiency. Temperance, rather, is the sign under which a set of Renaissance priorities – mercantile, economic, quantitative, commodified – acquire an ancient pedigree, both asserting their consistency with classical ethics and philosophy, and, paradoxically, insisting on their currency and innovation, their potential for selfjustifying and self-governing perpetual motion, like the gears of the mechanical clock. While building on temperance’s musical signification, Molenaer’s painting also extends the virtue into another ancient discursive realm: humoral medicine, derived from ancient Hippocratic and Galenic physiology, in which temperance signifies the perfect balance among the four substances composing the human body. In this context, an ideal balance among the four humours composing the human body – black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm – would constitute temperance, also known as crasis, from the Greek for ‘mixture, combination.’ For Renaissance Christians, though, perfect humoral temperance was unattainable by postlapsarian subjects, in whom one humour or another inevitably predominates, creating a particular temperament. The melancholic is thus governed by black bile, the choleric by yellow bile, the sanguine by blood, and the phlegmatic, tautologically, by phlegm. As van Thiel explains, Molenaer’s monkey and cat, in addition to signifying the perversity of lustful appetites, represent the sanguinary and choleric temperaments, respectively, naturally given to sensuality and cruelty.50 The monkey and the cat in Allegory of Marital Fidelity, van Thiel opines, serve as humorally intemperate foils to the new bride and groom, who should aspire to physiological as well as appetitive, musical, and temporal temperance. As the final instalment of this brief history of the late medieval and early modern visual culture of temperance, Molenaer’s painting begins to suggest the impressive discursive range that temperance achieves over the course of these several centuries of ethical culture. The traditional iconography of restraint and dilution of the passions has neither disappeared nor merely endured, but has instead generated new semantic possibilities. As Torrentius’s and Molenaer’s

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paintings both attest, the temporal dimension of temperance – first iconographically expressed and developed through the novel attribute of the hourglass and mechanical clock – extends the virtue into the discourse of music. In that context, temperance signifies not only technically, as a description of harmonious tuning and even maintenance of tempo, but also of the virtue’s gentrification, its complicity in White’s ‘bourgeois ethos’: a symbol of cultural accomplishment, leisure time, and commodified entertainment available not merely to born nobility but to a nascent merchant class.51 At the same time, temperance’s new musical denotation helps to sustain its cultural importance. As a technical description of the ‘music of the spheres,’ temperance signifies cosmic harmony, and commands the cultural prestige of a virtue that simultaneously describes and transcends earthly experience. In a similar discursive expansion, temperance’s traditional representation as a careful admixture of water and wine resonates with the Galenic theory of the humours that predominates in medieval and Renaissance medicine. In this capacity, temperance liaises between classical iconography and contemporary physiological theory, providing an ethical foundation for, and rationalization of, medical ideology. In the next section, I will discuss some of the ways in which these migrations of temperance into new semantic territory situate the virtue as a crux of early modern ideologies of colonialism. Temperance and Colonialism The subsequent chapters of this book explore the ways in which temperance’s panoply of significations collaborate, in various combinations and contexts, to render the virtue a category of colonial ambition, apologia, and critique. As those chapters will argue, Renaissance literary, dramatic, sermonic, and economic texts invoke temperance in rhetorically strategic and contingent – and yet insistent and consistent – ways, using temperance as a privileged lens to focus their views on the morality and ethics of New World colonialism. To set the stage for those sustained investigations of temperance’s colonial deployments in various literary and polemical discourses, this section offers a brief introduction to England’s colonial ambitions, theory, and practice during the period covered by this book. It then proceeds to discuss the role played by temperance in the discourses of early English colonialism. Availing themselves of temperance’s polysemy – including physiological, climatological, and temporal

Temperance’s Renaissance Transformations 45

significations – these texts of early English imperialism demonstrate that English Renaissance writers considered temperance as an ethical foundation of England’s ambitions and establishments in the colonial New World. The terms ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’ risk anachronism when applied to the English Renaissance; so say historians of the British Empire, who rightly locate the ideological origins of England’s early New World ventures in the classical precedent of ancient Rome and in the historiography of translatio imperii.52 Indeed, the term ‘British Empire’ failed to capture the Renaissance imagination when it was first introduced: John Dee wrote of the ‘British Impire’ in 1577, attempting to describe and justify England’s transatlantic claims, but his coinage found little cultural purchase save among city merchants and maritime adventurers.53 In this book, I aim simultaneously to observe such caveats by respecting the historical specificity of Renaissance exploration and settlement in the New World, and to argue that these early endeavours laid the ideological groundwork for colonialism per se. Without question, ‘colonialism’ and ’empire’ are proleptic descriptions of England’s overseas endeavours in the mid-sixteenth century. Despite navigational and exploratory prowess, not to mention ample experience with colonial plantation in Ireland and Scotland, the English were notoriously slow ‘to follow up their “Discoveries” and to claim domination over foreign peoples and trading routes, as the Iberians did so spectacularly from the outset.’54 In 1558, English maritime activity was largely confined to European waters; interest in expansion was restricted to merchants and explorers envious of their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts.55 England began to adopt a more ambitious posture toward New World exploration at the behest of Sir Francis Walsingham, Principal Secretary to Queen Elizabeth I, who warned the Queen that – now, now, even now, very now – Spanish explorers and settlers in the New World were accruing financial and political advantages over their English rivals.56 Walsingham thus became the first official mouthpiece for the ideology that would come to be known as the ‘Black Legend’: an enduring and widespread mythology in Protestant Europe of ‘Spain’s unique brutality in the conquest of the New World.’57 Among the first to take up Walsingham’s torch were Richard Hakluyt and his acolyte Samuel Purchas (whose 1625 Hakluytus Posthumus is a continuation of Hakluyt’s 1589 Principal Navigations), advocating New World trade and settlement in order to advance the

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status and power of Protestant polities relative to their Catholic counterparts. But if Hakluyt and his apprentice were ‘essentially propagandists for militant Protestantism,’ their legacy to English foreign policy and public opinion was more profane.58 Not until 1650 would the English crown construct a coherent imperial policy, leaving most English New World enterprise in the hands of small groups of ‘adventurers,’ a term that applied both to financial backers of transatlantic ventures and to the migrants whose relocation they subsidized.59 If Protestant evangelism served as the ideological wellspring of nascent English colonialism, profitability was the current that carried it along. Sir Francis Drake’s 1585 voyage to the West Indies illustrates this ‘uneasy alliance’ between publicly sanctioned rhetoric and private interests. Nominally under royal sponsorship, Drake received from Queen Elizabeth only two of his thirty ships, and a total investment of £20,000 out of £60,000; private adventurers supplied the rest.60 Even early idealists of a Hakluyt-esque stripe ‘recogni[zed] that the merits of overseas endeavour would come to enjoy a wider appreciation only when . . . made to appear essential to the commercial, military, or spiritual interests of their home societies.’61 The Black Legend owes its longevity, in part, to its adaptability to both the religious idealism and the mercenary reality of England’s New World endeavours. The religious etiology of the Black Legend enjoys an enduring, if qualified, currency among historians: fuelled by the zealotry of the Reformation, English Protestants interpreted Spanish Catholicism as a proxy for broad moral and ethical decrepitude. In this capacity, the Spanish served usefully as a common enemy to unite Protestants in England, Scotland, and Ireland, effacing doctrinal diversity in favour of a shared ‘anti-Catholicism that was more negative in content than affirmative in structure.’62 As representatives of orthodox English Protestantism – Hakluyt as the rector of Wetheringsett in Norfolk, prebendary of Bristol Cathedral, and archdeacon of Westminster Abbey; Purchas as the vicar of Eastwood, chaplain to archbishop George Abbot, and rector of St Martin’s and of All Hallows – Hakluyt and Purchas marshalled their religious authority in the service of their colonial agendas. They propagated a triumphalist narrative of the Church of England, identifying the consolidated royal power brought about by the Reformation with divinely sanctioned exploration, settlement, and colonization.63 Even while acknowledging the political and economic rewards of the New World endeavour, Hakluyt carefully prioritized England’s

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evangelical responsibilities, and condemned its Iberian predecessors for neglecting this divine mandate: . . . Godlinesse is great riches, and . . . if we first seeke the kingdome of God, al other thinges will be giuen vnto vs, and . . . as the light accompanieth the Sunne, and the heate the fire, so lasting riches do waite vpon them that are zealous for the aduauncement of the kingdome of Christ, and the enlargement of his glorious Gospell . . . I truste that . . . our men will take a . . . godly course, and vse some part of their goods to his glorie: if not, he will turne euen their couetousnes to serue him, as he hath done the pride and auarice of the Spaniardes and Portingales, who pretending in glorious words that they made their discoueries chiefly to conuert Infidelles to our most holy faith, (as they say) indeed and truth sought not them, but their goods and riches.64

Hakluyt distinguishes the English from the Iberians by insisting that their ventures will be, above all, evangelical; remuneration will follow as a consequence of their godly efforts. By denouncing the Spaniards and Portuguese for prioritizing their ‘pride and avarice,’ Hakluyt turns their precedence in New World exploration and settlement into a liability. The English, he insists, will learn from the negative Iberian example, such that the last – those who prioritize wealth last, those who come to the New World last – will be first, both spiritually and financially speaking. In his 1584 Discourse of Western Plantinge, Hakluyt again invokes the missionary rationale for New World colonization to chastise the Spanish for their pleonexia, declaring: That This westerne discouerie will be greately for thinlargemente of the gospell of Christe whereunto the Princes of the refourmed relligion are chefely bounde amongest whome her Maiestie ys principall That all other englishe Trades are growen beggerly or daungerous especially in all the kinge of Spayne his Domynions, where our men are dryven to flinge their Bibles and prayer Bookes into the sea, and to forsweare and renownce their relligion and conscience and consequently theyr obedience to her Maiestie . . .65

Here, religious, political, and mercantile justifications for settlement converge in vilifying the Spaniard, who simultaneously menaces

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English ‘Trades,’ ‘obedience to her Maiestie,’ and ‘relligion.’ The spectre of the Catholic Spaniard allows Hakluyt to efface not only the fissures within British Protestantism, but also the differences among spiritual, political, and mercantile warrants for colonization. New World settlement, Hakluyt argues, will strengthen the English empire, church, and economy alike, all thanks to its laudable Protestant foundation. As hostilities between England and Spain continued to simmer between 1580 and 1604, English proponents of New World colonialism expanded the propositional content of the Black Legend beyond religious ideology, claiming their own colonial superiority on legal and ethical grounds. In legal terms, English advocates of New World colonialism sought to dismiss charges of belatedness, insisting that England’s claims to the New World were contemporary with or even prior to Spain’s. Hakluyt identifies a legal basis for his ‘great hope, that the time approcheth and nowe is, that we of England may share and part stakes (if wee will our selues) both with the Spaniarde and the Portingale in part of America, and other regions as yet vndiscouered . . . whiche of equitie and right appertaine vnto vs, as by the discourses that followe shall appeare most plainely.’66 The first such discourse of the Diuers Voyages comprises two copies, in Latin and English respectively, of the letters patent issued by Henry VII to John Cabot in 1496, granting rights to ‘subdue, occupie, and possesse’ for the King ‘whatsoeuer iles, countreyes, regions, or prouinces, of the heathen and infidelles whatsoeuer they bee, and in what part of the worlde soeuer they be, whiche before this time haue been vnknowen to all Christians.’67 Other writers of Hakluyt’s opinion called upon letters patent issued by Elizabeth I – to Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1578, and to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584 – which, they claimed, reaffirmed England’s jurisdiction over the New World as established by her grandfather.68 And while extending England’s claims farther into the past, Hakluyt minimized the progress of the Spanish in the present: ‘the lymites of the kinge of Spaines Domynions,’ he scoffed, ‘be nothinge so large as ys generally ymagined and surmised.’69 By locating English imperial policy not only in the humanistically favoured classical past, but in recent Tudor history, Hakluyt lends legal and political authority to the animosity of the Black Legend. The most persistent and virulent strain of the Black Legend – and the one most pertinent to the purposes of this book – concerned the ethics and morality of the Spanish, especially as manifested in their New World exploration and conquest. Ironically and compellingly,

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English purveyors of this mythology drew largely on Spanish accounts, penned by missionaries in the New World concerned about the legitimacy of their own imperial enterprise. The most famous and influential of these was Bartolome´ de las Casas’s Brevissima relacı´on de la destruccio´n de las Indias, first published in Spanish in 1552, translated into French in 1578, and into English in 1583.70 Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting, notably, ventriloquizes las Casas to describe the barbarity and peculation of the Spanish conquistadores in the Americas: Vpon these lambes (meaninge the Indians) so meke, so qualified and endewed of their maker and creatour as hath bene saied, entred the rein spanishe, incontinent as they knewe them, as wolves, as lyons, and as Tigres moste cruell of longe tyme famished: and haue not don in those quarters those 40. yeres be paste, neither yet doo at this presente oughte els, then teare them in peces, kill them, martir them, afflicte them, tormente them and destroye them by straunge sortes of cruelties, neuer either seene or reade or hearde of the like . . . The Spaniardes with their horses, speares, and launces . . . entred into Townes, Burroughes, and villages sparinge neither children, nor olde men neyther women with childe, neither them that laye in, but they ripped their bellies and cutt them in peces as if they had bene openinge of lambes shutt vpp in their folde: They laied wagers with suche as with one thruste of a sworde would paunche or bowell a man in the middest, or with one blowe of a sworde moste readily and moste deliuerately cut of his heade, or yt woulde best perce his entralls at one stroke. They tooke the little soules by the heeles rampinge them from their mothers brestes and crusshed their heades againste the cliftes . . . They made certen gibbetts longe and toughe in suche sorte that the feete of the hanged on[e] touched in a manner the grounde, every one enoughe for thirtene, in the honour and worshippe of our saviour and his xij Apostles (as they vsed to speake) and settinge to fire, burned them all quicke that were fastened.71

Hakluyt’s rendering of de las Casas accuses the Spanish simultaneously of cruelty and of intemperance, identifying them as ‘incontinent’ perpetrators of ‘[s]o many and so monstrous . . . cruelties . . . excedinge all . . . moderation.’72 His brutal catalogue creates a symbolic register for these accusations of intemperance, portraying the Spaniards as hungry predators with an insatiable appetite for Indian flesh. The alimentary character of the slaughter – including the ripping of bellies and the ‘paunching’ of bowels – reinforces the identification of the Indians with

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prey, rather than predator: deprived of their own capacity to digest, they are not subjects but objects of intemperate consumption. Hakluyt’s principal interest is not in the Black Legend per se, but in establishing a persuasive and ethical rationale for England’s own ambitions in ‘western planting.’ It is in this context – as the grounds of England’s self-conception as a powerful New World presence, emulating Spanish success while condemning its cruelty – that temperance becomes central to colonial discourse. Pursuing their New World ambitions requires the English to undertake an ambitious reconceptualization of their geographical and ideological place in the world, with respect to both newly discovered lands and familiar European competitors. Temperance emerges as a linchpin in this process because it allows the English simultaneously to extol the ethical probity of their own New World endeavours and to reimagine the world organized around the political supremacy of the British Empire. Temperance lends itself to such colonial deployment because of its capacity to signify both micro- and macrocosmically, describing both the well-ordered human body and the well-ordered cosmos. In Renaissance epistemology, the individual humoral ‘temperament’ corresponds to the climate, more commonly called ‘temper’ in Renaissance English (OED 6, first attested 1473). Conversely, the climatological temper manifests itself not only in the environment, but also in the individual humoral body. Temperance thus affords English colonialists the opportunity to evaluate, first, their own political and colonial ethics; and second, the humoral natures of the new-world natives, whose ethnicity serves as a foil against whom the English can define themselves in an expanding world. As Mary Floyd-Wilson has compellingly argued, Renaissance humoralism and congruent theories of climate and geography drew their authority from classical writers, especially Herodotus and Hippocrates.73 Greco-Roman in their geography as in their physiology, these discourses of ‘geohumoralism,’ in Floyd-Wilson’s parlance, identified temperance with Mediterranean climates and bodies. Northern ‘Scythians’ – the English, Picts, Scots, Celts, and Goths – were consequently intemperate: sanguine and phlegmatic in accordance with the cold, wet climate, with symptoms that included mental dullness, cruelty, and barbarity.74 English historians and geographers of the Renaissance thus received and perpetuated a notion of their own marginality – both individually, as intemperate humoral subjects, and collectively, as a climatologically intemperate nation.

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As exercises in nation-building and geographical expansion, England’s colonial settlements in the New World represent direct challenges to this geohumoral inheritance. Unlike colonial settlement in Ireland – a topic that has rightfully attracted recent scholarly attention in Renaissance literary studies75 – New World settlement literally expanded the contours of the known world, suggesting the obsolescence of the principles underlying classical geohumoralism. Each stride toward imperial domination in the New World represented a revision of the geographical and thus the humoral basis of English intemperance. Temperance thus not only rationalizes but also motivates New World colonialism. Both the ignominious legacy of classical geohumoral theory and the ambitions of English Renaissance writers to revise that legacy shape the proem to book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: the beginning of the Legend of Temperance. Comparing the poem’s fantastic landscapes to those of the New World, the proem mounts a pointed challenge to classical geography and the ethnic assumptions it generates: . . . let that man with better sence aduize, That of the world least part to vs is red: And dayly how through hardy enterprize, Many great Regions are discouered, Which to late age were neuer mentioned. Who euer heard of th’Indian Peru? Or who in venturous vessell measured The Amazons huge riuer now found trew? Or fruitfullest Virginia who did euer vew? Yet all these were, when no man did them know; Yet haue from wisest ages hidden beene: And later times things more vnknowne shall show. Why then should witlesse man so much misweene That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?

(2.proem.2.1–3.5)

These lines reveal the geographical ignorance of the classical world, the ages otherwise considered ‘wisest.’ The uncomprehending voices of antiquity, unenlightened by sixteenth-century exploration, are ventriloquized in the concluding queries of stanza 2. Voiced as rhetorical questions, but concretely answerable by any English

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Renaissance reader, these interrogatives reverse the hierarchy of privilege in classical auctoritas: the esteeming of the disembodied, dead auctor over the contingent, embodied lector.76 Furthermore, in claiming that the world is only in ‘least part to vs . . . red,’ these stanzas insist on the inadequacy of extant texts to describe global geography, which reveals itself incrementally, day by day, to intrepid European explorers mapping heretofore unknown territories. Thus alluding to revision of the classical geohumoral canon, the proem simultaneously launches its own ironic salvo against classical authority: admonishing the reader to maintain total credulity, identifying the ‘witlesse man’ with the sceptic rather than the unquestioning believer. Traditionally, medieval and Renaissance exegetes identify credulity with ignorance; texts protect the truth beneath an allegorical veil, where only the educated elite will find it.77 Advocating a hermeneutics of credulity rather than suspicion, Spenser’s proem discredits both classical auctoritas and its interpretive legacy.78 The proem thus introduces New World exploration, discovery, and colonialism as the occasion for major cultural, epistemological, and ideological change. By registering such transformations at the beginning of the Legend of Temperance, The Faerie Queene suggests that this cardinal virtue is poised to assume a new and crucial role in filling the ethical and ideological vacuum created by the discrediting of classical geohumoralism. As Spenser’s proem implies, New World colonialism and the ascendancy of the Black Legend allowed the English to refashion their identity in opposition to the Spanish, whose Mediterranean locale had earned them a loftier position in the classical geohumoral hierarchy. This opportunity helps to explain the focus of English Renaissance historiographies on English temperance, invoking the virtue both to rationalize the late advent of England’s New World presence, and to moralize the late seventeenth-century collapse of the Spanish economy.79 In calling the Spanish presence in the New World intemperate, English writers impugn their rivals both for their unchecked greed for Aristotle’s ‘pleasant sensible objects’;80 and for their temporal heedlessness, obedient to short-sighted desires rather than long-term missionary, ethical, economic, and political prospects. Under the pressure of colonial competition, then, English writers draw on multiple significations of temperance – the geohumoral, the Aristotelian, and the temporal – to shed the cloak of classical intemperance and to endorse their own colonial endeavours.

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Pro-colonial writers thus defend England’s New World endeavours as unimpeachably temperate. Using the Spanish as a foil, the English glorify their own New World explorers, investors, and eventually settlers as ‘knights of temperance.’ David T. Read has suggestively argued that temperance appealed to sixteenth-century English writers and theorists of colonialism because the virtue is ‘characterized by abnegation – by not doing certain things, acting in certain ways, or following particular paths.’81 Trailing their colonial rivals by decades, the English could thus find virtue in their own colonial lassitude, and valorize their own failure to achieve profits commensurate with those of the Spanish triumph as reported in England beginning in the 1550s.82 Certainly, the potential to valorize inactivity accounts for part of temperance’s rhetorical appeal, especially to the many apologists for England’s belated American presence. Rather than a virtue of simple abstention, though, temperance in this period is, as I have already argued, semantically overdetermined. Although classical geohumoral theory may occasion temperance’s entrance into the arena of New World colonialism, various other discourses – including the Black Legend, along with the virtue’s Aristotelian and temporal resonances – immediately join the fray, allowing the English to construct their colonial rationale in ethical as well as material terms. Especially important in early texts advocating New World settlement is the temporality of temperance. From the late sixteenth century well into the seventeenth, advocates of English New World colonialism find virtue in the temporal postponement and longevity of their plans for colonization, settlement, and profit. Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting, for example, argues for the moral probity of England’s relative lassitude: [W]ithoute this plantinge in due tyme wee shall neuer be able to have full knowledge of the language manners and custommes of the people of those Regions, neither shall wee be able throughly to knowe the riches and commodities of the Inlandes . . . To make this plaine by example . . . [consider] the folly of Iohn Grigalua for his not inhabitinge that goodd and riche Contrie of Iucatan, which ymmediatly after he had neglected, the same Fernando Cortes tooke in hande and perfourmed and gott all the honour and commoditie from him leavinge greate wealthe and honour to his posteritie, and to himselfe an euerlastinge name . . . Et si hauesse conosciuto la ventura sua, haueria fatto populatione in paese cosi ricco, come lo preganano i suoi compagni et lui saria stato quello che dipoi il [C]ortes (If he had been aware of his good

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Colonial Virtue fortune, he would have planted a colony in that land, as his companions begged him to do, and would have become what Corte´s became).83

As we have seen, Hakluyt elsewhere characterizes the Spanish conquistadores as ‘incontinent,’ perpetrators of ‘[s]o many and so monstrous . . . cruelties . . . excedinge all moderation.’84 Here, though, he makes the exception that proves the rule: an impulse frequently imitated in English colonial theory, which often invoked the anti-Hispanism of Spain’s own de las Casas to legitimize and disseminate the Black Legend.85 Hakluyt shifts the grounds of colonial virtue from nationality to temporality by locating a model of ethical conquest in Fernando Corte´s, successor to Juan de Grijalva. The latter, the first European to explore the Yucata´n Peninsula and encounter the Aztecs, returned to Spanish colonial Cuba without making any attempt at settlement. Grijalva’s uncle Diego Vela´zquez, infuriated by his oversight, demoted Grijalva and entrusted the job of colonization to Corte´s. Hakluyt uses Grijalva’s fall from grace to derive a temporal moral for hopeful English colonists: Corte´s outperforms Grijalva by committing to slow, longterm cultural and economic investment – that is, to the gradual attainment of ‘full knowledge of the language, manners and customs of the people of these Regions’ rather than to the immediate but short-term accumulation of wealth. And yet Hakluyt’s rhetoric overlays his anthropological concerns with capitalistic ones; Corte´s’s achievement lies in his simultaneous attainment of ‘honour and commoditie . . . greate wealth and honour.’ The antidote to Spanish ‘incontinen[ce]’ and ‘[im]moderation’ is the careful investment and management of time, which serves in this context as a conceptual and a linguistic metonym for temperance. In accordance with Aristotle’s acknowledgment that temperance governs ‘such things as nearly everyone must share in and take pleasure in,’ Hakluyt proposes a new temporal schedule for gratifying material desire without denouncing either the desire or its satisfaction. In this temporal capacity, temperance simultaneously condemns those Spanish who have proven themselves impatient for riches; justifies the comparable English desires for material wealth and political power in the New World; and reassures English readers – especially privileged readers with access to the royal coffers – that, however modest the material returns thus far, the temperate course in the New World will eventually yield substantial profits. Like the plantations themselves, the English rationalization of colonialism as a temporally temperate endeavour persists well into the

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seventeenth century. In his 1624 tract A Plaine Path-Way to Plantations, west-country preacher Richard Eburne draws simultaneously on the geohumoral and temporal dimensions of temperance to advocate English settlement and plantation in the New World. In the climatological register, he claims that the English will be physiologically amenable to New World settlement because ‘the Country it selfe is healthy and temperate, very agreeable to the Constitution of our English bodies, as which is very neere in the same temperature for heat and cold, that England is.’86 Eburne identifies the English as temperamentally similar to New World natives on the basis of their northern constitutions; he furthermore characterizes the shared climate of their native lands not as marginal and displaced from the Mediterranean, but as ‘temperate’ in its own right, participating in the rhetorical appropriation of temperance as a national English characteristic. As he proceeds to defend the progress made thus far in the New World settlement, Eburne extends this characterization of the temperate New World settlers into the province of temporal control: It is not long that any haue beene in any of these Plantations, and there must be a time for euery thing. They that will haue corne from the ground, must tarry the ripening of it. It is not one yeeres worke or two, to get a good state in Lands, and to get some store of wealth about a man in the same likewise. They that goe ouer to such a businesse, haue many things to doe first, before they can haue time to gather wealth about them; as to build, to rid their grounds, to make fenses to destroy wilde and hurtfull beasts, to get ouer good and profitable cattell, to plant and sow their grounds, and the like: All which be matters of great labour, time and expence . . . It is well if seuen, or ten, or twentie yeeres hence, happely in the next generation, men can attaine vnto riches. It is enough for the fathers to take in the grounds, and settle the lands and liuings for them and theirs against the time to come, though for the present, and for their owne time, they hardly stand vp, and meet with some difficulties.87

Eburne reframes the apparently slow progress in the New World as a testament to English virtue; the failure to ‘attaine vnto riches’ symptomatizes not English temporization but English temperance. In taking his cue from the georgic language of Ecclesiastes (‘To all things there is an appoynted time, and a time to euerie purpose vnder the heauen. A time to be borne, and a time to die: a time to plant, and a time to plucke vp that which is planted’; 3:1–2, Geneva Bible), Eburne implies

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that the English are virtuously, temperately, conforming to a Providentially sanctioned plan for colonial development. This religious special pleading is even more explicit earlier in the dialogue, when the farmer Respire – whose name itself suggests a temperately paced ‘taking of breath,’ or ‘relief from toil or exertion’ (OED 4) – responds to the objection that the Spanish will ‘rise against vs [English Protestants] in the day of Iudgement, and condemne vs’ for failures to exercise proper zeal in converting New World natives to Christianity.88 Respire remarks, I am sorry to heare that we should not be as forward as Papists . . . But . . . we had need to haue some assurance of the will of God, that it should be done. For as you know better then I can tell you; If the time of their Conuersion be not come; or if God, as he hath wrapped them hitherto in vnbeliefe, so he be not pleased nor determined to release them, to call them to the knowledge of his truth, and to manifest his Son vnto them at all: our labour then will be but in vaine, and our attempt not pleasing, but displeasing in his sight.89

Eburne frames the investment of ‘great labour, time and expence’ and the patient expectation of the ‘time of . . . Conuersion’ as both Providentially and materially prudent; temperate delay will avoid ‘displeasing’ God and will eventually yield the desired ‘store of wealth.’90 These and other precedents for temperance’s semantic plurality pave the way for ongoing and ingenious rhetorical displays, which invoke the virtue in myriad dimensions to advocate continued and increasing English settlement in the New World. In 1630, John White’s The Planters Plea: Or the Grounds of Plantations Examined, and Vsuall Objections Answered [. . .] frames colonial settlement as an endeavour not only consistent with but actively conducive to the temperance of the colonists, conceived as both an ethical and a physiological ideal: Now, that the spirits and hearts of men are kept in better temper by spreading wide, and by pouring, as it were, from vessell to vessell (the want whereof is alleaged by the Prophet Ieremy as the cause that Moab setled vpon his lees, and got so harsh a relish Ier. 48:11.) will bee euident to any man . . .91

The importance of temperance in this passage hinges on the resonance between the ‘temper’ of the men who ‘spread wide’ from England

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among her colonies and the image of ‘pouring, as it were, from vessel to vessel.’ While explicitly citing the Old Testament’s Book of Jeremiah, White implicitly evokes the traditional iconography of temperance pouring wine into water (q.v. Figs. 2 and 3) when he insists that such motion will allow men to keep their ‘spirits and hearts . . . in better temper.’ The corporeal language of this final phrase, clearly, reinforces the connection between the traditional mixing of wine and water and the physiological mixing of the four humours in the human body. White manipulates the metaphorical registers of temperance to suggest that Britain’s imperial expansion throughout the globe promotes and sustains the proper ‘mixture’ in English physiology and habits of consumption as well as ethical comportment. White’s central image rewards greater scrutiny still; adapted from an Old Testament metaphor, the vessel of wine represents an ingenious elaboration of temperance as a virtue of empire and colonial settlement. In Jeremiah 48, God punishes the country of Moab for its recalcitrant idolatry and idleness: Moab hath bene at rest from his youth, and he hath setled on his lees, and hath not bene powred from vessell to vessell, neither hath he gone into captiuitie: therefore his taste remained in him and his s[c]ent is not changed. Therefore beholde, the dayes come, saith the Lorde, that I will sende vnto him such as shall cary him away, and shall emptie his vessels, and breake their bottels. (Jer. 48:11–12, 1560 Geneva Bible)

Jeremiah’s Moab is compared to a stagnant flagon of wine in which the bitter lees precipitate out and settle at the bottom; Moab has thereby ‘got’ (attained) a harsh ‘relish’ or flavour. The OED offers an instructive contrast in a contemporary citation for ‘relish,’ from Thomas Bowe’s De La Primaudaye’s French academie (1589, 1594): ‘God . . . hath giuen such relishes to meates and drinkes, whereby . . . all liuing creatures can presently know by their taste what things are good to eate and drinke.’ For Bowe, ‘relish’ is an objective quality possessed by meat or drink, not a verb describing the subjective human perception thereof. In Jeremiah, however, subject and object collapse: the bitter taste acquired by the Moabites qua wine will also be experienced or ‘relished’ by them as they taste the bitterness of divine punishment (in, e.g., Jer. 49:12: ‘For thus saith the Lord, . . . Thou shalt not go free, but thou shalt surely drink of [the cup]’). The Scriptural text thus describes the Moabites simultaneously as intemperate subjects – those

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who drink or ‘relish’ to excess – and intemperate objects – the drink, the taste, the ‘relish’ that has been immoderately consumed. In adapting the metaphor, White capitalizes on Jeremiah’s concurrently subjective and objective renderings of the virtue in question. When White associates good ‘temper’ with geographical ‘spreading wide’ and perpetual motion, he achieves a geographical specificity absent from Jeremiah: the movement ‘from vessel to vessel’ corresponds, in White, to the emigration to the colonies. The settlers are the well-mixed wine, while England and the New World correspond to the containing vessels. While the stagnant Moabites were simultaneously the subjects and objects of intemperance, White seems to attribute each function to a separate population. If the colonists enjoy good health and ‘temper,’ who, in White’s adaptation of the image, takes the place of the subjects of intemperance, who must taste the bitter lees? New World natives haunt White’s metaphor as spectatores ab extra, implicit tenors of an otherwise supernumerary vehicle.92 White leaves these victims of intemperance unacknowledged, focusing instead on the temperance – as moral virtue and physiological health – of the brave English souls who will ‘spread wide’ into the New World. White does not, as some apologists for colonialism might do, objectify the natives as commodities; his metaphor makes it preferable to be an object (here, the wellmixed wine, the vehicle for the English colonists) rather than a subject (here, the justly punished Moabites, the vehicle for the colonized natives). With this reversal of agency, White disavows English responsibility for colonial expansion, trusting that plantation, and any suffering thereby inflicted on colonized subjects, conforms to a Providential mandate. Temperance serves here both as the justification for and the happy outcome of English colonial expansion. Hakluyt, Eburne, and White represent variations on a single theme: the probity and profitability of a colonialism based on temperance. For these three writers, temperance comprises a temporization with the capacity both to rationalize England’s extant colonial efforts, however torpid relative to their Spanish counterparts; and to augur eventual material wealth and mercantile success for New World explorers, settlers, and traders. Rather than allowing the temporal dimension of the virtue to supplant more traditional definitions, these writers add the temporal possibility to the humoral, the climatological, and the alimentary, rendering temperance a labile concept, readily available for rhetorical and political manipulation. In these particular cases, the political ends of such rhetorical maneuvers are comparable: Hakluyt,

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Eburne, and White all advocate long-term settlement and plantation in the New World in the interest of cultural and material hegemony. And yet temperance’s semantic plurality virtually guarantees the ephemerality of this rhetorical concord. Despite White’s clear partisanship, the extensibility of temperance in his tract threatens to undermine the author’s claim to ‘Answer’ the ‘Vsuall Objections’ to plantation – by, for example, positioning Native Americans as ethical subjects and English settlers as commodities, and thus challenging any claim the so-called temperate colonialist might have to represent the ‘Capitain that fighteth manlie,’ the heroic agonist struggling against appetite, the spirit of mercantile ambition. In subsequent chapters, I will investigate at greater length the range of colonial ideologies represented by temperance in its various discursive registers: how this virtue achieves a privileged and a paradoxical status as a term of colonial apologia and critique, sometimes within the space of a single text. For the moment, Hakluyt, Eburne, and White serve to attest to temperance’s status as an invaluable tool for English rhetors interested in the theory and practice of English colonialism. Drawing opportunistically on temperance’s rich iconographic history, and especially on the temporal aspect introduced by the new iconography, these writers install a persistent and compelling association between the cardinal virtue and the colonial venture – and thus offer Renaissance scholars a new lens through which to focus our attention on transatlantic cultural and material exchange.

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PART I

Temperance Explores America

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2 Edmund Spenser’s ‘Blood Guiltie’ Temperance

In Karl Marx’s narrative of the birth of capitalism, England’s exploration, exploitation, and colonization of the New World plays a crucial role. The event in Tudor history most commonly cited as emblematic of Marx’s ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ – i.e., the forcible separation of labourers from their traditional means of production as a necessary precondition of capitalism – is the enclosure of the Commons, which Marx describes as the systematic and legislative appropriation and transformation of arable land into privately held pasture land. In his Utopia, Thomas More decries this very practice as a great social injustice, and a chief cause of the vagabondage that Renaissance states tried to legislate and emigrate out of existence: [T]hat one couetous and vnsatiable cormaraunte and verye plage of his natyue contrey may compasse abowte and inclose many thousa[n]d acres of grounde together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust owte of their owne, or els[e] other by cozeyne or fraude, or by vyolent oppression they be put besydes it, or by wronges and iniuries they be so weried that they be compelled to sell all: by one meanes therfore or by other, other by howke or crooke they must nedes departe awaye, pore, sylie, wretched soules[:] men, women, husbandes, wyues[,] fatherles chyldren, widdowes, wofull mothers with their yonge babes, and their hole housholde smal in substau[n]ce, and muche in nombre, as husbandrie requireth many handes.1

But while the enclosure of the Commons is perhaps the most obvious example of Tudor primitive accumulation, it is not the only mechanism of this early phase of pre-capitalist development. Primitive

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accumulation ventured far from the English commons, into international cum colonial territory, as Marx explains: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation . . . [T]he veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal.2

Recent scholarship in the humanities has validated and built upon Marx’s characterization of New World colonialism as a means of primitive accumulation. Margaret Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, for example, introduce their 2007 collection Rereading the Black Legend by explaining how primitive accumulation distinguishes early European colonialism from other imperial ventures in history. By placing New World colonialism ‘in a wider context of a global system of imperial expansion,’ they explain, cultural historians and scholars are in a better position to see how the distinct form of western European imperialism is marked by capitalist effects not much in evidence elsewhere [. . . T]he massive appropriation of land on new continents by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and finally the English, along with the massive exploitation of the labor of indigenous and imported nonindigenous peoples, created the conditions of a proper capitalist global market in newly valuable commodities (not merely the gold and silver found in the Americas but also the labor of extracting them itself).3

The expropriation of the workers from the means of production – the sine qua non of primitive accumulation – describes both the Tudor enclosure of the commons in Marx and More and the appropriation of goods and labour capital in the New World. David Armitage offers a complementary perspective, suggesting that commerce and primitive accumulation not only described but in fact motivated England’s early New World ventures: The British Empire was an arena of hemispheric and international trade. Its character was therefore commercial. The attachment to commerce –

Spenser’s ‘Blood Guiltie’ Temperance 65 and the means by which commerce connected the various parts of the Empire to one another – made the British Empire different from its predecessors or its rivals, most of which (it was believed) had been integrated by force, or had been operated more for reasons of power (often over subject peoples) than plenty.4

Marx, Greer, Mignolo, Quilligan, and Armitage share the conviction that primitive accumulation accounts for the force and violence characteristic of early English imperialism, including although not limited to England’s early colonial ventures in the New World.5 Economic historians have also, of course, constructed more celebratory narratives of England’s early American investments. Especially prominent among such apologiae for colonialism is the metaphor of the Invisible Hand: a figure that rose to prominence with Adam Smith, who conjured this image to argue that capitalism harnesses self-interest in the service of the common good. In fact, though, the Invisible Hand precedes both Smith and capitalism per se by at least a generation. As formulated by Montesquieu, the image originally represented the benignity of pursuing not material gain, but personal honour, and applied not to the quest of the aspiring entrepreneur, but that of the chivalric knight.6 In A.O. Hirschman’s narrative: as the Renaissance gives way to the Enlightenment, and chivalric idealism gives way to Machiavellian and Hobbesian cynicism, the Invisible Hand and the beneficence it represents migrate away from the individual hero and toward a depersonalized system of economic aspiration.7 Smith’s appropriation of this figure, then, instances a rhetorical mobility analogous to the sort I ascribe to temperance in English Renaissance discourse. Marx, enraged by Smith’s rhetoric, which he interprets as a whitewashing fiction, reappropriates the figure of the Invisible Hand in turn, lending it an additional dimension of conceptual mobility. In a scathing critique, Marx excoriates the myth of benevolence represented by Smith’s Invisible Hand, which euphemizes capitalism’s violent origins: ‘conquest, enslavement, robbery, [and] murder . . . written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.’8 Marx replaces this Invisible Hand with a corporeal image as horrifying as Smith’s is benign, depicting capitalism as a fetus born savagely into the world, ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.’9 In conversation with Smith’s metaphor, Marx’s grotesque newborn recasts the Invisible Hand both as phantom midwife, ushering the demonic infant of capitalism into the world, and simultaneously as

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a fantasy of disembodiment – a disavowal of the material reality of capitalism. The Invisible Hand, for Marx, represents an unconscionable denial of primitive accumulation: Adam Smith washing his Hand(s) of capitalism’s foundational violence. This chapter considers a Renaissance primary text that stages the convergence of the two aforementioned figures – temperance and the Invisible Hand – whose relentless rhetorical mobility allows them to confront the ethical quandaries of England’s colonial activity in the New World. Edmund Spenser’s Legend of Temperance, book 2 of The Faerie Queene, anticipates the metaphorical and the ethical content of the disagreement between Smith and Marx; the poem uses the figure of the guilty hand to critique the colonial deployment of temperance as a whitewashing fiction that obscures the reality of New World primitive accumulation. Book 1, I will argue, presents archaism and the conventions of chivalric romance as whitewashing fictions, similar to Smith’s Invisible Hand in Marx’s estimation: images invoked to obscure the violence of primitive accumulation. Confronted with a nightmarish scene of forced labour in the New World, Guyon, Spenser’s Knight of Temperance, seeks asylum in chivalric mythology. His disavowal of violence and suffering manifests, allegorically, in two related fictions, both subjected by the poem to sceptical review: first, the repeated figure of bloody or guilty hands, implicating Guyon and his nominal virtue in the violence of primitive accumulation; and second, the virtue of temperance itself, which works to disavow the violence and brutality of New World colonialism represented by the figure of ‘blood guilty’ hands. The Mammon episode, I will argue, presents temperance as a fiction of European time management, thrift, and virtue, which purports to justify the suffering of the enslaved, and so obscures the injustice of the colonial mode of production. In readings of three scenes from the Legend of Temperance, I will argue that the poem critiques temperance – formulated repeatedly as a proto-capitalistic virtue of time management – as an ethically and epistemologically impoverished virtue. This critique develops over the course of book 2, as Guyon oscillates between competing models of virtuous conduct: affective engagement with the suffering he witnesses, and ahistoricizing disengagement, an impulse the book identifies with temperance in its proto-capitalistic guise. Like Smith’s Invisible Hand in Marx’s reading, temperance in this sense proves to be ethically content-less: a fiction erected both to justify and to disavow the violent truth of primitive accumulation.

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Early in book 2, Guyon’s responses are dictated by affect: empathy and identification, which he works actively to reconcile with his defining virtue of temperance. Challenged by his Palmer to reconcile this emotional response with his nominal virtue, though, Guyon turns away from affective engagement toward the distancing logic of temperance as a mercantile principle. The knight’s empathy gives way to economic repayment in the form of revenge, his identification with the bloody-handed babe to a form of recompense that will wash his hands clean of the whole affair. Subsequently, when Guyon descends into the Cave of Mammon, temperance’s economic logic becomes literal and explicit. Unlike the classical and Renaissance epic heroes who precede him in the descent to hell, Guyon experiences empathy neither for the condemned sinners nor for the allegorized New World natives smelting gold in the bowels of the earth. While images of Guyon’s earlier traumatic encounter return in the text, like the manifest content of a Freudian dream, Guyon deploys an economically inflected version of temperance to ward off recognition, imagining his appetites pure, and his hands clean, of the violence of primitive accumulation. For Marx, such violence is obscured by Smith’s fiction of the Invisible Hand; for Spenser, it is obscured by temperance in its nascent commercial guise. The temperance that explains Guyon’s affective disengagement in the Cave of Mammon represents an ahistorical disavowal: the knight’s willingness to wash his hands clean of the ‘blood and fire’ that fuel the New World mines of primitive accumulation.10 Spenser’s critique of colonial temperance concludes with the partial restoration of the affect that Guyon has repressed. The first such gesture comprises the illogical appearance of an angel – in a book dedicated to a secular, Aristotelian virtue – to deliver Guyon from his ordeal in Mammon’s Cave. Identified with love, pity, and divine grace, the angel appears as an admonition to restore the empathy with which Guyon began. Concluding his mission in the Bower of Bliss, though, Guyon’s ‘tempest of . . . wrathfulnesse’ and ‘rigour pittilesse’ confirm his commitment to a model of temperance premised on the exclusion of affect (2.12.83.4, 2). In a second admonitory reminder of what is missing from the colonial deployment of temperance, the mourning occasioned by the Bower’s destruction is not excised entirely from the poem, but rather relegated to the margins – to Medea, engraved on the gate to the Bower, and to hoggish Grill, left to his ‘hoggish mind’ (2.12.87.8). Tenacious remainders of what Guyon

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disavows, Medea and Grill represent an insistence that however capacious Renaissance temperance becomes in the colonial context, it fails to acknowledge the affective consequences of its unrelenting application.11 Guyon’s Guilty Hands The opening episode of book 2 introduces an ethical ideal that resists assimilation to even the most capacious understanding of Renaissance temperance, and a hero who resists assimilation to the critical discourse that has arisen to describe him. The terms of the scholarly conversation about Guyon were established more than fifty years ago, with Harry Berger, Jr’s argument that Guyon’s self-righteousness attests not to his moral superiority, but rather to the limitations of his eponymous virtue.12 Paul Alpers disagreed, interpreting Guyon’s ‘rigour pittilesse’ (2.12.83.2) as one of the ‘myths of excellence that all good men can stand by.’13 Subsequently, critics have continued to remark upon Guyon’s cold unapproachability, playing out variations on the theme of Spenser’s vexed relationship to the definition of a ‘cardinal’ virtue attainable without the benefit of grace.14 Such readings of Guyon’s autarchy largely ignore this early encounter, where Guyon evinces a series of empathetic impulses to mitigate the suffering he witnesses in others. The episode begins when ‘a ruefull voice’ draws Guyon and his Palmer to a gory tableau: the anguished Amavia, ‘In whose white alabaster brest did sticke / A cruell knife, that made a griesly wound, / From which forth gusht a streme of gorebloud thick’ (2.1.39.5–7); her innocent baby son, who plays and bathes himself in her blood, insensible to the tragedy; and the corpse of her beloved knight Mortdant, blood-spattered and supine on the ground. Guyon’s response is first and foremost a profoundly emotional one; only secondarily does he consider whether and how his affective state might be assimilated to his nominal virtue. In fact, Guyon’s initial reaction to the grisly scene threatens to mimic the intemperance he ought to proscribe: His hart gan wexe as starke, as marble stone, And his fresh bloud did frieze with fearefull cold, That all his senses seemd bereft attone: At last his mightie ghost gan deepe to grone, As Lyon grudging in his great disdaine,

Spenser’s ‘Blood Guiltie’ Temperance 69 Mournes inwardly, and makes to himselfe mone; Till ruth and fraile affection did constraine His stout courage to stoupe, and shew his inward paine.

(2.1.42.2–9)

Guyon here experiences compassion in the most literal sense – participation in another’s suffering (as in the Latin com-, ‘together with,’ + patior, ‘to suffer, to endure’) – as he becomes like what he sees. His heart turns to marble, mimicking Mortdant’s corpse encased in its unyielding armour; his blood seizes in his veins like the ‘gorebloud thick’ clotting in Amavia’s wounds (2.1.39.7); and his spirit, compared to a lion as it begins ‘deepe to grone’ its way back into consciousness, echoes and reverses the movement of Amavia’s departing soul, which emits ‘a grone so deepe and low,’ like the death wails of a wounded hind (2.1.38.3). His senses, ‘bereft attone,’ are thus taken from him not only ‘at one and the same time, simultaneously’ (OED s.v. ‘at once,’ 3); or ‘in company, all together’ (OED s.v. ‘at one,’ 5, attested only in Spenser; q.v. The Faerie Queene 4.4.14.9, 4.9.30.2); but also ‘in a state of harmony or unity of feeling,’ ‘harmonious, accordant’ with the ‘bereft’ herself. Guyon is thus both ‘attuned’ to Amavia and ‘atoned’ to her (OED s.v. ‘at one’ 2; s.v. ‘attuned’; s.v. ‘atone’ 1). His transfixion thus echoes Dante’s over-identified faint in Inferno V more closely than it anticipates Guyon’s own swoon in the Cave of Mammon, which the narrator insistently attributes to physical, not affective, exhaustion. Here, though, Guyon is struck by wonder: that affective stupor induced by experiences that exceed intellectual comprehension. Several decades later, Descartes would classify wonder as a passion, a taxonomy that belies its propriety for the supposed paragon of temperance: When the first encounter with some object surprises us . . . this makes us wonder and be astonished at it. And since this can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, it seems to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion.15

Guyon is clearly moved, surprised, and astonished – this latter term invoked by the image of his petrifying heart. Just as Descartes would predict, he seems to experience these affects before he considers whether the objects of his empathy – intemperate erotic love and its tragic consequences – are suitable ones. Guyon’s wonder transports

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him from his faculties, marking his astonishment at, rather than his cognition or moralization of, the passions on display in Amavia’s tragic tableau. As Caroline Walker Bynum has argued, ‘wonder’ in this sense is non-appropriative, distinct from the fetishized ‘wonders’ that fascinated scholars of the 1990s as symbols of the early modern European imperialist impulse.16 As I discussed in chapter 1, early English colonialists such as Richard Hakluyt insisted on the compatibility of missionary, anthropological, and acquisitive agendas, arguing that New World plantation would enable ‘full knowledge of the language manners and custommes of the people of those Regions’ as well as ‘the riches and commodities of the Inlandes.’17 What Hakluyt brings together, though – wonder and wonders – Guyon holds asunder with his affective paralysis. As Descartes and Bynum imply, Guyon’s wonder threatens his embodiment of his nominal virtue, having the potential both to disarm his judgment about what constitutes a proper object of empathy, and to overshadow the acquisitive impulses that, as Lorna Hutson has argued, characterize the self-appointed ‘knights of temperance in the realms of gold.’18 Guyon strives, though, to accommodate his affective response to the mandates of temperance. When he comforts Amavia, he tries to reconcile empathy with moderation: ‘all I seeke, is but to haue redrest / The bitter pangs, that doth your heart infest. / . . . / That I may cast to compasse your reliefe, / Or die with you in sorrow, and partake your griefe’ (2.1.48.4–9). To ‘redres[s]’ Amavia’s suffering, Guyon vows first ‘to compasse [her] relief.’ Literally, he means to plan, design, and achieve such relief (OED 1, 11), but the secondary meanings of the verb bespeak Guyon’s attempts to assimilate his affective response to temperance in the new iconography. ‘To compass’ also means ‘to describe with compasses (a circle)’ (4), and ‘to embrace, encircle with the arms’ (8b), a conjunction that aligns the geometric ‘measure’ of the new iconography with Guyon’s empathetic response. The faint echo of patior (the root of ‘compassion’ though not of ‘compass’) also intertwines Guyon’s affect with temperance in its new iconography; patior’s English translations include ‘to suffer, to endure,’ and ‘to wait,’ linking the empathy of ‘compassion’ to the patient delay of temporal temperance. Guyon’s vow to ‘compass’ thus suggests both his intention to remain emotionally identified with Amavia, and his hope to reconcile such affect with his nominal virtue. The ‘or’ of line 9, however, reveals Guyon’s reservations about these aims: if he cannot compass – achieve, but also encircle, circumscribe, measure,

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delimit – Amavia’s grief, perhaps he will find himself compelled actually to die alongside her. Perhaps empathetic identification, he worries, will in fact overwhelm him, render him as helpless and as moribund as Amavia. With this ‘or,’ Guyon reveals his doubts about both the sustainability of empathy, and its compatibility with his efforts to achieve, impart, and enact temperance in its new iconographic guise. Guyon continues to empathize with Amavia’s plight throughout their encounter. When he offers to testify to Amavia’s suffering, he reaffirms his commitment to affect, which he once again situates in opposition to temperance in its mercantile formulation. He pleads, ‘Speake, O deare Lady speake: help neuer comes too late’ (2.1.44.9): Let one word fall that may your griefe vnfold, And tell the secret of your mortall smart; He oft finds present helpe, who does his griefe impart.

(2.1.46.7–9)

Telling, here, is decidedly not the affectless, ahistorical accounting that Mammon later performs (‘in his lap a masse of coyne he told,’ 2.7.4.7).19 Guyon’s invitation to ‘tell the secret of your mortall smart’ is instead an offer to bear witness, a form of altruism that Amavia introduces when she commissions her son: . . . thou, sweet Babe, whom frowning froward fate Hath made sad witnesse of thy fathers fall, Sith heauen thee deignes to hold in liuing state, Long maiste thou liue, and better thriue withall, Then to thy lucklesse parents did befall: Liue thou, and to thy mother dead attest, That cleare she dide from blemish criminall; Thy litle hands embrewd in bleeding brest Loe I for pledges leaue.

(2.1.37)

Amavia’s language here is legal: she interpellates her son as a witnesse to his father’s murder; she asks that he attest to her innocence; and she identifies his bloody hands as pledges to her freedom from criminall stain. ‘Attest’ and ‘witness’ – from the Latin ad + testari and the Old English witness, both meaning ‘to furnish written or sworn evidence’ – describe the sole mode of furnishing legal testimony before the advent of the legally binding signature in the thirteenth century. More

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specifically, Amavia’s bequest represents the transformation of bodily suffering into narrative, recapitulating the evolution of testimony out of the early medieval institution of trial by ordeal.20 Guyon and the babe are thus doubly analogous: in their inability to assimilate this trauma – viz. Guyon’s faint of wonder and the babe’s nonplussed pursuit of his ‘cruell sport, in stead of sorrow dew’ (2.1.40.6) – and in their charge to bear witness. While Amavia imagines that she will live only in the narrative legacy carried by her son, Guyon remains more hopeful about the revivifying possibilities of witnessing: despite her ‘mortall smart,’ he insists that Amavia’s ‘telling’ could find not only future exoneration but ‘present helpe,’ which ‘neuer comes too late’ (2.1.46.9, 44.9). Guyon’s hopes are thus commensurate with those of contemporary trauma theorists, who argue that agency depends on the presence of an ‘inner witness, set up in dialogic relations with the other.’21 While massive trauma delivers a ‘mortall smart’ by destroying the inner witness, bearing witness restores the victim’s agency, even as it constatively recalls the trauma of objectification.22 Guyon’s relationship to Amavia here is, as in Bynum’s model of wonder, non-appropriative; his offer to bear witness to her suffering represents a compassionate identification with her own ruined ‘inner witness’ and with the babe whose bloody hands serve as testimonial ‘pledges.’ The affective mandates of witnessing continue to inform Guyon’s conduct through the burial scene, when Guyon and Palmer entomb the corpses of Mortdant and Amavia: ‘The great earthes wombe they open to the sky’ (2.1.60.2), to provide the ‘honorable toombe’ that Guyon demands for them both despite Mortdant’s lustful ‘crime’ and Amavia’s suicide (2.1.58.9, 7). The tomb and the womb thus coincide, in an oxymoronic juxtaposition that will return in the poem, as a traumatic event returns to possess its subject.23 Earlier in the canto, this rhyme is a morbid one: a ‘[p]ittifull spectacle’ of the maternal body that is no longer life-giving (2.1.40.1). But when the paradox reappears, it implies a more hopeful future, made possible by Guyon’s participation as witness. These deaths come to mark the birth of mute trauma into narrative, the restoration of subjectivity through testimony. In bearing witness, Guyon holds out the promise of transforming annihilation into resurrection. The Knight of Temperance, despite his name, here cleaves to affect and empathy. By bearing witness, Guyon will help to restore Amavia to subjectivity from her status as an object of trauma.24 Committed to interacting with Amavia as subject rather than object, Guyon eschews both the appropriative model of

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wonder and the mercantile dimensions of temperance in favour of his own empathetic engagement. But at the Palmer’s behest – and reminded by the ‘heauie sight’ of Amavia’s corpse (2.1.56.7) of his earlier fear that empathy could be fatal – Guyon sets about trading his affective engagement for a quantifiable, economic conception of temperance. His first attempt comprises the burial itself, an undertaking of Guyon’s to which the Palmer, inexplicably, acquiesces, even while reminding Guyon of the impropriety of Christian burial for these suicides. Hamilton feels called upon to explain this unusual occurrence: ‘In this one matter Guyon refuses to submit to the Palmer’s judgment: burial customs are too deeply felt to yield to reason.’25 As this gloss suggests, affect here divides Guyon from his Palmer. Guyon, out of empathy and grief, resolves to bury both sinners, unable to bear the idea of denying a soul ‘so much of his rest’ (2.1.59.7). The Palmer, on the other hand, plays by the book, advising against burying Mortdant because he died overcome by ‘crime’ (2.1.58.7). This disagreement seems to separate Guyon and his Palmer into allegories of Aristotelian continence and temperance, respectively: in Sir Thomas Hoby’s formulation, Guyon is the ‘Capitain that fighteth manlie’ against his passions, ‘but for al that not without much a do and daunger’; the Palmer, on the other hand, is ‘the Capitain that without resistance . . . reigneth . . . full and wholy most obedient to reason,’ without experiencing the emotional distress of empathy, passion, or desire.26 Guyon’s empathy, that is to say, stands between him and the perfect embodiment of his nominal virtue: at this moment, affect is not assimilable to temperance, but an explicit obstacle to its adoption. The burial rite, offering a way out of this impasse, thus represents not the Palmer’s capitulation to Guyon’s desire, but rather a ceremonial induction into Aristotelian temperance, distancing Guyon from affect and making him ‘full and wholy most obedient to reason.’ The question of affective closure for the bereaved was a pressing one in Reformation England, where the eradication of the doctrine of Purgatory had left mourners only the austere burial rite of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer as a ritual severance of their ties to the deceased. Denied the prerogative of intercessory prayer to assist the souls of the departed through Purgatory, Reformation Protestants were forced to use the burial rite to mark a final end to their connections with the dead; ‘the dividing line between life and death, the living and the dead, assumed a far greater clarity.’27 For Guyon, this ritual differentiation represents not only a stage of grief, but also the symbolic advent of a form of

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temperance premised on the rejection of affect and – as I will argue – the embrace of mercantilism and colonial aggression. Burial has already appeared in The Faerie Queene in this guise – a disavowal of affect and identification – in a scene that anticipates this one: Redcrosse’s encounter with his doppelga¨nger Fradubio. Like Virgil’s Polydorus and Dante’s Pier della Vigna, Fradubio is imprisoned in the bark of a tree; he tells an uncomprehending Redcrosse Knight about his entrapment by the sorceress Duessa: both a double for Acrasia, Mortdant’s predatory seductress, and Redcrosse’s current travelling companion. The scene serves, in Janet Adelman’s words, as a ‘nearly textbook illustration of the ways in which splitting and projection function to ward off’ self-recognition. Redcrosse’s ‘disavowal . . . is registered in his final gesture, when he thrusts the bleeding bough’ broken from Fradubio’s tree-trunk body ‘ “into the ground, / That from the bloud he might be innocent” (1.2.44.6–7); in effect, he buries the evidence as quickly as possible in order to maintain his sense of his own innocence[.]’28 Burial functions psychically to deny the connections between the living and the dead. Guyon’s unorthodox insistence on burying Amavia and Mortdant thus represents a departure from the affective engagement he evinces earlier in the episode. As the burial concludes, Guyon adopts a second strategy of affective disavowal, committing himself to a project of revenge: Sir Guyon more affection to increace, Bynempt a sacred vow, which none should aye releace. The dead knights sword out of his sheath he drew, With which he cut a locke of all their heare, Which medling with their bloud and earth, he threw Into the graue, and gan deuoutly sweare; Such and such euill God on Guyon reare, And worse and worse young Orphane be thy paine, If I or thou dew vengeance doe forbeare, Til guiltie bloud her guerdon doe obtaine: So shedding many teares, they closd the earth againe.

(2.1.60.8–61.9)

Guyon’s vow seems in some ways to intensify his affective enmeshment in the tragedy. The ambiguous referent of ‘all’ suggests that Guyon cuts a lock of hair not only from the deceased, but from the

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heads of every body in the scene, symbolically asserting his entanglement in the ruined family; and his vow is designed ‘more affection to increace,’ in the sense of ‘goodwill, warmth of attachment’ (OED 3rd ed. 2a). And yet these details initiate Guyon’s disengagement, as he transfers his empathy for suffering into the single-minded antipathy of revenge. ‘Affection’ also begins to signify ‘animosity towards’ (OED 3rd ed. 4), while Guyon’s insertion into the family begins to usurp the orphaned son’s prerogative, cutting off ‘all their heir’ – Amavia and Mortdant’s only son.29 Guyon’s implication in the family structure thus begins, paradoxically, to distance him affectively from the victims, as he assumes the role not of compassionate witness but rather of avenging son. This transition marks the evolution of Guyon’s animating virtue into its mercantile, pre-capitalistic form. The mercantile dimensions of revenge are explicit in Guyon’s vow to pursue this charge ‘Till guiltie bloud her guerdon doe obtaine,’ with ‘guerdon’ meaning ‘reward, requital, or recompense,’ derived via the Old French guerdon from the Old English wiðerle´an, meaning ‘payment.’ As R.L. Kesler has argued, Renaissance conceptions of revenge turned on ‘linear and causal explanations of time’ – one death leading directly to another, and then another – that were both descriptive and prescriptive of a ‘bourgeois conceptual economy.’30 At a time when plays and play scripts were becoming commodities in their own right,31 revenge as depicted on the stage allegorized the market in which such commodities would circulate. Renaissance revenge was both a symbol and a product of proto-capitalism. In vowing to avenge this tragedy, Guyon sacrifices empathy to the economic logic of temperance in the new iconography. What this logic omits is what Renaissance moralists insist that Christians must not: grace, the gift that exceeds economic exchange.32 Take William Baldwin, in his 1547 Treatise of Moral Philosophy: ‘Wrath and revengement taketh from man the mercy of God, and destroyeth and quencheth the grace that God hath given him.’33 Alexander Hume counsels, ‘either mon thou forgiue man, and remit the revenge to God (to whome vengeance apertaineth) . . . or else looke not to be forgiuen of thy heauenly Father, nor to be releeved of thy present trouble.’34 Christianity is defined by a gift: an undeserved sacrifice, one that belies the strict Old Testament ‘Law of Retaliation, requiring eye for eye, tooth for tooth, wound for wound, stripe for stripe,’ in the words of preacher Nicholas Stratford.35 Guyon’s revenge effaces grace, reverting to cruel Old

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Testament economies, even while reaching into emergent capitalistic ideology. Book 2 will insist on the poverty of virtue without grace when an angel rescues Guyon from the Cave of Mammon, the realm of the economy toward which temperance in the new iconography tends. As Marx accuses Smith, so Spenser accuses Guyon of perpetuating the violent fiction of virtuous autonomy, and of denying the intersubjectivity on which Christian salvation depends. Guyon performs his final act of affective disengagement in his futile attempts to wash Ruddymane’s hands. Traditionally, critics identify their indelible stain with original sin, and Guyon’s failed washing with the limits of baptism.36 More important for my purposes than this theological context is Guyon’s response to the failure: Then soft himselfe inclyning on his knee Downe to that well, did in the water weene (So loue does loath disdainfull nicetee) His guiltie hands from bloudie gore to cleene. He washt them oft and oft, yet nought they beene For all his washing cleaner. Still he stroue, Yet still the litle hands were bloudie seene; Then which him into great amaz’ment droue, And into diuerse doubt his wauering wonder cloue. He wist not whether blot of foule offence Might not be purgd with water nor with bath; Or that high God, in lieu of innocence, Imprinted had that token of his wrath, To shew how sore bloudguiltinesse he hat’th; Or that the charme and venim, which they druncke, Their bloud with secret filth infected hath, Being diffused through the senselesse truncke, That through the great contagion direfull deadly stunck, Whom thus at gaze, the Palmer gan to bord With goodly reason . . .

(2.2.3.1–5.2)

At first, Guyon is driven by compassion, love that admits no disdain (a formulation that will return later in the Cave of Mammon). The pronominal confusion recalls Guyon’s identification with Ruddymane,

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and his ‘wonder’ recalls his affective paralysis. Subsequently, Guyon resorts to various forms of intellectual distancing, multiplying explanations for the indelible stain, until he locates one that achieves the desired disengagement, transforming his pity into disgust for the ‘secret filth’ infecting the corpses. Guyon bids Ruddymane farewell with two bequests: the ‘memorie of that dayes ruth’ registered on his hands, and the charge to transform pity into revenge, as Guyon himself has done (2.3.2.7). The sequence thus chronicles Guyon’s attempt to wash his hands clean of this affair; to disentangle himself from affect and identification; and to proceed into the economic logic of the talion. But his attempts are insufficient. Affect will return to haunt Guyon in the Cave of Mammon, where his fantasy of a fully economic conception of temperance is not the antidote to suffering, but its very cause and condition. What Guyon Disdains In the Cave of Mammon episode, the New World context and the colonial resonances of temperance come to the thematic fore. For several decades now, Renaissance scholars who have descended into Spenser’s Cave of Mammon have found the New World staring back at them. David Read shows how descriptions of the Cave echo sixteenthcentury travel narratives describing New World mines, and argues that Spenser distinguishes Guyon, his Knight of Temperance, from the Spaniards condemned by English explorers for their gold-mongering.37 Maureen Quilligan compares the ‘feends’ smelting gold in Mammon’s Cave to the Peruvian goldsmiths depicted in Theodor de Bry’s 1596 America (2.7.35.6), arguing that the episode forces Guyon to confront the slave labour on which Europe’s gold-standard wealth depended.38 David Landreth reads Mammon’s coins as artefacts that consolidate the narrative histories of their production, histories Mammon obscures in his obsessive, miserly counting.39 Most recently, Edmund Valentine Campos reads this ‘epic underground journey into a South American mine’ as a means of ‘marking the moral distance between the English and the Spanish, but also the racial difference between the Indian and the English.’40 While Mammon’s ‘masse of coyne’ represents the promise of El Dorado (2.7.4.7), and his Cave the South American mines where it is extracted, Guyon himself clearly does not belong to this New World landscape, representing instead

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‘the anachronism of knight-errantry in an increasingly commercialized world,’ as Mammon scornfully argues:41 Sonne . . . let be thy bitter scorne, And leaue the rudenesse of that antique age To them, that liu’d thererin in state forlorne; Thou that doest liue in later times, must wage Thy workes for wealth, and life for gold engage.

(2.7.18.1–5)

Mammon’s pun on ‘wage’ – meaning both ‘to gage, pledge’ and ‘to engage or employ for wages; to hire’ (OED 1–3, 7) – captures Guyon’s suspended position between what Marx would call the feudal and the capitalist modes of production, and between the models of temperance corresponding to each. As Quilligan explains, ‘Mammon . . . put[s] his finger on the contradiction between Guyon’s wage-laboring knighthood and the ideals of feudal array based on land tenure,’ ideals that hadn’t corresponded to the reality of military compensation since 1385.42 While underscoring his idealism, Guyon’s ‘bitter scorn’ also reiterates the anti-affective tendency he established in canto 1. During a three-day temptation, Mammon works to disrupt Guyon’s nostalgic dissociation from the present, in all of its material glory. At the level of the narrative, he fails. Guyon betrays no desire for Mammon’s lures, and his notorious faint at canto’s end betrays his physical, not moral, exhaustion. Nevertheless, the canto itself mounts a pointed critique of rationalistic temperance. In his disdain for Mammon’s obsessive ‘telling’ of his treasure, Guyon disavows the continuity between Mammon’s hoarding and his own rationalizations. While he traverses Mammon’s cave with apparent impunity, the poem implicates Guyon in both the wage economy and the physical suffering displayed therein. The ‘guiltie hands’ that Guyon tried frantically to wash clean in canto 2 do not transform into Adam Smith’s benign Invisible Hand (2.2.3.4), but instead reappear as nightmarish metaphors – a disembodied hand gouging the earth to mine for gold, the defiled hands of Pontius Pilate – refuting the fantasy that temperance in its rationalistic, mercantile formation can recuse the virtuous subject from affect. The episode’s denouement, finally, belies the delusions of human autonomy and bourgeois self-legislation: the ideology characteristic of temperance unmediated by empathy or affect. Critics generally concur that Guyon remains unallured by Mammon’s material temptations.43 They pay less attention to Guyon’s impassivity to the suffering he witnesses, a response predicted by his

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disavowals in the Amavia episode, but not by the journey-to-hell topos of classical and Renaissance epic; such infernal journeys occasion tremendous sadness for, for example, Aeneas and Dante. But for Guyon, these two forms of disengagement are bound up together from the outset, as when he rejects Mammon’s claim that wealth engenders ‘glory and renowne’ (2.7.11.9): All otherwise (said he) I riches read, And deeme them roote of all disquietnesse; First got with guile, and then preseru’d with dread, And after spent with pride and lauishnesse, Leauing behind them griefe and heauinesse. Infinite mischiefes of them do arize, Strife, and debate, bloudshed, and bitternesse, Outrageous wrong, and hellish couetize, That noble heart as great dishonour doth despize.

(2.7.12)

A set of abstract nouns identifies two strains in Guyon’s objections: the depraved actions taken to acquire or maintain wealth, and the affective states resulting from these actions. By this Boethian logic, riches corrupt not only insofar as they motivate immoral acts; more insidiously, they engender destructive passions – disquietness, grief, bitterness, etc. – derived from the fear of loss and the greed for more. Guyon evinces equal disdain for material possessions and for the affective vacillations they generate. Distanced from the temptations to empathy and affect characteristic of Aristotelian continence, Guyon here evinces a form of temperance comprising impassivity with respect to both material acquisition and affective engagement. Temperance dissociates Guyon not only from Mammon’s worldly temptations, but also from his fellow creatures. Thus Guyon displays no interest in the inhabitants of Mammon’s Cave, the miners who, in Quilligan’s words, look ‘so like the picture of New World conquest – naked workers surveyed by armed knights,’ a vision of ‘New World wealth as it really was, without the erasure of its base in forced labor’:44 . . . an hundred ranges weren pight, And hundred fornaces all burning bright; By euery fornace many feends did bide, Deformed creatures, horrible in sight,

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Temperance Explores America And euery feend his busie paines applide, To melt the golden metall, ready to be tride. One with great bellowes gathered filling aire, And with forst wind the fewell did inflame; Another did the dying bronds repaire With yron toungs, and sprinckled oft the same With liquid waues, fiers Vulcans rage to tame, Who maistring them, renewd his former heat; Some scumd the drosse, that from the metall came; Some stird the molten owre with ladles great; And euery one did swincke, and euery one did sweat.

(2.7.35.4–36.9)

With technical precision, Spenser depicts the forced labour of smelting in a gold or silver mine. Situated as it is between the proem, with its direct allusions to the territories of the New World, and the Bower of Bliss, also a popular site for colonial reading, this passage invites interpretation as an allegory of sixteenth-century colonialism. Spenser’s own colonial commitments were in Ireland rather than in the Americas, and the latter landscape was in any case represented in Elizabethan England as an analogue of the former.45 But this scene of mining offers greater support for a New World than an Irish reading, both because of the unequivocal racial marking of the labouring ‘blacke fiendes’ (2.7.41.9), and because of the insistence that ‘till that day,’ these labourers ‘neuer creature saw, that came that way’ (2.7.37.4–5). The allegory thus refers both to an historically specific economic formation – the European slave trade as the basis of a New World form of primitive accumulation46 – and to a set piece of the epic genre – the classical hero’s descent to hell. This simultaneity forcefully condemns slave labour, and the protocapitalistic mode of production formed on its back, as a source of infernal suffering. To situate New World mining in hell is to suggest that the prerogative of divine judgment has been arrogated by European colonial powers, who thus betray, warns Alexander Hume, their failure to ‘remit . . . to God’ what to Him ‘apertaineth.’ Despite Guyon’s impassivity, the verse implicates him, and his dispassionate virtue, in such hellish suffering, when he agrees to tour the caves only to learn the history of the proffered gold: Me list not (said the Elfin knight) receaue Thing offred, till I know it well be got,

Spenser’s ‘Blood Guiltie’ Temperance 81 Ne wote I, but thou didst these goods bereaue From rightfull owner by vnrighteous lot, Or that bloud guiltinesse or guile them blot.

(2.7.19.1–5)

‘Bloud guiltinesse’ is a phrase used only two other times in The Faerie Queene, both in 2.2: once to gloss the theological import of Ruddymane’s stained hands (2.2.4.5), and once to question three intemperately sparring knights: ‘were [it] not better, faire it to accord, / Then with bloud guiltinesse to heap offence, / And mortall vengeaunce ioyne to crime abhord?’ (2.2.30.2–4, emphasis added). These repetitions associate Guyon, the self-appointed revenger, with Ruddymane, and with the slaves securing Mammon’s misbegotten wealth. The phrase describing the burden of testimony and the guilt of revenge here extends to the wealth unearthed by Mammon’s slaves, where guiltiness converges with giltiness in the bloody reality of New World mining.47 Guyon is thus linguistically implicated in the suffering of these colonized labourers, and in the bloody history of primitive accumulation, which he, along with Adam Smith, would obscure behind fictions of virtue. Smith’s fiction takes the form the Invisible Hand, which implies that self-interested industry guarantees delivery from suffering (and thus that these miners deserve their fate); Guyon’s fiction takes the form of temperance, which implies that the experience of passion is itself a moral failing (and thus that these miners, similarly, are responsible for their own suffering). Temperance is the name under which Guyon recuses himself from the blood guiltiness on which the verse insists. The poem continues to identify Guyon with the miners, inviting from the reader the affect and empathy that he resists, by drawing on the trope of colonial primitivism: the narcissistic view of the colonized subject as either the ‘mirrhour’ of European culture, or its ‘antique history,’ to borrow Spenser’s terms (2.pr.4.7, 2.pr.1.2). Such visual doubling occurs and recurs as Guyon travels through Mammon’s storehouse of gold. The knight ‘with wonder all the way / Did feed his eyes’ (2.7.24.3–4), overwhelmed by the sight ‘of richesse such exceeding store, / As eye of man did neuer see before’ (2.7.31.4–5); the fiends analogously ‘wonder at the sight’ of Guyon, ‘for till that day, / They neuer creature saw, that came that way’ (2.7.37.4–5). The fiends ‘[f]rom their whot worke . . . did themselues withdraw,’ a recoiling echoed in Guyon’s urge to ‘retire’ from these sights (2.7.37.3, 8).

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But once again, Guyon disavows his similarities to the labourers, when Mammon prompts him, unsuccessfully, to satisfy his curiosity: Behold, thou Faeries sonne . . . ... The thing, that thou did craue so earnestly, To weet, whence all the wealth late shewd by mee, Proceeded, lo now is reueald to thee.

(2.7.38.1, 3–5)

Instead of remarking on the gold’s provenance, though, Guyon offers an evasive rhetorical question: ‘what needeth mee / To couet more, then I haue cause to vse?’ (2.7.39.3–4). The historical allegory of colonialism serves on the one hand to reveal Guyon as complicit – blood guilty – in primitive accumulation and the hellish suffering it entails, and on the other hand to showcase his denial of that very complicity. In fact, it is a distinct form of allegory that becomes Guyon’s preferred means of distancing himself from affective and historical engagement. The knight’s strategic recourse to allegory comes into view when Mammon – rebuffed by Guyon’s rhetorical question and ‘much displeasd, yet no’te he chuse, / But beare the rigour of his bold mesprise’ (2.7.39.7–8) – leads the way to a massive gate, guarded by a golden giant: Disdayne he called was, and did disdaine To be so cald, and who so did him call: Sterne was his looke, and full of stomacke vaine, ... And with his pride all others powre deface: More fit amongst blacke fiendes, then men to haue his place.

(2.7.41.1–9)

Hamilton’s note to this passage reflects a consensus that Disdayne embodies Guyon’s scorn for Mammon’s offer; ‘Disdayne appears in response to Guyon’s “bold mesprise.” ’48 If ‘mesprise’ means ‘contempt, scorn, failure to appreciate or recognize the value of something’ (OED 3rd ed. s.v. ‘misprision,’ n.2), this interpretation suffices. But ‘mesprise’ also invokes another constellation of meanings: an error or mistake, whether criminal, clerical, or perceptual (OED 3rd ed. n.1). In this alternative sense, Guyon’s ‘bold mesprise’ could represent the ‘rigour’ of his dissociation from the demonic miners, his mistaken – even potentially criminal or ‘blood-guiltie’ – judgment of their plight

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as unrelated to his own. Disdayne thus represents self-directed criticism that Guyon cannot tolerate, and so disavows as an allegorical personification. This alternative reading makes sense of Spenser’s allegorical joke that Disdayne ‘did disdaine / To be so cald’; disdain consists not in scorn for another, but in the rejection of self-characterization: the refusal to be interpellated by the analogy between act and identity. Furthermore, Spenser’s source – canto 42 of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso – establishes a precedent for Disdayne as a manifestation of self-directed loathing. In the Furioso, the knight Rinaldo, in love with Angelica, is pursued by Gelosia; Rinaldo’s rescuer, who materializes to conquer Gelosia, declares, ‘Sappi, Rinaldo, il nome mio e` lo Sdegno, / venuto sol per sciorti il giogo indegno’ (‘Know this, Rinaldo: My name is Disdain, and I have come only to free you from your shameful yoke’).49 Sdegno’s name echoes the indegno yoke of love and jealousy with which Rinaldo has saddled himself; the personification manifests the knight’s recognition that Angelica and the jealousy she inspires are unworthy of him. Rinaldo accepts this judgment, both insofar as Sdegno is his partisan, not his foe, and insofar as Sdegno vanishes immediately after making this pronouncement; the allegory exists only until the hero reintegrates the affect it represents. Guyon, on the other hand, sets himself in opposition to Disdayne, and then leaves him behind, ‘For nothing might abash the villein bold’ (2.7.42.8); as long as Guyon disavows affect, ‘[n]othing can . . . confound Disdain: to disdain Disdain . . . only increases his power,’ as Hamilton suggests.50 Allegory here functions as Guyon’s strategy for the preservation of his affective autonomy from Mammon’s suffering, slaving fiends. Guyon’s disavowals, though, remain incomplete; in the Mammon episode, the bloody hands that he tried to wash clean in his inaugural gesture of affective disengagement return to haunt him. The first revenant appears when Guyon describes the disruption of the Golden Age, which produced landscapes like Mammon’s mines: Then gan a cursed hand the quiet wombe Of his great Grandmother with steele to wound, And the hid treasures in her sacred tombe, With Sacriledge to dig. Therein he found Fountaines of gold and siluer to abound, Of which the matter of his huge desire And pompous pride eftsoones he did compound;

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Temperance Explores America Then auarice gan through his veines inspire His greedy flames, and kindled life-deuouring fire.

(2.7.17)

The rhyming of ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’ echoes Guyon’s earlier transformation of the ‘earthes wombe’ into an ‘honorable toombe’ for Amavia and Mortdant (2.1.60.2, 58.9).51 The disembodied hand that digs in the earth echoes the ‘cursed hand’ responsible for their deaths (2.1.44.7); it penetrates the womb of its matriarch with steel, recalling the ‘cruell steele’ in Amavia’s breast (2.1.43.1). And the exhuming hand, finally, recalls Guyon’s burial of Mortdant and Amavia against the Palmer’s advice. The inaugural tragedy of book 2, repressed, thus haunts Guyon’s imagination as a spectre of primitive accumulation: forced labour in American mines as a trope of colonial brutality.52 What Guyon cannot acknowledge – his complicity in the colonial mode of production – returns to haunt him in this symbolic form. Guyon’s journey through Mammon’s Cave ends, as it begins, with the return of the repressed. The final figure he encounters in the cave is Pilate, who stretches his dirty hands above the waters of the river Cocytus: [Guyon] lookt a little further, and espyde Another wretch, whose carkasse deepe was drent Within the riuer, which the same did hyde: But both his hands most filthy feculent, Aboue the water were on high extent, And faynd to wash themselues incessantly; Yet nothing cleaner were for such intent, But rather fowler seemed to the eye; So lost his labour vaine and idle industry.

(2.7.61)

The echoes of Ruddymane’s hands are self-evident; less so, perhaps, is the way in which Pilate’s acquiescence to ‘Iewes despiteous,’ and his trading of the ‘Lord of life’ for a ‘murdrer felonous,’ entangle Pilate in an economic logic (2.7.62.5–7, emphasis added). In pardoning Barrabas alone (Matt. 27:17–21), Pilate not only commits a miscarriage of justice, but an omission of pity or mercy, the very principle Jesus inhabits in pardoning the mob (Luke 23:34) and the thief on the cross (Luke 23:43). Pilate acts as the symbolic return of Guyon’s ‘bloud guiltinesse’: his implication in the ideologies and rationales of English New World colonialism. Derrida might characterize this imagistic haunting as an instance of ‘spectrality’: a ‘mode of historical attentiveness that the living might

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have to what is not present but somehow appears as a figure or a voice, a “non-living present in the living present” that is no longer or not yet with us.’53 This spectrality, as Carla Freccero argues, stands in opposition to necrology, the historiographical mode that depends on the burial of the dead: the former represents a continued ethical obligation to the deceased, while the latter represents an attempt to ‘replace[], cover[] over, or displace[].’54 In such historiographical terms, Guyon’s burial of Amavia and Mortdant represents a necrological relationship to the deceased; the recurrent image of the hand, in turn, represents the displacement of necrology by spectrality: an enduring, if uninvited and perhaps welcome, ethical relationship to the deceased. But if Guyon has incurred such an ethical obligation, he neither realizes nor acknowledges it. Unlike his predecessors in the epic tradition, Guyon shows no affective response to his hellish double, echoing Dante’s notoriously over-identified swoon in Inferno V more in the breach than in the observance. His pitilessness is explicitly condemned in the next canto, which opens with Guyon, still unconscious, under the watchful eye of an angel – a philosophical challenge to the mercantile conception of temperance. And is there care in heauen? and is there loue In heauenly spirits to these creatures bace, That may compassion of their euils moue? There is: else much more wretched were the cace Of men, then beasts. But O th’exceeding grace Of highest God, that loues his creatures so, And all his workes with mercy doth embrace, That blessed Angels, he sends to and fro, To serue to wicked man, to serue his wicked foe. How oft do they, their siluer bowers leaue, To come to succour vs, that succour want? How oft do they with golden pineons, cleaue The flitting skyes, like flying Pursuiuant, Against foule feends to aide vs millitant? They for vs fight, they watch and dewly ward, And their bright Squadrons round about vs plant, And all for loue, and nothing for reward: O why should heauenly God to men haue such regard?

(2.8.1–2)

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This final question, which seeks a logical explanation of infinite condescension, has no satisfactory response. To imagine that it could is to inhabit Guyon’s bankrupt ideology of equivalency, a quantitative conception of virtue. But divine ‘care,’ ‘succour,’ and ‘seru[ice]’ are commanded by affect: compassion, grace, mercy, and, repeatedly, love. These affects replace desert, for the angels who work ‘[t]o serue to wicked man, to serue his wicked foe’ would not distinguish between the sinning Pilate and the temperate Guyon. They act ‘all for loue, and nothing for reward’: to operate according to an economic logic of justice, as Guyon has, is to forget Stratford’s admonition: ‘how inexpressibly miserable must that man be, with whom God will deal according to the merits of his Sins?’55 This inauguration of the final act of book 2 effectively conveys the poverty of the two rhetorical reappropriations I have discussed: that of temperance in its emergent conception as a rationale for primitive accumulation; and – for readers not concerned with anachronism – that of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, which effaces the violence of the origins of capitalism. Guyon, however, remains unconscious and uncognizant of these divine interventions. When he wakes, he thanks Arthur as the ‘Patrone of his life’ but neither suspects the angelic presence nor adjusts his exercise of temperance to accommodate the operation of grace or its earthly counterparts – empathy, pity, forgiveness, and other gifts of affect. In the reading of the Bower of Bliss that follows, I consider the way in which the poem insistently registers this oversight, and pines not only for the Bower, but for the impulses of empathy and affect that Guyon has eliminated in favour of colonial temperance. Mourning the Tempest In my introduction, I suggested that the ‘tempest of . . . wrathfulnesse’ with which Guyon destroys the Bower represents neither a perfect fulfilment nor an outright violation of his nominal virtue. Instead, this paradoxical conclusion to the Legend of Temperance attests to the semantic range of this virtue in Renaissance discourse, where it becomes a crucial term for the ethical evaluation of New World colonial settlement. Two separate conceptions of time converge in this episode, which stages the conflict between Guyon’s nominal ‘temperance’ (referring to the tempus/chronos: the time that passes in a steady, linear march) and his sudden ‘tempest’ (referring to the occasio/kairos: the appropriate time for action, to be seized and exploited, lest it pass

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irretrievably by). And yet these competing notions of time do not necessarily constitute an epistemological crisis; temperance’s semantic plurality in Renaissance English leads almost inevitably to such tension, if not to outright paradox. Rather, what is troubling about this culminating ‘tempest’ is Guyon’s apparent dispassion during and after the destruction of the Bower. The affective engagement that was so crucial to his responses at the outset of book 2 is transferred to two minor, and officially reviled, figures on the literal and the conceptual margins of the Bower: Medea, whose image is engraved on the entrance gate to the Bower, and Grill, the last figure whose intemperance Guyon decries before the book’s conclusion. Although positioned in the text as avatars of intemperance, both Medea and Grill evince profound emotional capacity, particularly for mourning and loss: the precise affective experiences undergone by Guyon early in book 2, and conspicuously absent from his response to the Bower’s destruction. Thus registering Guyon’s affective poverty in the final episode of book 2, Medea and Grill turn the tables on the Knight of Temperance, serving to critique the emotional paucity of his nominal virtue, rather than suffering its critiques themselves. The mournfulness and nostalgia of Medea’s presence in the Bower is evident in both the content and the form of her appearance; the ekphrasis describing her engraved history introduces Medea and her family as a ghostly, absent presence in the poem. Carved into the Bower’s ivory entrance gate, Medea’s ‘famous history’ ostensibly exemplifies the intemperate love practised within. Yt framed was of precious yuory, That seemd a worke of admirable wit; And therein all the famous history Of Iason and Medea was ywrit; Her mighty charmes, her furious louing fit, His goodly conquest of the golden fleece, His falsed faith, and loue too lightly flit, The wondred Argo, which in venturous peece First through the Euxine seas bore all the flowr of Greece. Ye might haue seene the frothy billowes fry Vnder the ship, as thorough them she went, That seemd the waues were into yuory, Or yuory into the waues were sent;

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Temperance Explores America And other where the snowy substaunce sprent With vermell, like the boyes bloud therein shed, A piteous spectacle did represent, And otherwhiles with gold besprinkeled; Yt seemd th’enchaunted flame, which did Creu¨sa wed.

(2.12.44–5)

The mythological tradition provides a number of rationales for Medea’s presence on the Bower’s entrance-gate, where she constitutes a doppelga¨nger for the temptress Acrasia: her sorcery, her voracious amorous appetite, the violent acts her desire engenders. As it turns out, though, canto 12 minimizes these points of contact. Spenser’s Acrasia does practise Circean sorcery, transforming her former lovers into beasts; and her murders of Mordant and Amavia, as we have seen, were every bit as gruesome as Medea’s dismemberment of her brother, painted in dramatic ‘vermell’ on the gate. But when Acrasia appears in the flesh (2.12.72 ff.), her Medea-like sorcery and violence are invisible. Acrasia’s snowy breast, soft sighs, and languid posture in erotic pieta` – all situated against an aural backdrop of a carpe florem lay, transcribed in full by the poem – identify her as an erotic object rather than a cruel sorceress. Spenser’s Medea, on the other hand, is only incidentally a creature of sexual appetites. Her passion for Jason motivated the violent deeds depicted here, but the gate represents the effects rather than the cause of her intemperate passions: her dismemberment of her half-brother Apsyrtus, strewing his limbs behind the fleeing Argo to delay her pursuers; her murder of Jason’s new wife Creu¨sa; and her infanticide of her two sons by Jason in retribution for his betrayal. Spenser’s gate portrays Medea’s ‘furious loving fit,’ and it is no accident that the ‘loving’ characteristic of Acrasia in canto 12 is here reduced to an adjectival participle, subordinate to Medea’s fits of violence. ‘Fit’ here unmistakably describes Medea’s passionate, affective episode (OED n.2 3b, ‘a paroxysm of lunacy’) rather than her aptness as a double for Acrasia (OED n.4). The apparent mis-fit between Medea and Acrasia disappears, though, if we adduce a different – and heretofore unacknowledged – source for the depiction on the Bower’s gate: Ludovico Ariosto’s Cinque Canti, a coda to the Orlando Furioso probably written in 1519, between the first and second editions of Ariosto’s longer poem.56 There, Medea is not only the progenitor of the violent acts engraved in the gate, but a sympathetic victim of the passions, evoking the empathy, nostalgia, and regret so notably absent from Guyon’s destruction of the Bower.

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Darker and more elegiac than the Furioso, the Cinque Canti chronicle the rout of Charlemagne’s armies at Prague – the process by which the Occident, the narrator explains, is forced to live its etymology from the Latin occidere: to set, to fall down, to perish.57 Medea’s tale shares this mournful, elegiac tone with the rest of the poem; she appears on the scene only when Charlemagne determines to clear-cut the forest where she makes her home. The narrator explains that Medea’s tenure here post-dates her most notorious misdeeds, including fratricide, infanticide, failed regicide, and murder. Safely hidden in the forest, Medea uses her maleficent arts to imbue every tree with a protective spirit to ward off enemies. Attributing her former troubles to overwhelming monogamous desire, she founds a kingdom devoted to sexual profligacy, staging public orgies six out of every ten days: Finita l’orazion, facean due stuoli, da un lato l’un, da l’altro l’altro sesso; indi levati i lumi, a corsi e a voli venian al nefandissimo complesso; e meschiarsi le madri coi figliuoli, con le sorelle i frati accadea spesso . . . (Having finished their prayer, [Medea’s subjects] formed two groups, one sex on one side, the other on the other; then they put out the lights and came together racing and flying into the most unspeakable embraces, and it often happened that mothers mingled with sons and brothers with sisters . . .) (2.112.1–6)

This orgiastic setting makes Medea into a plausible double for Acrasia, but the echo of Acrasia’s ruination is stronger than that of her reign. Like Spenser’s sorceress, Medea witnesses the destruction and desecration of her insular, erotic kingdom. Ariosto, though, includes what Spenser omits: an extended jeremiad for this sexual paradise, devastated by an army marching under the banner of Christian empire and morality. When Charlemagne’s troops begin to raze the forest, the destruction is so terrible that nature itself registers the trauma: Sotto il continuo suon di mille accette trema la terra, e par che ’l ciel ribombi; or quella pianta or questa in terra mette il capo, e rompe all’altre braccia e lombi.

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Temperance Explores America Fuggon da’ nidi lor guffi e civette, che vi son piu` che tortore o colombi; e, con le code fra le gambe, i lupi lascian l’antiche insidie e i lochi cupi. ... Un fremito, qual suol da l’irate onde del tempestoso mar venir a’ lidi, cotal si udı` fra le turbate fronde, meschio di pianti e spaventosi gridi; indi un vento per l’aria si difonde che ben appar che Belzebu` lo guidi: ... Cade l’eccelso pin, cade il funebre cipresso, cade il venenoso tasso, cade l’olmo atto a riparar che l’ebre viti non giaccian sempre a capo basso; cadono, e fan cadendo le latebre cedere agli occhi et alle gambe il passo: piangon sopra le mura i Pagan stolti, vedendo alli lor Dei seggi tolti. (The earth trembles under the continuous sound of a thousand hatchets, and the heavens seem to echo; first that tree, then this one, drops headlong to earth and breaks the arms and limbs of others as it falls. Hoot owls and screech owls, which are more numerous there than turtledoves or pigeons, flee from their nests, and wolves, with their tails between their legs, abandon their ancient coverts and dark lairs . . . A roaring was heard throughout the shaking branches, like that which comes from the angry waves of a stormy sea upon the shore, mixed with wails and fearful screams; then a wind, which truly seemed to be sent by Beelzebub, blows through the air . . . The lofty pine falls, the mournful cypress falls, the poisonous yew falls, the elm falls . . . [T]he foolish pagans lament upon their city walls, seeing the seats of their gods taken away) (2.122–5)

The verse here registers a profound mourning for the animistic world where the gods had a ‘seat’; although the pagans are dismissed as stolti (foolish), the experience of loss, especially for a woman of Medea’s appetites, is substantial and real. In Medea’s animistic world, the gods inhered in the material universe, and bodily experience was thus coeval with spirituality. The sensual abandon of her kingdom

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did not necessarily represent a sinful perversion of divine love, but a frolicsome celebration of divinity from within its midst. Both the trauma registered by the loss and the temporal precision of this destruction set this Ariostan precedent apart from the Spenserian text. Repeated words – or quella pianta, or questa; cade . . . cade . . . cade – convey the passage of time, the extension of both the event and its aftermath in the regretful perception of Medea’s subjects. As the animistic gods flee along with the forest beasts, the pagans themselves take up their cries, suggesting the endurance of Medea’s kingdom, if only in the laments of the mourners. In the Bower of Bliss, in contrast, Guyon compresses the destruction into a single stanza, and effaces any trace of regret. Much wondred Guyon at the faire aspect Of that sweet place, yet suffred no delight To sincke into his sence, nor mind affect, But passed forth, and lookt still forward right . . .

(2.12.53.1–4)

The pity Guyon displayed earlier in book 2 has disappeared entirely, and the poem’s diction demands recognition of the omission. The non-appropriative, humbling, petrifying ‘wonder’ induced in Guyon by Amavia’s suffering has been transformed into an act of casual intellectual musing (OED 2, ‘to feel some doubt or curiosity’). The ‘sense’ that was formerly ‘bereft attone’ remains untouched in this case, because Guyon ‘suffers’ none of the Bower’s pleasures to move him; he remains completely unsusceptible to both the Bower’s temptations and to a sense of loss at its destruction. In ‘passing forth’ and ‘look[ing] still forward right,’ he refuses to linger temporally over any of the spectacles that might threaten to ‘affect’ his mind or sense with affect: to haunt him, as Medea’s subjects were haunted, with loss, regret, or mournfulness. The ‘piteous spectacle’ of Medea’s tale thus serves as a foil, illuminating the affective omission and temporal compression Guyon practises in performing temperance as an act of colonial destruction. Guyon’s unresponsiveness to the ‘piteous spectacle’ represented by Medea and her intertexts anticipates his precipitous destruction of the Bower with ‘rigour pittilesse’ (2.12.83.2); he concludes the canto without recollecting the ‘ruth and fraile affection’ evoked by the ‘[p]ittifull spectacle’ of Amavia’s suffering (2.1.42.8, 2.1.40.1, 9). Lest Medea’s counterexample begin to fade, though, the poem again registers the loss to

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which Guyon seems insensible: this time in the figure of Grill. One of Acrasia’s former lovers, transformed into a hog when she tired of his attentions, and restored to humanity by the Palmer’s magical staff, Grill ‘[r]epined greatly, and did him miscall, / That had from hoggish forme him brought to naturall’ (2.12.86.8–9). Like Medea and her subjects, Grill took pleasure in the fleshly indulgences so precipitously destroyed by Guyon in the name of temperance. ‘[M]iscall[ing]’ the Palmer for his transformation, Grill supplies the lament that Guyon omits. Grill is described as ‘[r]epin[ing],’ literally meaning ‘to grumble about, complain’; but the root verb ‘pine’ – traceable back to the Latin poena, punishment – suggests a greater affective range, including ‘to suffer, to endure pain’ (OED 2), and ‘Of a person or animal: to become exhausted or wasted from physical or emotional suffering, esp. from hunger, disease, or grief’ (OED 4a, emphasis added). In repining, Grill does more than gripe; he expresses anger and grief, passions that Guyon has systematically eliminated from his repertoire as he has adopted the form of rationalized temperance advocated by the Palmer. The Palmer’s only reassurance to his charge is an affirmation of his critic’s intransigence: ‘Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind, / But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues, and wind’ (2.12.87.8– 9). The conjunction that begins this final line of book 2, and the nonsequitur it introduces, serves to acknowledge the impossibility of integrating Grill’s grief and anger with Guyon’s rationalistic temperance, and with the New World colonial agenda that might be carried on in its name. The uncertainty of the final line – the contingency of its ‘whilest,’ with its foreboding about a tempest-tossed future – testifies to the fraught colonial context in which temperance fulfils its optative and justifying offices, and to the uneasy armistice The Faerie Queene seems to achieve with this mercurial virtue. Spenser’s poem makes its peace with temperance’s relentless mobility by following the Palmer’s lead. Unable to articulate a satisfying version of temperance per se, the poem shifts the burden of integrating virtue and affect to book 3, and the Legend of Chastity. Defined as sexuality licensed not necessarily by marriage or procreation, but by temporal appropriateness – the seizure of the proper occasion – chastity combines the temporal precision of Renaissance temperance with a Neoplatonic celebration of love.58 To hang the hopes for temperance’s redemption on chaste love, and to imagine this virtue flourishing in the colonial context where temperance begins to resonate in this period, is to imagine a scenario very like Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. An integration of temperance’s

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temporal dimensions with its eroticization: in Northrop Frye’s analysis, such a balancing act seems to be precisely what The Tempest accomplishes: [A] feeling for the right time ramifies into all the imagery of The Tempest. The moon and the tides . . . are a part of its rhythm, and so is the moral virtue of patience, or waiting for the time to accomplish one’s desires. Patience is one of the two virtues personified in the dialogue; the other is the ‘delicate wench’ Temperance, the central virtue of all comedies, the etymology of which connects it, like the word tempest itself, with time (tempestas) and the distribution of time. The chastity of Miranda is a controlled energy that must develop from virginity to marriage by observing the proper rhythms of time and of ritual, otherwise the whole order of nature will go out of alignment.59

This is a beautiful description of the play, and a sensitive speculation about how Miranda’s marriage to Ferdinand might represent a true restoration of ethical and temporal order to the world. Frye’s description, though, does not attend to historical context: like book 2 of The Faerie Queene, The Tempest stages some of its most fraught exercises of alleged virtue in the context of the colonial New World. That world – like Medea, like Grill – formulates charged responses to the imposition of such so-called virtue, and Shakespeare’s play is in part a document of the colonial resistance to temperance’s ethical, temporal, and political operations. In the next chapter, I read The Tempest as a play about the ambivalent imposition and reception of temperance in another fictionalized version of the colonial New World.

3 Intemperance and ‘Weak Remembrance’ in The Tempest

In the previous chapter, I interpreted the paradoxical conclusion to book 2 of The Faerie Queene as a testament to the evolution of temperance into a term of colonial agonism. Guyon’s tempestuous destruction of the Bower of Bliss – as well as the contrast between his own ataraxy, and the mournful and resentful affects of Medea and Grill, respectively – attest to the vexed status of temperance as an evaluative term used to describe the ethical postures and behaviours of English explorers and colonists vis-a`-vis the New World. The colonial setting, and the tempest generated by a poorly self-governed protagonist, both recur in Shakespeare’s late play The Tempest, as literary scholarship has thoroughly attested. Less well rehearsed is the play’s similarity to Spenser’s text in associating the eponymous tempest with intemperance, and in attributing this failure of virtue to the European colonial endeavour. These terms of critique come into starkest relief in what might be considered Prospero’s lowest moment of the play: his interruption of the wedding masque he has staged to honour his daughter Miranda and her new fiance´ Ferdinand, the shipwrecked Prince of Naples. Up until now, he has been smugly self-satisfied with his success playing the yenta. ‘It goes on, I see, / As my soul prompts it,’ he says (I.ii.422– 3); and then, later, ‘It works’ (I.ii.496).1 Buoyed by his success, Prospero plays simultaneously the stern father – ‘be more abstemious, / Or else, good night your vow!’ (IV.i.53–4); the proud father offering a lavish wedding celebration – ‘I must / Bestow upon the eyes of this young couple / Some vanity of mine Art: it is my promise, / And they expect it from me’ (IV.i.39–42); and, of course, the playwright staging the wedding masque.

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The masque itself represents a virtuosic display of temporal control – suggesting temperance as the mastery of tempus in accordance with the iconographic tradition outlined in chapter 1. With Prospero pulling the strings, Iris, Juno, and Ceres enlist the help of the Naiads, or ‘temperate nymphs’ (IV.i.132) in narrating the slow, careful procession of the agricultural seasons. Juno descends with the announcement of ‘spongy April’ (IV.i.65); and the Naiads augur the harvest with the entrance of ‘sunbur’d sicklemen, of August weary’ (IV.i.134). Ceres explains why the narration ends here: ‘Spring come to you at the farthest / In the very end of harvest!’ (IV.i.114–15). This is a wish for a Golden Age of winterless years, where the end of harvest gives way to spring again, in a perpetual cycle of abundance. The fantasy is that someone with Prospero’s temperance qua temporal mastery need not ever cede control, even to winter and death. And here is where, inevitably, things fall apart. The Folio stage directions read, ‘Enter certain Reapers, properly habited: they join with the Nymphs in a graceful dance; towards the end whereof Prospero starts suddenly, and speaks; after which, to a strange, hollow, and confused noise, they heavily vanish.’ Prospero exclaims, ‘I had forgot that foul conspiracy / Of the beast Caliban and his confederates / Against my life: the minute of their plot / Is almost come’ (IV.i.139–42). A discomfited Miranda says to her betrothed, ‘Never till this day / Saw I him touch’d with anger, so distemper’d’ (IV.i.144–5). Literally, Miranda means that Prospero’s bodily humours seem to be out of whack: only an excess of yellow bile could explain her father’s sudden turn to anger here. His body itself is disordered, out of joint, and, by the logic of the familiar metaphor of the body politic, his sovereignty is threatened with similar disruption.2 But this implied etiology raises as many questions as it answers, suggesting a number of registers in which Prospero’s distemper might signify. Drawing on the classical definition of temperance, Miranda expresses surprise at the immoderateness of her father’s passions: an excessiveness at odds with his measured precision in directing the masque and the other events of the play. Additionally, Miranda echoes the discourses of seasonal or calendrical cycles when she describes her father’s agitation; Hippocrates’s pre-Galenic theory of the humors associated yellow bile and choler with summer.3 In this sense, Miranda’s accusation of distemper reveals that Ceres’s winterless years may not suit the human body as much as they do the human fantasy; the excess of summer proves humorally disruptive. In a related vein, Miranda implies a

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climatological disruption – ‘distempered’ referred to inclement weather from the fifteenth century onward – and thus posits a connection between Prospero’s momentary distress and the play’s eponymous tempest. Prospero’s ‘distemper’ thus supplies the inclement winter weather that was missing from the masque. The plot against his life intrudes into the masque, replacing the death, decay, and violence that Prospero, in his arrogance, decided to omit. The island magus not only ‘forgot’ the plot against his life; he wilfully miswrote it, replacing the conspiratorial plot (OED 3rd ed. 4) with a theatrical plot (OED 3rd ed. 6) to counteract the threat: a pretty story about the vanquishing of time by human ingenuity and labour – both his own magical machinations and the more prosaic work of the ‘sunburn’d sicklemen.’ The problem is that this story, like its narration in the masque, is premised on forgetting, and makes Propsero a liar. Temperance, he pretends, can reverse the brutality of time; his distemper proves otherwise. Temperance as a virtue of temporal control fundamentally informs the contemporary critical reception of The Tempest and Shakespeare’s other ‘last plays.’ The nineteenth-century logic that designated those plays ‘romances’ turned in large part on their shared characteristics as dramas of endurance: the preservation of affective, erotic, familial, and political loyalties over long stretches of time. But The Tempest is a difficult case, because it begins with – in fact is titled for – an etymological and meteorological challenge to this virtue. Just as in Guyon’s precipitous destruction of the Bower of Bliss, The Tempest’s narrative of long-awaited reconciliation begins with a tempesta: not the time of patient delay but the time of an eschatological event, not the carefully managed tempus of temperance, but the occasio that marks its interruption.4 In order to provide a deeper understanding of the temporal significations acquired by temperance in the seventeenth century, this chapter explores the successes and failures of memory in The Tempest, focusing on how acts of forgetting and erasure mark Prospero, and the other European characters, as figures of distemper and intemperance, even as they try to achieve perfect temporal and narrative control. The Tempest’s Italian nobility, led by Prospero, construct a comedy out of re-membering the body politic, and attempting to restore a temperate order. The trajectory of the play witnesses the repair of familial and political discord of twelve years’ memory, metaphorized by the ship that splits apart in the opening scene of the play.

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And yet this remembering entails specific forms of forgetting and erasure. The Tempest avoids falling into the pattern of revenge tragedy only because Prospero insists that the brothers must not ‘burthen our remembrance’ with / A heaviness that’s gone’ (V.i.199–200). Prospero deliberately forsakes the charge of the revenger – the very role that Guyon vows to adopt on Ruddymane’s behalf – to rescue the past from oblivion through unforgiving memory.5 The European version of memory in The Tempest, then, simultaneously enacts a recollection of earlier wrongs and a palinodic, narrative erasure of others. This paradoxical form of remembering, I argue, draws on the nascent temporal dimension of temperance that emerges with increasing clarity and force over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This nexus of concepts – temperance, colonialism, memory – also provides a new inroad into the questions of coloniality and postcoloniality that have preoccupied, inspired, and sometimes enraged critics throughout the last several decades. As Ronald Takaki explains, in an article that makes a persuasive case for the New World reading of the play, The Tempest’s composition in 1611 located it after the English invasion of Ireland but before the colonization of New England, after John Smith’s arrival in Virginia but before the beginning of the tobacco economy, and after the first contacts with Indians but before full-scaled warfare against them. In that historical moment, the English were encountering ‘other’ peoples and delineating the boundary between civilization and savagery.6

The playtext itself underscores this suggestive chronological invitation, including an explicit reference to Bermuda – Ariel secures the shipwrecked vessel in a cove whence, Prospero’s servant complains, ‘once / Thou call’dst me up at midnight to fetch dew / From the stillvex’d Bermoothes’ (I.ii.227–9). Critics also concur that the play’s eponymous storm represents a dramatic retelling of William Strachey’s True Reportory of the Wrack, a widely circulated pamphlet narrating the July 1609 shipwreck of the Sea Venture, an English vessel bound for Virginia but run aground by a tempest in Bermuda.7 Indeed, the colonial/New World reading has acquired such canonical status that critics such as Barbara Fuchs and Meredith Skura have felt compelled to remind Shakespeareans that the play is more than a political allegory, and that the New World does not provide an exhaustive key to

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all Tempest mythologies.8 They rightly warn against superscribing the text of the play with a narrative of New World colonialism, reminding scholars to honour the specificity – the alterity, perhaps – of the text itself. In this chapter, I build on the familiar interpretation of the play in the context of the colonial New World while also investigating within the text itself Skura and Fuch’s caveat about the dangers of deductive, and reductive, reading. Attending to Caliban’s evocation of European fantasies and fears about New World cannibalism, I interpret Prospero’s slave/son as a figure of incorporate memory, resistant to the European, temperate, colonial re-membering, in both the literal and punning senses of that word. Caliban refuses to forget the threats of death and dismemberment that have characterized his servitude on the island, remaining painfully cognizant of a history of violence, and resisting the imprint of western narrativization. If Prospero’s memory entails the restoration of temperance, Caliban’s remains recalcitrantly tied to the disruption of the tempest. Caliban’s defiance of Prospero’s ‘temperate’ mode of memory, I argue, suggests one way in which The Tempest formulates a critique of European colonialist practice, and specifically of European historiography as a disingenuous erasure of violence. In this sense, the play warns that facile fictions – whether Renaissance narratives of colonial benignity or twenty-first century literary-critical narratives of postcolonial allegory – repeat the very violence they attempt to obscure and displace. The restoration of an allegedly temperate order at the end of the play depends not only on Prospero’s ‘forgetting’ his brother’s treachery, but also on forgetting his own tempest: his wilful conjuration of an etymological and meteorological challenge to temperance in all of its ethical dimensions. Temperance in The Tempest thus serves in part as a term of anti-colonial critique, but also as a capacious recognition of the ethical complexity of New World exploration and colonial settlement. The Brain – Washed and Rewritten In medieval and early modern theories of memory, violent storms, such as Prospero’s or Strachey’s, foreclose the possibility of temperate endurance by serving as vehicles of radical amnesia, like that which induces Prospero’s ‘distemper’ during the masque. Theorists of memory from Plato onward favour the image of the mind as a block of wax, which in this or that individual may be larger or smaller, and composed of wax that is comparatively pure or muddy, and harder

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in some, softer in others, and sometimes of just the right consistency . . . [W]henever we wish to remember something . . . we hold this wax under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring. Whatever is so imprinted we remember and know so long as the image remains; whatever is rubbed out or has not succeeded in leaving an impression we have forgotten and do not know.9

In the sixteenth century, theorists of memory applied humoral physiology to the wax seal metaphor, suggesting that failures of memory could be traced to physiological conditions that affect the condition of the wax.10 Lethargy, for example, was theorized as a form of forgetting resulting from the humoral alteration of the wax tablet of the brain, as Thomas Cooper suggests in the 1559 edition of Eliotes Dictionary: Letargia [is a] disease in that parte of the heade, in the whiche the power of reason is conteined, possessyng the same place that phrenesy dooeth, that is to saie the brayne: but the cause and manier be contrary. For in this is continuall necessite of slepe, harde to be awaked, the mattier beyng moyste and veraie colde humour [i.e., phlegm]; wasshyng the brayne, and compellyng one to slepe . . . [T]herein is suche a forgetfulnesse, that he which is sicke, can not remembre what he wolde speake . . . [W]here somtyme they dooe gape, they do forget to close theyr mouthes.11

The ‘wasshyng of the brayne’ causes the sleep and forgetfulness of lethargy because it makes the wax tablet too moist to hold an impression. As inhabitants of an island nation, surrounded on all sides by water, the English were particularly susceptible to such weaknesses of mind and memory, according to medieval and Renaissance authorities. In the twelfth century, Pierre de Celle, Bishop of Chartes, writes to Nicholas of St Albans, ‘Your island is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are affected by the nature of the element in which they live.’12 In the seventeenth century, James Howell elaborates further this diagnosis, explaining that because ‘the sea tumbleth perpetually about the Countrey’ the brains of the British ‘do fluctuat in their noddles, which makes them so variable and unsteady’ (though he takes a moment to retaliate against Pierre’s accusation: ‘And herein they are little inferior to their next transmarin neighbours the French’).13 As Mary Floyd-Wilson explains, the watery climate thus compromises the stability of English identity. The water-logged English brain – incapable of taking a deep impression, constantly washed into ‘suche a

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forgetfulnesse’ – rendered the entire nation vulnerable to constant reinvention, ‘constant’ only in their ‘inconstancie.’14 The tempest of Shakespeare’s play has precisely this effect on the memories of its characters. Prospero’s storm washes clean the brains of his various subjects. When Miranda first approaches her father to ask him to ‘allay’ the ‘wild waters’ of the storm, their conversation reveals what Dympna Callaghan has called a pact of ‘collective amnesia.’15 Prospero declares his daughter, almost performatively, ‘ignorant of what thou art,’ and professes his scepticism that her brain could retain any imprint in its waxen contours: ‘Of any thing the image tell me, that / Hath kept with thy remembrance’ (I.ii.18, 43–4). When Miranda responds with a few, shadowy memories, Prospero demands, ‘But how is it / That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else / In the dark backward and abysm of time?’ (I.ii.48–50). The haunting image of the ‘dark backward and abysm of time’ evokes the threatening depths of the ocean where Ferdinand believes his father drowned ‘full fadom five’ (I.ii.399); forgetting is thus associated with the obviating power of the storm. Prospero concludes their conversation by putting Miranda to sleep, inflicting an irresistible lethargy, which, as Eliotes Dictionary suggests, underscores this failure of temperance, and of memory. When, several scenes later, the band of nobles attending King Alonso find themselves similarly sleep-stricken, Antonio remarks, ‘They fell together all, as by consent; / They dropp’d, as by a thunder-stroke’ (II.i.198–9), connecting the oblivion of sleep once again with the violence of the tempest. While their compatriots sleep, Antonio and Sebastian use similar language as they plot to kill the king. ‘[T]h’occasion speaks thee,’ urges Antonio, suggesting that the tempus (and temperance) of historical memory will give way to the occasio of present action (2.1.202). Sebastian protests, punningly, ‘Well, I am standing water’: antonio: I’ll teach you how to flow. sebastian: Do so: to ebb Hereditary sloth instructs me. antonio: . . . Ebbing men, indeed, Most often do so near the bottom run By their own fear or sloth.

(II.i.216–23)

The metaphor follows the same logic as the amnesiac tempest: ebbing water will wipe clean the slate of historical memory, and inaugurate a new order, one characterized not by the usual temporality, where

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succession passes from father to son, but by replacement within the same generation, brother succeeding brother. By learning to ‘flow,’ Sebastian will inaugurate a regime of forgetfulness, overwriting the legacy of the nobles sleeping before them: ‘th[ese] lord[s] of weak remembrance, . . . / . . . shall be of . . . little memory / When [they are] earth’d’ (II.i.227–9). Antonio fantasizes that, like Prospero the masquemaker, he and Sebastian will exercise such control over time that it will respond to their directives like a subject: their minions will ‘tell the clock to any business that / We say befits the hour’ (II.i.284–5). Such virtuosic control of time both depends on, and – in their imaginations – compensates for what they have razed from the waxen tablet of the brain. Antonio and Sebastian’s plot fails, of course. But elsewhere on the island, Prospero too seizes the occasion to write narrative history onto the slates washed newly clean by the tempest. As Paul Brown argues, Prospero’s narrative is always a mnemonic of power, and ‘demands of its subjects that they should accede to his version of the past.’16 This context explains Prospero’s repeated, apparently unprovoked reminders to Miranda as he writes the history of her past – ‘Obey, and be attentive’; ‘Dost thou attend me?’; ‘Thou attend’st not?’; ‘Dost thou hear?’ – finally provoking Miranda’s frustrated rejoinder, ‘Your tale, sir, would cure deafness’ (I.ii.38, 78, 87, 106). Prospero’s insistence here betrays the pressure he applies to Miranda’s mind; he aims not for recollection, but for imprinting, not for the retrieval but for the creation of memory. With Ariel, Prospero’s wilful invention of memory is even more notable, because the memories he inscribes are memories that the fairy servant could not logically possess. prospero: Dost thou forget From what a torment I did free thee? . . . Thou dost . . . . . . Hast thou forgot The foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy Was grown into a hoop? hast thou forgot her? . . . Thou hast . . . . . . I must Once in a month recount what thou hast been, Which thou forget’st. This damn’d witch Sycorax, . . . from Argier, Thou know’st, was banish’d . . . . . .Thou, my slave,

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(I.ii.250–93)

Prospero insists repeatedly, over Ariel’s protestations, ‘[T]hou forget’st,’ performatively clearing the slate onto which Prospero can write the narrative of Ariel’s rescue at his own hands. The tales of Sycorax’s banishment and death are not memories belonging to Ariel but to the witch herself, and to Prospero, who witnessed her death before Ariel was released from his wooden prison. These details, alongside the length and fervour of Prospero’s diatribe, once again suggest that he aims at something more ambitious than the retrieval of Ariel’s own account of the past. Prospero in fact inscribes his own version of events as Ariel’s, claiming that this narrative, which he tells at such length, is what ‘thou report’st thyself,’ what ‘thou know’st.’ Lords of Weak Remembrance As my reading of Prospero’s truncated masque has already suggested, The Tempest speaks most directly about temperance as a category of colonial power during moments of rhetorical failure, when attempts to impose narrative closure and coherence falter under the pressure of historical particularity. Prospero’s aged and loyal counsellor, Gonzalo, affords some of the play’s most poignant insights into temperance’s vexatious ethical status when his clumsy rhetoric leads him unwittingly into contentious colonial territory. The setting is act 2, scene 1, which opens with Gonzalo and Adrian trying, ineffectually, to console the Neapolitan King Alonso about the ostensible death of his son. ADRIAN:

Though this island seem to be desert, – . . . It must needs be of subtle, tender, and delicate temperance. ANTONIO: Temperance was a delicate wench. SEBASTIAN: Ay, and a subtle; as he most learnedly deliver’d. (II.i.34–44)

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The double entendre turns on the popularity of the name ‘Temperance’ among the Puritans, and on ‘delicate’ and ‘subtle’ as qualities of this imaginary seductress (with a possible submerged pun on ‘temptress’). Adrian remarks on the ‘temperate’ climate to reassure the king that the danger of the tempest has passed, and to suggest that the Neapolitans will enjoy commensurate political stability: no Julius Caesar– style ‘strange eruptions’ here.17 When Antonio first gives Temperance a capital ‘T’ and a feminine pronoun, he might seem to be personifying the virtue as an allegorical figure, a prosopopoeia that exemplifies the abstract quality. But Sebastian’s final quip confirms that the body that has been imaginatively conferred on Temperance does not faithfully figure forth her nominal virtue. The past-tense verb implies that at least Sebastian, Antonio, and Adrian have all debauched the wench, and can ‘learnedly’ speak of her sexual subtlety.18 Temperance is thus not an allegory of temperance, but an historically particular, embodied woman – one whose conduct specifically belies such allegorical nomenclature. This anti-allegorical gesture has two important implications for this exploration of temperance in The Tempest. First: consoling fictions, such as Prospero’s winterless masque and Adrian’s tale of climatological and political stability, have a limited range in the play. Rhetorical figures – such as temperance here, offered as a psychological palliative to Alonso – have a way of assuming an agency that belies their intended signifying function. Not all rhetors, it seems, will enjoy Prospero’s privilege of only infrequently losing temperate control over their narratives. The second important implication of this exchange about temperance is specific to this particular virtue, which – this passage reveals – remains conceptually intact only so long as it is merely a consoling fiction. Once Temperance assumes a material body and a place in the historical world, it becomes precisely perverted from its original meaning, and becomes an exemplar of intemperate behaviour. Temperance may be subtle and delicate in only the best ways when it comprises insipid commentary about the weather; but once she is flesh-and-blood, her dark underbelly, so to speak, begins to show. Gonzalo’s consoling fictions, and especially his claims about temperance, represent attempts to overwrite the material reality of their referents, attempts that the material world may well disrupt. These lessons go unheeded by Gonzalo, that ‘lord of weak remembrance’ (as Antonio will soon call him, II.i.227) who fails to notice the material contradictions of his own utopian fantasy. Undeterred by

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remarks from the peanut gallery, he continues his attempts to cheer the despondent King. gonzalo: Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when we put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of the King’s fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis. sebastian: ’Twas a sweet marriage, and we prosper well in our return. adrian: Tunis was never grac’d before with such a paragon to their Queen. gonzalo: Not since widow Dido’s time. antonio: Widow! a pox o’ that! How came that widow in? widow Dido! sebastian: What if he had said ‘widower Æneas’ too? (II.i.66–76)

This passage has been a source of much editorial and critical confusion. Dido was, technically, the widow of Sychaeus before she was Aeneas’s lover. Stephen Orgel argues that there is in fact no interpretive problem here, and that our puzzlement derives from our Virgilcentric sense of Renaissance humanist classicism.19 For Orgel, Gonzalo clearly invokes the alternative tradition represented in, for example, Petrarch’s Trionfi, or Andrea Mantegna’s portrait (see Fig. 13). Mantegna depicts Dido clothed in her regal robes just before she throws herself on her funeral pyre. The urn she clutches to her chest contains the ashes of her dead husband; it may also serve as an allusion to her chastity, which she continues to value over her kingdom and her life.20 Although wood and the kindling are visible in the background, the funeral pyre remains as yet unlit, and Dido faces her decision not ignited with the flames of passion, but with quiet, clear-sighted determination. This is Dido as ‘an exemplary ruler, famous for her chastity and her devotion to the memory of her murdered husband, [who . . .] committed suicide to prevent her forced marriage to a local king.’21 Petrarch, notoriously, was offended by Virgil’s revision to this generous depiction, professing his bewilderment about why the poet chose to besmirch Dido’s legacy, ‘inventing’ a story of ‘lustful love’ for ‘this one woman, worthy of eternal praise, who he knew had laid down her life to preserve her chastity and widowhood.’22 If Orgel is right, then what is at stake in Sebastian and Antonio’s merriment is the confusion generated by revision. As with Temperance, Sebastian and Antonio use rhetoric that retroactively installs debauchery where it was once absent. A cardinal virtue is rewritten as a lascivious young girl; and a heroine of classical chastity is

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Image Not Available

Figure 13: Dido; Andrea Mantegna; Tempera and gold on linen canvas; c. 1500 (photography by Christine Guest; The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Purchase, John W. Tempest Fund; reproduced by permission of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts)

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rewritten as a spurned lover driven to suicide by unrequited passion. The crux of this misunderstanding, among the characters and among critics, lies in the capacity of revisionist memory to slander a reputation. At the same time, even if Gonzalo can offer literary authentication explaining precisely ‘[h]ow came that widow in,’ The Tempest has trained us to think of Dido in relation to Virgil, as Sebastian does when he asks, ‘What if had said “widower Æneas” too?’ (Sebastian seems to indulge a quaintly puritanical fantasy that Aeneas and Dido were married: just one of several moments when these Italian colonists reveal their English underpinnings.) Good Elizabethan readers would, like Sebastian, expect a Virgilian Dido rather than a Mantegnan one; and if a humanistically trained Elizabethan viewer had been undecided on the matter, he would doubtless have been set on the Virgilian straight and narrow by Ferdinand’s re-enactment of the O dea certe speech from The Aeneid in the scene immediately preceding this one (‘Most sure the goddess / On whom these airs attend!’ I.ii.424–5).23 The rhetorical context here, too, raises the spectre of a Virgilian Dido, imagined specifically as an erotic way-station on the road to empire. The topic of conversation onstage is the recent marriage of King Alonso’s daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis, a match that, in Sebastian’s words, left the princess torn ‘between loathness and obedience’ (II.i.126): between her personal desire to remain in Europe and her political duty to assent to an expedient match. Claribel’s dilemma was the choice between eros and empire, Dido and Rome. And finally, for Elizabethan audiences who would recognize The Tempest’s echoes of Strachey’s True Reportory of the Wrack, among other recent texts of New World exploration, the imperial project of The Aeneid serves as a more likely point of comparison than do the Italian texts.24 In fact, Dido herself makes an appearance in Strachey’s pamphlet, which begins by describing the original search for a suitable location for the colony that would become Jamestown: At length, after much and weary search (with their barge coasting still before, as Vergil writeth Aeneas did, arriving in the region of Italy called Latium, upon the bankes of the river Tiber) . . . they had sight of an extended plaine and spot of earth[: . . . a] low level of ground about halfe an acre (or so much as Queen Dido might buy of King Iarbas, which she compassed about with the thongs cut out of one bull hide and therein built her Castle of Byrsa) . . .25

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Strachey invokes Aeneas and Dido to describe the landscape that would come to comprise the Jamestown colony, in a gesture of translatio imperii, appropriating for Renaissance England the authority and cultural prestige of ancient empires. This gesture translates from two imperia at once, according to David Scott Wilson-Okamura, trading not only on the mythology of the Holy Roman Empire, but also the ancient Carthaginian Empire, which established colonies in North Africa and Spain.26 Strachey’s letter and Shakespeare’s play thus represent ancient Carthage, ancient Rome, Aeneas, Dido, and Jamestown as kindred colonial spirits, analogously engaged in the imperial conquest of the uncivilized world. For all of these reasons, we, like Sebastian, cannot help but imagine Dido in relation to Aeneas rather than Sychaeus, to successful rather than failed empire. When Gonzalo invokes ‘widow Dido,’ he proffers a counterfactual history, imagining Dido as the widow of Aeneas. This alternative Dido awaits Aeneas patiently in Carthage, honoured, rather than betrayed, by her lover’s departure. By erasing the dramatic gesture of her suicide, this narrative turns Dido into a proponent of empire. She becomes a wife who willingly sacrifices in order to allow Aeneas to fulfil his political destiny. This Dido looks more like Penelope than Medea, more like the good Puritan girl Temperance than like her lascivious double. By transplanting the faithful wife from the Petrarchan tradition into the Virgilian narrative, then, Gonzalo overwrites the ways in which the imperial project entails the destruction of the family. This deliberate revision is salient both because the competing representational traditions explicitly raise the issues of cultural memory, and because this very scene opened, not sixty lines before, by acknowledging the fragmentation of families that began the play. gonzalo: Beseech you, sir, be merry; you have cause, So have we all, of joy; for our escape Is much beyond our loss. Our hint of woe Is common; every day, some sailor’s wife, The masters of some merchant, and the merchant, Have just our theme of woe . . .

(II.i.1–6)

If Gonzalo had paid attention to Hamlet, he would know that this consolation never works; Gertrude’s ‘[t]hou know’st ’tis common’ was similarly unsuccessful.27 Undeterred, he tries a different tack, now denying – rather than downplaying – the loss. Gonzalo’s rewriting of

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Dido as the ever-patient war-wife amounts to a forgetting of the problems of empire. He re-members a fictional, pro-imperial family that never existed as such. He invents a temperate, patient Dido, whose long-suffering, like Penelope’s, will be rewarded as if at the end of a Shakespearean romance. He effaces the intemperance of Dido’s passion, the cruelty of Aeneas’s departure, the various acts of violence that dismembered that would-be-family in the first place. Of Cannibals, White Cannibals, and Liars Gonzalo’s attenuated rhetorical violence lays the groundwork, as the scene progresses, for a meditation on more literal forms of dismemberment and erasure. In a second act of colonialist rewriting, Gonzalo spins out a humanist utopian fantasy, one that develops further the link between violence and historical memory. While Antonio and Sebastian continue their snide commentary, Gonzalo imagines the island transformed into a utopian commonwealth: gonzalo: Had I plantation of this isle, my lord, – antonio: He’d sow ’t with nettle-seed. sebastian: Or docks, or mallows. gonzalo: And were the King on ’t, what would I do? sebastian: ’Scape being drunk for want of wine. gonzalo: I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure: No sovereignty; – sebastian: Yet he would be King on ’t. antonio: The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. (II.i.139–54)

As Antonio and Sebastian are quick to point out, Gonzalo’s fantasy of the self-governing society ‘forgets’ the very premise – his sovereignty – on which such a state of affairs would redound to his own credit. In

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Richard Halpern’s persuasive account, this apparently naive forgetting of the comic senex masks an insidious, colonialist erasure, what Halpern calls an act of ‘white cannibalism,’ a narrative counterpart to the alimentary practice evoked anagrammatically by Caliban’s name. Halpern’s Gonzalo assimilates a specific historical New World civilization to this fictional humanist utopia: ‘Gonzalo in effect consumes the body of the racial other in order to appropriate its cultural force.’28 For Halpern, the transhistorical utopian fantasy of Western myth effaces – or cannibalizes, in his vocabulary – non-Western history. Such rhetoric effaces its own origins in violence, just as Gonzalo’s gesture toward a self-legislating society effaces the foundation of his utopia in a fantasy of colonial rule. Building on Halpern’s powerful metaphorics, I would like to explore the distinctions between white cannibalism and cannibalism per se. Meredith Skura warns us that an anagram does not a cannibal make; Caliban seems to dine on roots, berries, maybe the occasional fish.29 If Caliban is not a cannibal, even less so is this ‘lord of weak remembrance,’ whose failures of memory in fact emerge in this speech in opposition to the intractable physicality of cannibalism. Gonzalo is, as critics have long recognized, not the only western humanist mediator in this monologue. His speech adapts closely a passage from John Florio’s English translation of Montaigne’s On Cannibals, first published in 1603. But no critic has, to my knowledge, examined this adaptation in the context of Montaigne’s entire essay. If we return to Florio’s translation, we do indeed find Montaigne remarking on narrative’s potential for violent erasure. The essay, in fact, goes even further in considering the ethical consequences of narrativization, specifically opposing the kinds of memorial lacunae entrenched by narrative to the forms of memorial preservation accomplished by cannibalism.30 Gonzalo adapts his utopian fantasy from an essay that anatomizes this ‘lord of weak remembrance’ and excludes him from the forms of anatomical memory available only to the colonized subject. Montaigne’s essay begins, perhaps unsurprisingly, with a kind of tempest, invoking that now familiar figure for the ‘washhyng the brayne’ clean of memory. It surmises that the as yet undiscovered Isle of Atlantis could have been ‘swallowed vp by the Deluge, [which . . .] extreame ruine of waters wrought strange alterations in the habitations of the earth.’31 Alternatively, Florio’s Montaigne suggests, more temperate changes might have hidden lands from modern sight, for the river Dordogne, in Montaigne’s lifetime alone, gradually eroded

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so much land that ‘should it alwaies keepe one course, or had it euer kept the same, the figure of the world had ere this beene overthrowne.’32 Atlantis, along with the lands so completely forgotten that we have no name for them, stands as a figure for how much has been forgotten. Like Eliotes Dictionary, the essay connects this effacement to a physical erosion: the washing away of land and the washing away of imprints from the waxen tablets of memory. Florio’s Montaigne then applies this principle to western contact narratives in a series of observations that should make Halpern proud and Gonzalo blush: [S]ubtile people may indeed marke more curiously, and observe things more exactly, but they amplifie and glose them: and the better to perswade, and make their interpretations of more validity, they cannot chuse but somewhat alter the storie. They never represent things truely, but fashion and maske them according to the visage they saw them in; and to purchase credit to their judgement, and draw you on to beleeve them, they commonly adorne, enlarge, yea, and Hyperbolise the matter.33

The vocabulary here recalls less the waxen tablet of memory than familiar English critiques of courtly insincerity. The truth is not washed away, but ‘amplifie[d],’ ‘glose[d],’ adorned with ‘fashion,’ ‘maske[s],’ and hyperbole. And yet underneath these lying masks, what is the memory being adorned? Montaigne (and/or Florio) equivocates. Subtle people ‘may indeed marke more curiously, and observe things more exactly.’ Mark here means ‘to notice or observe,’ of course, but also ‘to brand, tattoo, or otherwise put a distinctive mark on (a person) . . .; to put an identifying mark on (an animal), as by branding, cutting, or notching the ear’ (OED 3rd ed. III, 2a, 2c).34 So there may or may not be, underneath the ‘glosing’ garments of rhetoric and flesh, a precise memorial imprint in the waxen brains of these ‘subtile people.’ Either Montaigne is speaking of deliberate liars, who retain accurate memories but recount something else; or else he is speaking of those whose memories are inadequately imprinted in their brains. Prospero, though, has already forestalled this equivocation, early in The Tempest, explaining how the first alternative erodes into the second. Speaking of Antonio’s perfidy in seizing his dukedom, he explains: He being thus lorded, Not only with what my revenue yielded,

Intemperance in The Tempest But what my power might else exact, like one Who having into truth, by telling of it, Made such a sinner of his memory, To credit his own lie, he did believe He was indeed the duke; out o’ th’ substitution, And executing th’ outward face of royalty, With all prerogative; – hence his ambition growing, – Dost thou hear?

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(I.ii.97–106)

Most editors gloss ‘into’ as ‘unto,’ meaning ‘made his memory such a sinner against truth.’ In the 1921 New Cambridge edition, though, Dover Wilson suggested that these lines may represent a corrupted description of Antonio as ‘one / Who having minted truth, by telling of it, / Made such a finer of his memory,’ drawing on the Oxford New English Dictionary definition of ‘finer’ as an official at the Royal Mint (not attested in the OED). Wilson refers readers to a precise parallel in The Apology of Dr Henry More (1664): [T]hough it were in our power to mint Truth as we please, and to set that stamp and title upon what ever Proposition would serve our turn best, yet we should find that it would not serve all Emergencies, nor fit all occasions, nor be exempt from all exceptions.35

More, unlike Prospero, writes with cautious approval of the minting of truth, which is not the occupation of the villain alone, but rather a corollary to the contingency of all prospositions: what he calls ‘a marvellous Incommensurability of things in humane affairs.’36 Wilson elaborates: ‘The misprint may be explained thus: – Shakespeare wrote “minted” with one or two minims short, and with the ed like oe; this the compositor read as “inntoe” or “into” and set up as “into.” ’37 (It is easier to imagine the substitution of ‘sinner’ for ‘finer,’ given the long ‘s’ of Renaissance orthography; the compositor need only have doubled the ’n’ by mistake.) Although this complex hypothesis has converted few subsequent editors, Wilson’s ingenuity brings into relief the preponderance of vocabulary related to coining elsewhere in the passage. ‘Telling’ suggests counting, in the same idiom the Spenserian narrator applied to Mammon; ‘credit his own lie’ suggests a way in which the process of minting invests worth in a coin; ‘out o’ th’ substitution’ suggests counterfeiting, the substitution of a base metal for a valuable one; and ‘executing the outward face’ refers to the sovereign’s image on the minted

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coin. Even if the process began as a deliberate counterfeit, Prospero suggests, the coin itself circulates as legal tender; it is imprinted and ‘credited’ as much as any true coin. The Tempest thus collapses Montaigne’s distinction between those who lie and those who forget. Here, we see the metaphor of the wax tablet merging with another common medieval trope: memories as coins or jewels to be laid away in the treasury of the mind, which serves as the treasure-house or ‘thesaurus.’ Cicero and Quintilian both use this image, the latter writing eloquently of the memory as the place where ‘the riches are hidden away as in a kind of most sacred treasury.’38 Illuminated medieval manuscripts quote visually from this classical metaphor to admonish readers to attend to and store their contents for future use, as in figure 14 below, an edition of the Hours of the Virgin printed in Bruges in the fifteenth century, and lavishly illustrated by the Master of Sir George Talbot. In the margins, diligent and pious readers are depicted gathering the liturgical and devotional coins that the Hours of the Virgin makes available, metaphorically, in the form of scripture, hymns, and psalms. When the two tropes of the wax tablet and the treasure house are combined in Prospero’s description of Antonio, the erasure of the wax tablet evolves figurally into the counterfeiting of coins. Suddenly, Antonio’s memory is not only metaphorically, but metonymically related to his material sins. His venial thefts of the dukedom, and of ‘what [Prospero’s] revenue yielded,’ correspond to the debasement of the coins of his memory. His worldly sins are intimately bound up with his sins of forgetting. Read against The Tempest, then, Montaigne’s essay suggests the fundamental untrustworthiness of narrators: whether through gradual erosion, sudden tempest, or deliberate counterfeit, their memories erase the truth. Unsatisfied to let the matter rest there, Montaigne’s essays mount a counter-argument to Prospero’s equation. Not ‘Of Cannibals,’ but another essay from the same volume (book 1), ‘Of Lyers,’ sets out to defend the forgetful from these aspersions. Read closely, however, the essay suggests the ethically untenable position of Gonzalo and the other forgetful European narrators of The Tempest, who imagine themselves as the temperate controllers of time. Considered together, ‘Of Cannibals’ and ‘Of Lyers’ condemn this kind of narratively produced memory in contrast to a cannibalistic mode of memory, one that resists the erasure of the body. Before considering the essay’s remarks on memory, it is worth attending to several characteristics that recommend ‘Of Lyers’ as a

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Figure 14: Hours of the Virgin, Pierpont Morgan ms M.390, f. 45r (The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910; reproduced by permission of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York)

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probable referent of this scene.39 The essay includes specific reference to the forgetfulness of old men, ‘who have onelie the memorie of things past left them,’ and in whose mouths ‘some very pleasant reports become most irkesome and tedious,’ a description that Antonio and Sebastian would readily apply to Gonzalo.40 It chides those whose historical reach is too broad, ‘who recoile their narration so farre-backe, and stuff-it with so many vaine circumstances, that if the story be good, they smoother the goodnesse of it,’ a possible explanation for the inappropriateness and inaccuracy of Gonzalo’s biography of Dido.41 Most compellingly of all, the essay concludes with an anecdote illustrating the dangers of lying. The players in this parable are King Franc¸ois I of France, who emerges victorious, and his adversary – none other than the dishonest Duke of Milan, Francesco Sforza: a perfect Machiavellian villain for the Shakespearean stage, and an invitingly nefarious doppelga¨nger for Prospero’s usurping brother. In its fundamental content as well as its identifying details, ‘Of Lyers’ speaks compellingly to the issues raised by Gonzalo’s colonialist fantasy. The essay begins as an apologia for forgetfulness. Montaigne begins by explaining that he considers himself blessed by his weak memory. Had he a more retentive mind, he explains, he might find himself unduly influenced by ‘forren inventions & strange opinions,’ which could cause him to ‘easily lay downe and wire-draw [i.e., strain] my mind and judgement, vpon other mens traces.’42 The language here contains more than a hint of xenophobia; on this model, all ideologies and influences not emerging ex nihilo from one’s own mind are ‘forren’ and ‘strange.’ This is the fantasy of Renaissance self-fashioning: of a subject created in perfect intellectual isolation, free from the taint of influence, opinion, and ideology. According to ‘Of Lyers,’ this perfectly autonomous subject, unburdened by the inscriptions of memory, will pragmatically eschew lying, knowing that he lacks the memory to track his own prevarications. So far, this sounds like a perfect rejoinder to Prospero’s claim that forgetfulness amounts to lying. But like Gonzalo’s utopian fantasy, this essay is a self-consuming artefact; its latter end forgets its beginning. The anecdote that concludes the essay as its ‘Q.E.D.’ purports to contrast the admirable King Franc¸ois I from the lying, perfidious Duke of Milan. But ultimately, this anecdote distinguishes imperfectly, if at all, between its lying villain and its virtuous truth-teller. The story begins when [King] Francis [I of France] sends an informant to the Milanese court, ‘in effect as his Ambassador, but in

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appearance as a private man.’43 The unsuspecting Francis [Sforza, Duke of Milan] employs the man as his ambassador to the court of Denmark, where he was hoping to woo the king’s daughter. Eventually, Francis [Sforza] learns the true identity of the French ambassador, and has him executed on a false charge of murder. He then sends yet another ambassador – a man also named Francis [Taverna] – to the French king to deny any knowledge of the executed man’s true identity. The cagey [King] Francis [I of France] manages to catch Francis [Taverna] in his own lie. Montaigne proudly concludes: ‘Heere every man may guesse whether he were taken short or no, hauing tripped before so goodly a nose, as was that of our King Francis the first.’44 While the nationalities of the two central players reliably predict Montaigne’s partisanship, the superabundance of Francises in the narrative confuses any clear distinction between them. (In Florio’s text, everyone is a ‘Francis,’ whether French or Italian.) This confusion of names only underscores the ethical murkiness of this situation. The Italian ambassador Francis [Taverna] does lie to [King] Francis. But [King] Francis lies in attesting to a false identity for his informant, and the informant lies in professing fidelity to Francis [Sforza]. Finally, no one in this anecdote, including [King] Francis [I of France], acts as a self-fashioned, autonomous subject: this is an anecdote peopled almost entirely by ambassadors, men whose function is in fact to represent someone else. In effect, then, this parable illustrates not the dangers of lying, or the salutary effects of a poor memory, but rather the impossibility of a perfectly sovereign subject whose forgetful mind guarantees his immunity to ‘forren inventions & strange opinions.’ Every Francis has his doubles and his ambassadors, whose political necessity confirms that no man is an island. This anecdote undoes the fantasy of self-sovereignty just as Gonzalo’s fantasy undoes its own premise of sovereignty over the island. Montaigne’s own memory has failed him even within the space of this essay, whose latter end forgets its beginning. The relevance of this logical collapse to the Gonzalo scene, and to The Tempest more generally, becomes clearer as ‘Of Lyers’ progresses, and Montaigne’s railing against mendacity reaches its most fervent pitch. Onely lying, and stubbornesse somewhat more, are the faults whose birth and progresse I would have severely punished and cut off; for they grow and encrease with them: and if the tongue have once gotten this ill habit, good Lord how hard, nay how impossible it is [sic] to make her

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leave it? . . . I have a good lad to my tailour, whom I never heard speake a truth; no not when it might stand him in stead of profit.45

Montaigne begins here with an image of dismemberment. We have the violent impulse to cut off faults at the moment of their ‘birth,’ followed by the image of the dismembered lying tongue operating on ‘her’ own, independent from the obviously ill-governed body. The liar here is the fragmented subject who has, presumably, been corrupted by ‘forren influences,’ and lost his autonomy. But then, once again, the real-world example undoes the rest. The exemplary liar Montaigne cites is a tailor’s boy. Etymologically, ‘tailor’ comes from the Old French tailleur, cutter. But by the thirteenth century, a trade distinction had already emerged between the ‘cutter’ who fashioned the pieces of a garment and the ‘tailor’ who pieces them together into a whole costume or ‘habit,’ the image in the Montaigne passage here. This tailor’s boy is the one who tries to sew together the dismembered pieces of the subject – the tongue, the appendages so rudely cut off – into a coherent whole. This process of suturing together falsely what is essentially fragmentary exemplifies mendacity for Montaigne. In his mistrust of tailors, Montaigne repeats a familiar motif of Renaissance ethnography, which associated the instability of English identity – the ‘variable and unsteady’ nature that James Howell attributed to the watery climate – with the Englishman’s love of sartorial style. William Slatyer thus attributes the English appetite for ‘other Country-far-fetcht and new-fangle fashions’ to their ‘braine-sicke’ geohumoral condition,46 and Andrew Boorde chooses the figure of the tailor to represent the typical Englishman as ‘exceptionally impressible, vulnerable, and inconstant’ (see Fig. 15).47 In English ethnographic discourse as in Montaigne’s essay, then, the tailor represents the mendacity associated with the English climate and humoral temperament, and the forgetful, waterlogged brain characteristic thereof. In The Tempest, tellingly, the clothing of the shipwrecked men is immediately associated with the erasure of an historical trauma and thus with forgetfulness and lying: gonzalo: But the rarity of it is, – which is indeed almost beyond credit, – . . . [t]hat our garments, being, as they were, drenched in the sea, hold, notwithstanding, their freshness

Intemperance in The Tempest and glosses, being rather new-dyed than stained with salt water. antonio: If but one of his pockets could speak, would it not say he lies? sebastian: Ay, or very falsely pocket up his report. gonzalo: Methinks our garments are now as fresh as when we put them on first in Afric, at the marriage of the King’s fair daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis.

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(II.i.56–68)

The men’s clothing lies. It erases the evidence of the violent shipwreck that it has so recently endured, along with its occupants. Its clean slate, its ‘glosses’ (the same word that Florio’s Montaigne used to describe narrative embellishment), its appearance of being as fresh as when it was donned for the African wedding: these characteristics all represent a forgetting, an erasure of even recent history. Antonio and Sebastian’s punning may be slightly ham-fisted here, but their point stands: Gonzalo’s pockets cannot speak; only the man, the coherent subject mendaciously fashioned from of an olio of dismembered parts, enjoys the privilege of narration. For Prospero, for Gonzalo, for Montaigne, and for the tailor’s boy, the unity of a narrative, or of a body, may suffice to overwrite the material specificity of worldly memory. But traces of what has been forgotten persist in moments of incoherence, when the latter end of a narrative forgets its beginning. These ruptures serve to suggest how much has been lost, washed clean from the brain. Making the Old World New Together, Montaigne’s essays and The Tempest paint a bleak picture of re-membering as practised by western humanists. It seems to be premised on erasure and forgetting; it is indistinguishable from lying; it falsely sutures together fragments of narrative in a way that effaces their original dismemberment. In this context, Miranda’s ‘O brave new world . . . !’ in the reunion scene (V.i.183–4), the augur of rebirth and wonder that will repair age-old divides, already anticipates Aldous Huxley’s twentieth-century dystopia. The irony of Miranda’s exclamation is that this final congregation of characters – in which Prospero appears dressed ‘[a]s I was sometime Milan’ (V.i.86) – is in fact the oldest world that has appeared so far on the stage; it is only because Miranda has not seen Europe since infancy that she takes the

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Image Not Available

Figure 15: Depiction of an Englishman; Andrew Boorde; The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge; Bodleian 56 Art. Seld., B4r; c. 1562 (reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries)

old world for the new.48 Her naivete´ allows Prospero to resume his omniscient condescension, as he qualifies her exclamation: ‘’Tis new to thee’ (V.i.184). Miranda’s false consciousness here represents the outer limit of renewal in the play: belief in a lie that the world is new again, unburdened by memories of violence. The Tempest does not end in bleakness, though; this reading need not do so either, because the play does offer, however quietly and tentatively, the possibility of a different sort of memory, one implicit in both ‘Of Cannibals’ and The Tempest: a memory based on the intractability of the body, which preserves its own records of violence and dismemberment. Among his images of erosion and forgetting, Montaigne records a powerful riposte to these tales of rhetorical effacement. ‘I have a song made by a prisoner’ of a cannibalistic tribe, he explains. This prisoner sings his taunts to his cannibalistic captors:

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Let them boldly come altogether, and flocke in multitudes, to feed on him; for with him they shall feed vpon their fathers, and grandfathers, that heeretofore have served his bodie for food and nourishment: [‘]These muscles . . . this flesh, and these veines, are your owne; fond men as you are, know you not that the substance of your forefathers limbes is yet tied vnto ours? Taste them well, for in them shall you finde the relish of your owne flesh . . .[’]49

The prisoner insists on the body’s resistance to historical effacement. Whatever traumatic event might mark his death – whatever occasio might befall him – the long history of his ancestors inheres in his flesh. His muscles, his veins, his limbs: these constitute a corporeal record of every act of cannibalistic violence he and his victims have ever committed. He describes his body in parts, anticipating his literal dismemberment at the hands of his captors, while insisting at the same time that his identity will remain intact after his death and consumption. Through his dismemberment, he will be re-membered, even while he grants the conqueror a grotesque kind of reunification with his own ancestral family. In contrast to Gonzalo’s utopian fantasy, this cannibal’s end will not forget his beginning. Cannibalism, here, inverts Halpern’s white cannibalism. In the latter, western mythological memory, imposed on a New World, erases the acts of violence committed in its name. But in the form of cannibalism Montaigne describes, the physical act of eating preserves the memory of the deceased in the body of the living. The moment of physical dismemberment is the foundation of an intractable memory that does not give way under the rhetorical pressure of narrative. In the previous chapter, I argued that Guyon’s affectlessness in the Cave of Mammon – underscored by the recurrent image of the spectral hand, which he failed to recognize as a revenant of his own – represented an ethical failure of temperance. Cannibalism in The Tempest, perhaps, represents an ethical solution to this problem, or at least a riposte. As Carla Freccero argues, ‘cannibalism is in some sense haunting’s double, its . . . twin. A literalization of melancholic incorporation through the ingestion of the other, cannibalism is the flip side of the excorporation that a ghost might be said to be.’50 But while Freccero thinks of cannibalism as the evil twin – a symptom of ‘the desire to incorporate the other within the self,’ which ‘fundamentally destroys its alterity or otherness and consequently negates the other’51 – Montaigne and Shakespeare, I am arguing, reverse this polarity.

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Cannibalism here represents the persistence of ethical obligation, even in new geographic locales and new economic modes; it is thus the corrective to Guyon’s haunting, which functioned as the symptom of disavowal and self-exoneration from the scene of political conquest. Cannibalism, then, is a kind of violent memorialization: a description that perhaps suffices as well to describe Caliban’s role in The Tempest. Unlike Ariel, he refuses Prospero’s performative utterances. Caliban does not forget. This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first, Thou strok’st me, and made much of me; wouldst give me Water with berries in ’t; and teach me how To name the bigger light, and how the less, That burn by day and night: and then I lov’d thee, And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile: Curs’d be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own King . . .

(I.ii.333–44)

This is the less forgetful version of Gonzalo’s fantasy. Caliban preserves the memory of his birthright, and remains consistent in his desire for sovereignty. When reminded, some lines later, of his attempt to rape Miranda, he gloats, ‘O ho, O ho! Would ’t had been done! / Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans’ (I.ii.351–3). Caliban here confesses the colonialist desire that Gonzalo attempts to efface when he claims that his ‘plantation’ would have ‘[n]o sovereignty.’ Caliban remembers both his desire and its thwarting. His choice of verbs – ‘prevent,’ from the Latin praevenire, to come first or before – suggests a specific historical memory, a clear accounting of whose colonial desires came first. If Caliban’s recalcitrance suggests characterological unity, it is not a unity recognized by the Europeans in the play, who frequently remark on his dismembered and fragmentary state. When Stephano finds him buried underneath his gabardine, Caliban appears as a motley assemblage: ‘half a fish and half a monster’ (III.ii.28) with ‘[f]our legs and two voices . . . [whose] forward voice . . . speak[s] well of his friend; [while] his backward voice . . . utter[s] foul speeches’ (II.ii.91–3). Even

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after the mysterious hybrid ‘monster’ emerges and resolves himself into Caliban, his compatriots continue to think of him in parts: stephano: Drink, servant-monster, when I bid thee: thy eyes are almost set in thy head. trinculo: Where should they be set else? he were a brave monster indeed, if they were set in his tail.

(III.ii.7–10)

Caliban lends himself to physiological dissection and rearrangement in Trinculo and Stephano’s imaginations, a tendency altogether consistent with their initial impulse to consider Caliban as a commodity for European markets.52 But if dismemberment marks Caliban’s bestiality for the Europeans, it is also the source of his most sympathetic moment in the play, his lyrical speech about the beauty of the island. Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d, I cried to dream again.

(III.ii.133–41)

Caliban here finds peace in his fragmentation. In his waking life, he remains a creature split into parts, communing with other parts: disembodied voices sing at his ears, and these sweet airs lack a singer. But when he sleeps, he does not dream of unification, re-memberment into a coherent whole. Caliban’s gentle tempest – the clouds opening to drop down their riches53 – represents a fantasy of oblivion. When he wakes and ‘crie[s] to dream again,’ Caliban testifies to the burdens of memory incumbent upon the colonized subject, the desire, never tenable for the colonized as it is for the colonizer, to forget. A reading of one additional scene will underscore the play’s insistent recognition of the western narratives of reunification and, simultaneously, of the ways in which Caliban’s presence disrupts their coherence. The disappearing banquet that Ariel stages for the shipwrecked mariners has been pivotal to many readings of the play:

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comparative analyses of Shakespeare’s Virgilian sources, historicist readings of Prospero as James I, metatheatrical readings of Prospero as playwright, theological readings of divine justice. It is also, insofar as it adapts the sixteenth-century communion service, a scene of cannibalism. Michael Neill assembles a compelling set of structural and linguistic parallels: Ariel, dressed as a harpy, calls on the stunned mariners to ‘remember, – / For that’s my business to you’ (III.iii.68–9). Similarly, Christ calls on communicants, ‘Take ye and eate, take and drinke ye all of this: doo thys in remembraunce of me.’54 The banquet disappears because the Duke and his compatriots, as ‘men of sin,’ are ‘unfit’ to participate; Ariel’s image of the ‘never-surfeited sea . . . belch[ing] up’ the usurpers elaborates the impossibility of their felicitous participation in such a communal meal (III.iii.53, 58, 55–6). Just so, the 1559 Book of Common Prayer commands the minister to bar from the sacrament of Communion all ‘those, betwyxte whom he perceiueth malice and hatred to rayne, not suffering them to be partakers of the Lordes Table untyll he know them to be reconciled.’ And for Neill, this analogy confirms the triumphant, comic resolution of the play: In The Tempest memory becomes re-membering, re-jointing the divided self, reincorporating it in the membership of community; and the theatre, for its part, becomes Communion: Prospero’s final words, echoing the Priest’s invitation to the Table, summon us all, audience as well as actors, to participate in the celebration of human community restored . . .55

Isn’t it pretty to think so? And yet we cannot think of eating the flesh and drinking the blood, in this play, without thinking of would-be cannibal Caliban: he who is not part of the communion, is not a ‘very member[] incorporate in [God’s] mistical body, which is the blessed company of all faythfull people,’ according to the Book of Common Prayer. Forgiveness in The Tempest entails a forgetting, a final, tempestuous end to old schisms, a pretence that what was old is in fact a ‘brave new world.’ But Caliban will not be cannibalized, made incorporate. His body, ever in parts, retains the marks of all Old-world wounds. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, just as English emigrants begin to settle in Virginia and New England, The Tempest invokes and adapts the virtue of temperance to consider the ethical challenges and quandaries facing the inhabitants of those new colonial territories, with respect to both the native inhabitants of their newly

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claimed lands and the English nationals they left behind. Representing temperance as a form of narrative erasure and imposed forgetting, the play mounts a subtle allegorical critique of cultural, as well as literal, imperialism. Thus positioned as an English trait of questionable virtue, temperance concludes a journey of geographical, semantic, and ideological mobility: from England to the New World; from moderation to hegemony; from Aristotelian virtue to colonial vice. In part 2, I will turn away from these earlier literary experiments in temperance’s semantic extensibility, in favour of later textual productions written in explicit response to English colonial ‘adventures’ in the New World. Such texts take for granted the centrality of temperance as a term of ethical and political relevance to the colonial endeavour, and thus testify to the virtue’s vast mobility during the preceding decades of the English Renaissance.

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PART II

Temperance Colonizes America

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4 John Donne, Christopher Brooke, and Temperate Revenge in 1622 Jamestown

After receiving its charter from James I in 1606, the Virginia Company of London began preparations for the December launch of its first envoy to North America. The first group of 104 ‘adventurers’ completed their transatlantic voyage the following May, establishing the settlement they called Jamestown on the banks of the James River, sixty miles from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.1 This New World endeavour would, of course, satisfy the Virginia Company’s pleonexia – first in the exportation of New World crops, which generated an enormous European appetite for novel luxury goods; and later in the slave trade, which infused natural and labour capital into the English economy. But early Company documents attest that the Virginia Company originally understood its mission as twofold: self-interested in its mercantile dimensions, but altruistic in its religious and political ones. The ‘Principall and Maine Ends’ of ‘the hopefull Plantations begun in Virginia,’ according to an official declaration issued in 1610, weare first to preach, & baptize into Christian Religion, and by propagation of that Gospell, to recouer out of the armes of the Diuell, a number of poore and miserable soules, wrapt vpp vnto death, in almost inuincible ignorance; to endeauour the fulfilling, and accomplishment of the number of the elect, which shall be gathered from out all corners of the earth; and to add our myte to the treasury of Heauen, that as we pray for the comming of the kingdome of glory, so to expresse in our actions, the same desire, if God haue pleased, to vse so weak instruments, to the ripening & consummation thereof.2

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This passage implicitly acknowledges the material benefits of Virginia settlement, spiritual priorities notwithstanding. The gospel is not merely preached but agriculturally ‘propagat[ed]’ until the ‘ripening’ of the second coming; the elect will be ‘gathered from out all corners of the earth’ in an evangelical form of primitive accumulation; and the English ‘myte’ proves to be convertible to heavenly ‘treasur[e].’ The passage nevertheless implies, though, that such conversion serves as a horizon of accountability. Only insofar as the English ‘myte’ purchases heavenly rather than worldly riches; only so long as ‘poore and miserable soules’ are ‘gathered from out all corners of the earth’ for divine rather than mercenary ends; in short, only insofar as they hope one day to claim ‘to haue conuerted Nations’ – both in the sense of bringing spiritual salvation to New World natives and in the sense of transforming worldly riches into divine election3 – only then will the Company rest satisfied by the justice of its colonial settlement. While the 1610 declaration does not soft-pedal the Virginia Company’s selfinterest, it does attest to the colonists’ sense of moral and ethical obligation: a duty to subordinate worldly to spiritual goals, thereby preserving both their right to material success and their difference in kind from their reviled Spanish competitors.4 Along with much else, this rhetorical posture changed dramatically after 22 March 1622, when 347 Jamestown settlers were killed in a surprise Powhatan attack. One of the only events in early colonial Virginia widely reported in England, this episode occasioned an aboutface in English representations of the natives: no longer ‘poore and miserable soules’ requiring the compassionate intervention of Christian missionaries, but the villainous perpetrators of a ‘Barbarous Massacre in the time of peace and League, treacherously executed by the Natiue Infidels.’5 This subtitle comes from the pen of Company secretary Edward Waterhouse, who authored the Virginia Company’s official documentary response to the massacre, published in August 1622. In that text, Waterhouse describes the Company’s changed attitude toward the natives as a welcome relief from the burdens of missionary duty and Christian humility: [O]ur hands which before were tied with gentlenesse and faire vsage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Sauages, not vntying the Knot, but cutting it: So that we, who hitherto haue had possession of no more ground then their waste, and our purchaes at a valuable consideration to their owne contentment, gained; may now by right of Warre,

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and law of Nations, inuade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy vs: whereby wee shall enioy their cultiuated places, turning the laborious Mattocke into the victorious Sword (wherein there is more both ease, benefit, and glory) and possessing the fruits of others labours. Now their cleared grounds in all their villages (which are situate in the fruitfullest places of the land) shall be inhabited by vs, whereas heretofore the grubbing of woods was the greatest labour . . . [T]hose commodities which the Indians enioyed as much or rather more then we, shall now also be entirely possessed by vs . . . Because the way of conquering them is much more easie then of ciuilizing them by faire meanes, for they are a rude, barbarous, and naked people, scattered in small companies, which are helps to Victorie, but hinderances to Ciuilitie: Besides that, a conquest may be of many, and at once; but ciuility is in particular, and slow, the effect of long time, and great industry.6

Unlike the 1610 declaration, Waterhouse’s text does not attempt justification by divine analogy. To proceed from the 1610 to the 1622 text is to witness the desublimation of metaphor in Virginia Company rhetoric, from the divine to the martial: the land, the villages, the commodities, and the ‘fruits of others labours’ are neither metaphors for heavenly reward nor symptoms of spiritual election, but retributive spoils exacted from the Powhatan in acts of retaliatory violence. The conversion implicit in this passage comprises not an individual soul finding God under missionary tutelage, but the repurposing of the mattock – an agricultural tool used for breaking hard ground – as a sword. Gone is the Company’s vow to temper worldly ambition with missionary duty, supplanted by ‘liberty’ to indulge England’s most acquisitive, avaricious colonial appetites. The ‘cultiuated places,’ the ‘fruitfullest . . . of the land,’ and the everyday ‘commodities’ will be in the settlers’ possession. ‘Nor was this merely an angry response made in the heat of the moment,’ explains Tom Cain: ‘a letter of October 7, 1622 signed by the deputy Treasurer . . . as well as Waterhouse, and reflecting the views of “a great and generall Court” of the Company, urged the Governor to carry out the previous instructions and execute “a sharp revenge uppon the bloody miscreants, [by] . . . rooting them out for being longer a people uppon the face of the Earth.” ’7 The most important aspect of this dramatic shift in affect, ideology, and rhetoric, for my purposes, is the change it occasions in the conceptual role played by temporality and efficiency in English colonial rhetoric and rationale. As we have seen, English writers of the late sixteenth

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century seized on temperance as a virtue of temporal control and prudent delay in order to distinguish themselves from their Spanish counterparts. In the English imagination, Spanish activity in the New World was a model of intemperance in multiple senses of that virtue. Insofar as intemperance entailed excessive worldly appetites, the Spanish were intemperate in their insatiable thirst for riches – a characterization that informs, for example, Theodor de Bry’s engraving of natives pouring molten gold into the mouths of the invading Spaniards, enacting a dramatic if atavistic talionic revenge. Insofar as intemperance had come to refer to temporal mismanagement, the Spanish pleaded guilty to that vice, according to Richard Hakluyt, when they opted to return to Spain with their spoils rather than to establish plantations in the New World. As we have seen in Spenser and Shakespeare, the defensibility of English colonialism as compared to its Spanish doppelga¨nger partially consists in its longevity, its temporal extensibility, its patience – in short, its temperance in the sense of temporal endurance. In Waterhouse’s response to the 1622 massacre, though, what looked like temperance to Hakluyt appears to be nothing more than inefficiency and lassitude. For Waterhouse, conquest is preferable to the painstaking work of cultural and religious conversion not only because it satisfies the appetite for revenge, but because it is a faster, more efficient process: ‘a conquest may be of many, and at once; but ciuility is in particular, and slow, the effect of long time, and great industry’ (emphasis added). The very qualities that would recommend the imparting of religious and cultural ‘ciuility’ as a temperate endeavour, to Hakluyt and his ilk, render it insupportably inefficient to Waterhouse and the enraged, grieving, and vengeful members of the Virginia Company after the 1622 massacre. As Waterhouse’s declaration attests, English colonial settlement in the New World entailed territorial contestations both literal and rhetorical, as the English sought to establish political and ethical sovereignty over both the native peoples and their Spanish colonial competitors. In the chapter that follows, I examine two responses to the 1622 massacre, texts that reflect and effect the redefinition of temperance in defending England’s New World colonialism. The first, the best-known response to the Jamestown massacre, is John Donne’s sermon ‘To the Honorable, the Virginia Company,’ delivered on 13 November 1622 and subsequently published at the Company’s ‘Commandement.’8 The sermon comprises an exegesis of the first chapter of the Book of Acts – with special attention to verses 7–8: ‘It is

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not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.’ In its analysis, Donne’s sermon advises temporal delay, alongside moderation of the passions, especially the desire for revenge, in the colonists’ response to the massacre. In short, Donne’s sermon preaches a middle way between colonial ambition and spiritual humility, a via media perfectly consistent with various definitions of temperance extant in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Despite its compatibility with traditional and emergent discourses of temperance, though, Donne’s sermon never mentions that virtue. In my reading, I will argue that Donne’s sermon offers one possible explanation for this conspicuous absence in its preoccupation with the difference between the sermon qua performance and the sermon qua text. Diffident about the risk of fetishization – in both the religious and the Marxist senses of that word – Donne avoids interpellating temperance by name as if to avoid fixing the virtue intractably as a commodity per se. Like the text he had to be ‘Commande[d]’ to print, and the ‘trees, or druggs, or Dyes’ whose material allure distracts settlers from their missionary charge, the virtue of temperance verges on the ethical bankruptcy of commodification (A4r, 13). Donne’s avoidance of the term ‘temperance’ despite his interest in the various dimensions of the virtue, I argue, attests to temperance’s new complicity in the forms of colonial trade and primitive accumulation that, to Donne’s mind, compete with the Virginia Company’s religious mandate. I then turn to a text less well known, less accomplished, and less subtle than Donne’s, but one more explicitly and disquietingly engaged with temperance as a virtue of English colonial ideology. Christopher Brooke’s ‘Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia’ – published in September of 1622, six months after the event and one month after the Waterhouse declaration – surely ranks among the most shockingly racist texts of the Renaissance.9 Blaming the peaceful affect of ‘Securitie’ for Jamestown’s susceptibility to the massacre, Brooke advocates a doctrine of preemptive aggression, advising settlers to attack their native neighbours out of ‘fear’d danger,’ rather than waiting for provocation (B2v, line 19). Nor is this admonition to seize the occasion Brooke’s only recommendation to defy the mandates of temperance in its various discursive dimensions. As if programmatically, he opposes temperance in every available discursive context: affectively, praising the passions of

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anger and grief; musically, comparing the internecine violence attendant on revenge to an ill-tuned cosmic instrument; climatologically, exploiting the pun on temperance and tempest to associate the virtue with cosmological strife; and even colonially, excising the racialized other from language and narrative, that act of intemperance that compromises Prospero’s success as the heroic agent of romantic reconciliation. And yet despite this categorical rejection of temperance in its myriad dimensions, Brooke insists that his poem proceeds from an affective experience that he describes as a ‘temperate change’ (A3r, line 25). Transported from the paralysis of shock and grief into a state where his humours once again flow freely through the ‘passages more plaine’ of his body (A3r, line 23), Brooke claims that his most preemptive, passionate, and immoderate recommendations qualify as temperate responses to the massacre. Considered together, I will argue, these responses to the 1622 massacre reveal the vast rhetorical distance that temperance travelled during the preceding hundred years. No longer a virtue of moderation accomplished by temporal protraction and attenuation of desire, temperance comes to occupy the space of preemptive passion – a virtue not of postponement but of prolepsis. Donne and the Post-posement of ‘Temporall Gayne’ Compared to Waterhouse’s enthusiasm for vindictive retaliation against the Powhatan confederation, Donne’s sermon to the Virginia Company constitutes a model of moderation. A number of recent critics, in fact, have alighted on the rhetoric of temperance in describing the sermon’s ideological position. Andrew Fitzmaurice, interested in humanistic classicism in the Virginia Company sermons, argues that Donne preserves a special place for Ciceronian temperance in his vision of English New World settlement.10 As a virtue that encouraged moderation of worldly desires and appetites, Fitzmaurice argues, ‘temperance was fundamental to encouraging investment in a project’ such as the Virginia Company settlement, ‘which offered little prospect of return.’11 In Tom Cain’s reading, Donne deliberately, almost casuistically, eschews the rhetoric of legitimate aggression and just war common to early seventeenth-century English colonial discourse, substituting instead a genuine admonition to temperate conduct. Whereas Protestant writers technically ‘tempered’ their aggression with vows to colonize with ‘gentlenesse, love, amity and Religion’ – as even the racial primitivist Sepu´lveda had done, advocating a ‘just, moderate and humane’ conquest of the Indies – such

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rhetoric did not interfere with their fundamental ‘aggressiveness toward the indigenous peoples’ that is only ‘uneasily suppressed,’ according to Cain.12 Cain’s Donne, on the other hand, circumscribes English colonial ambitions with numerous qualifications, conditions, and ethical compunctions, advocating religious conversion over material profit ‘with more sincerity’ than his contemporaries.13 Thomas Festa interprets Donne’s rhetoric more cynically as ‘the contradictory effort of a religious man trying to persuade imperialists that adopting a humane attitude toward a native population is the best way to foster an economic structure of deepening exploitation.’14 The exploitation that most interests Festa is not that of the natives, but rather that of the London poor forced into colonial emigration, rendering Jamestown, in Donne’s metaphorical terms, ‘a Bridewell to force idle persons to work . . . a Spleene, to drayne the ill humors of the body [politic]’ (22). Even though, in Festa’s argument, Donne ‘indirectly voices the theoretical basis for future forms of enslavement in the New World’ with respect to white, English labour, the sermon itself ‘interven[es] on behalf of a humanitarian cause’; serves as a ‘plea for moderation toward the natives’; and ‘displace[s . . .] aggression away from the American Indians and onto the London poor.’15 Festa does not dwell on the image, but the representation of Jamestown as a spleen not only maligns the indigent Londoners as the ‘ill humors’ or waste of the body politic, but also confirms the centrality of temperance to Donne’s vision of the Jamestown colony. For Donne, the restoration and maintenance of humoral balance, or temperance, in the political body of Britain is one of the principal salutary functions of the Virginia settlement. According to traditional definitions, then, Donne’s sermon qualifies as a plea for temperance in the sense of moderation: the reining in of excessively impassioned anger after the 1622 massacre, and the maintenance of homeostasis within the English body politic. Donne’s sermon to the Virginia Company also qualifies as an admonition to temperance along the temporal coordinates that were, as I have argued, mapped out by early modern English culture. Temporality is a central concern of the Scriptural verse Donne chose for his meditations: Acts 1:8, along with the two verses immediately preceding, which the sermon also considers in some detail. Collectively, these three verses narrate an encounter between the resurrected Christ and the Apostles, ‘To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God’ (Acts. 1:3):

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When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. (Acts 1:6–8)16

In his exegesis, Donne emphasizes the temporal dimension of Christ’s refusal, in two distinct senses of the word. He attends to the ‘temporall kingdom’ hoped for in vain by the Apostles, and to the temporal delay that divides their expectation from its satisfaction. The verses deny the Apostles two kinds of temporal satisfaction, both present in the conjunction ‘But’ in verse 8: First it is an exclusiue word; something that the Apostles had required, which might not bee had, not that; And it is an inclusiue word; somthing Christ was pleasd to affoord to the Apostles, which they thought not of; not that, not that which you beat vpon, But, but yet, something else, somethiug [sic] better then that, you shall haue. That which this but, excludes, is that which the Apostles expresse in the Verse immediatly before the Text, a Temporall Kingdome; Wilt thou restore againe the kingdome of Israel? No; not a temporall Kingdome; let not the riches and commodities of this world, be in your contemplation in your aduentures. Or, because they aske more, Wilt thou now restore that? not yet: If I will giue you riches and commodities of this world, yet if I doe it not at first, if I doe it not yet, be not you discouraged . . . (5–6, emphasis original)

The conjunction ‘but,’ in other words, prepares the Apostles for two kinds of disappointment. First, the restoration of a temporal, rather than a spiritual, kingdom: the kingdom of Israel, Donne warns, will perhaps be restored only metaphorically, only typologically, only in the kingdom of heaven. Second, the occurrence of this restoration ‘now’: Israel will indeed be restored, but ‘not yet . . . not at first . . . not yet.’ The former possibility would have been a bitter pill to swallow for the Virginia Company, whose colonial objectives were, even at their most altruistic, focused on profitability. Nor were the Company’s worldly preoccupations mere abstractions to Donne, whose family – from forebears to progeny – cultivated an interest in New World exploration and settlement. In the trunk of his family tree, Donne’s

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great-great uncle Sir Thomas More17 famously anticipated, in Utopia, both the primitivism and the pragmatism of England’s New World ventures; in its higher branches, George Donne, the poet’s son, was appointed by Charles I muster-master-general and marshal of Virginia in the late 1630s, ‘grand sounding offices which the king never bothered to define.’18 Prior to his ordination and confirmation as deacon and priest at St Paul’s, Donne himself sought the post of secretary to the Virginia Company in London (a position that went instead to his friend Richard Martyn).19 Many of Donne’s friends and close acquaintances were investors in the Virginia Company, and although Donne himself lacked the necessary capital to join his fellow ‘adventurers,’ he remained ‘ever an affectionate servant,’ and was admitted as an honorary member of the Company in May of 1622: two months after the massacre, and six months prior to his invited sermon.20 Acceding to both his own sympathies with Company ambitions and the likely prejudices of his audience, Donne uses his sermon to explore the alternative reading: that the Apostles were misguided not in hoping for a ‘temporall kingdome,’ but in their hope that it would be delivered ‘now.’ He explains: [W]hat collaterall respect soeuer drew thee in [to the colonial endeavour], if now thou art in, thy principall respect be the glorie of God; that occasion, whatsouer it was, was vehiculum Spiritus Sancti; that was the Petard, that broke open thy Iron Gate; that was the Chariot, by which he entred into thee, and now hee is fallen vpon thee, if thou doe not Depose; (lay aside all consideration of profit for euer, neuer to looke for returne)[,] No, not Sepose (leaue out the consideration of profit for a time; for that, and Religion may well consist together:) but if thou doe but Post-pose the consideration of Temporall gayne, and studie first the aduancement of the Gospell of Christ Iesus, the Holy Ghost is fallen vpon you, for by that you receiue Power, sayes the Text. (25, emphasis original)

The original motives of the Company’s ‘adventurers’ are irrelevant for Donne, who is unconcerned here with the past. This apparent indifference might be explained by the figures of violence in this passage: the ‘Petard, that broke open thy Iron Gate,’ and the God who ‘is fallen vpon thee’ – ‘to fall upon’ meaning, ‘[t]o move precipitately or with violence; to rush’; ‘to make a hostile descent or attack upon, join battle with; to rush upon, assault’; and ‘to make an attack’ (OED s.v. ‘fall’ 28, s.v. ‘fall on’ 2, s.v. ‘to fall foul’ 3). As readers of ‘Holy Sonnet XIV’ or

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‘The Canonization’ cannot help but recall, such violence and annihilation often serve, in Donne, as preconditions of rebirth and renewal. Like the poems, the sermon represents the past as a moribund state, a burdensome condition of sin and affliction to be cast off and never reassumed. The fire that will ‘break, blow, burn, and make . . . new’ the sinner of the sonnet, the conflagration that will destroy the phoenix of ‘The Canonization,’ the petard that breaks open the iron gate of the Virginia ‘adventurer’: these acts of restorative violence mark an absolute break with, even an annihilation of, the past. Donne accordingly designates the moment of such destruction and resurrection an ‘occasion’: the occasio or kairos of the eschatological event, as opposed to the tempus/kronos, the undifferentiated time of patient delay. This ‘occasion’ having liberated the adventurers from their pasts, though, Donne prepares them to wait patiently for the future by biding their time, tempus. They should not, he explains, resign themselves to ‘depose’ or ‘sepose’ but instead to ‘post-pose’ their expectations of worldly gain. ‘Depose’ – in an obsolete sense first attested in 1526 – means ‘to lay aside (a feeling, quality, character, office, etc.),’ drawing on the spatial meanings of the prefix ‘de-’: ‘down, down from, down to; off, away, aside; down to the bottom’ (OED s.v. ‘depose’ 2, emphasis added; s.v. ‘de-’ 1). ‘Sepose,’ an obsolete verb with only sixteenthand seventeenth-century attestations, similarly means ‘to set aside, dismiss from consideration,’ and ‘to set apart or reserve,’ the spatial sense once again conveyed by the prefix: ‘se-,’ meaning ‘without, apart’ (OED, emphasis added). Donne offers a slightly different parenthetical definition for ‘sepose’: to ‘leaue out the consideration of profit for a time,’ a choice together with which ‘Religion may well consist.’ The mention of time here points toward Donne’s alternative solution to the problem of worldly ambition, but ‘sepose’ remains a primarily spatial, rather than temporal, operation. Seposition would consist in the leaving aside of concerns for profit, their complete (if temporary) removal from consideration, while the Company turned its attention instead to its spiritual mission. Neither form of spatial relocation of profit from the colonial arena – deposing or seposing – is acceptable to Donne. Instead, he proffers ‘Post-pose[ment]’: a temporal rather than a spatial relocation of ‘Temporall gayne.’ An early modern synonym for ‘postpone’ – the earlier and more enduring verbal form – ‘postpose’ means ‘To place (a person or thing) after or later than another in temporal or serial order, esp. as an indication of relative importance; to rank lower than, subordinate’ (OED 1). The concern for profitability

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and monetary gain, in other words, is never spatially removed from the scene of settlement, never ‘set aside’; instead, it remains in view as a long-term, a temporally secondary, priority. Donne thus proposes a temporal solution to the ethical problem of ‘Temporall’ desire. As I have argued in the context of my earlier readings, such temporal delay becomes integral to Renaissance conceptions of temperance, helping the English to explain their late arrival in the New World, and distinguishing their colonial ambitions from those of the Spanish villains of the Black Legend. According to the definitions of temperance that I have surveyed, Donne’s sermon to the Virginia Company uses that virtue, in several of its incarnations, to defend the ethical supportability of English colonialism: by pleading for moderation of the settlers’ passions for revenge on the Powhatan confederacy; by promoting the colony as a ‘Spleene’ that will redress a humoral imbalance in the body politic; by suggesting that colonial ambitions for profit and temporal power need only to be delayed, not denied. And yet Donne never cites ‘temperance’ explicitly in his admonitions to the Virginia Company. My aim, of course, is not to ‘adventure’ an argument about temperance in Donne’s sermon in isolation, or an argument by omission. Instead, this chapter compares Donne’s admonitions to moderation with the extremism of Brooke’s poem, which invokes temperance explicitly as the foundation of its virulence and violence. Before I move on to consider Brooke’s very different rhetoric, though, I want to mine Donne’s sermon for the information it provides, however obliquely, about the political misgivings of its author and possibly its audience. What hesitations are revealed about the Virginia Company and the Jamestown settlement? How might these reservations explain the sermon’s curious reluctance explicitly to identify the forms of moderation Donne advocates with the virtue of temperance? Notwithstanding its insistence that the desire for ‘Temporall gayne’ need be only ‘Post-pose[d],’ Donne’s sermon to the Virginia Company repeatedly expresses a concern about the dangers of commodification – a qualm, I want to suggest, that might underlie the sermon’s unwillingness to advocate ‘temperance’ per se. Temperance’s late-Renaissance expansion into the realm of mercantile time-management, and the commodification of time itself, makes it at least contiguous, if not identical, with forms of worldly ambition that provoke telling equivocations in the sermon. Donne voices concerns about commodification at the outset of his published text, in his prefatory letter ‘To the Honovrable Companie of the Virginian Plantation’:

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For the Preaching of this Sermon, I was but vnder your Inuitation; my Time was mine owne, and my Meditations mine owne: and I had beene excusable towards you, if I had turned that Time, and those Meditations, to GODS Seruice, in any other place. But for the Printing of this Sermon, I am not onely vnder your Inuitation, but vnder your Commandement; for, after it was preached, it was not mine, but yours: And therefore, if I gaue it at first, I doe but restore it now. The first, was an act of Loue; this, of Iustice. (A3r–A4r, emphasis original)

This passage distinguishes the orally delivered sermon from its printed successor. When Donne preached before the Company, his ‘Time’ and ‘Meditations’ remained his own; giving them over to the audience ‘was an act of Loue,’ the gifts freely given. Thus bestowed, though, these entities are alienated from their origin, Donne explains: ‘not mine, but yours.’ Thus deprived of ownership over his time and his thoughts, Donne announces his obedient capitulation to the ‘Commandement’ to publish the text of the sermon, which is no longer his own; he has no choice but to ‘restore’ the sermon to its already rightful owners. The claim that the sermon, when delivered, relinquishes its moral and intellectual content to its auditors seems uncontentious. Written explicitly for ‘the purpose of giving religious instruction or exhortation’ (OED 2), sermons expect, even require, audiences to assume moral and ethical possession of their precepts. In his 1598 Italian-English dictionary, John Florio defines the Italian cognate ‘sermone’ both as a religious oration and more generally as conversational discourse – ‘the speech[,] talke, or communication, or language of mankinde’21– suggesting that the oration needs not only to be spoken, but also assimilated by its auditors, to ensure the felicity of the homiletic performance. According to Jay Stubblefield, this dialectical structure is integral to the rhetorical strategy of Donne’s sermons, which he interprets as deliberately ambiguous. Donne’s sermon, Stubblefield argues, uses biblical and historical examples Thomistically, inviting his audience to consider whether the English settlers or the New World natives deserve comparison to the vengeful Samaritans from the Book of Acts, asking listeners to participate actively in their own moral instruction.22 Importantly, Donne purports to give over to his audience not only the sermon and the ‘Meditations’ it comprises, but also his ‘Time.’ What exactly does it mean for this speaker/writer to relinquish his own time? What time, specifically, does Donne sacrifice in the process of oration, and to what effect? The temporal interval that Donne

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spent preparing and delivering the sermon is, of course, irrecuperable; he can no longer choose to ‘turne[] that Time . . . to GODS Seruice, in any other place,’ as he might have opted to do prior to 13 November 1622. And yet irretrievability does not distinguish that temporal interval from any other – the audience, for example, cannot retrieve the time it spent auditing the sermon – which would render this an improbably empty assertion. Nor does Donne seem to be referring to his own necessary capitulation to the divine calendar (a point he makes later, in the sermon proper: ‘Non est vestrum nosse tempora, It belongs not to vs to know Gods times,’ 16). Rather, I propose, Donne describes his alienation from his own time just as Marx describes the alienated labour of the subject of industrial capitalism: Donne’s time, like the worker’s labour, becomes the property of someone else (initially the Virginia Company, who commissioned the sermon, or the factory owner, who orders the worker’s time; later the reader of the printed text, or the purchaser of the manufactured commodity). The performance of the sermon constitutes the moment of alienation for Donne; thus alienated, he has no choice but to accede to the ‘Commandement’ to print, which commodifies his time in the text. While the time of the sermon’s composition and performance was evanescent – as fleeting as any other temporal interval – the printed text records that interval in material form, literalizing the metaphorical gift Donne gave when he delivered the sermon. The printed sermon for Donne, I am suggesting, is analogous to the commodity for Marx: the objective congealment of the subjective labour that went into its production, or the transformation of time into space.23 Donne underscores this point about commodification in the conclusion to the passage, which identifies the written sermon with ‘Iustice,’ a virtue evocative not of the gift economy of ‘Loue’ but of the exacting calculations of mercantile exchange. Justice, with her perfectly balanced scales, represents an ethical economy of precise debt and repayment. As Spenser’s Arthegall explains, Justice derives from the precise numerical reckoning that ordered God’s creation of the universe;24 unlike love, justice is both appropriate to and appropriable by markets of commodity exchange. Donne’s unease with commodification evolves as the sermon develops the distinction between the oratorical performance of an act and the material text. With increasing conviction, Donne voices both his preference for the performance over the commodity, and his reservations about the reification of the former into the latter. The first words

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of the sermon proper, following the dedicatory epistle and the Scriptural verse, carefully elaborate this distinction: There are reckoned in this Booke, Two and Twentie Sermons of the Apostles, and yet the Book is not called the Preaching, but the Practice, not the Words, but the Acts of the Apostles: and the Acts of the Apostles were to conuey that name of Christ Iesus, and to propagate his Gospell ouer all the world: Beloued, you are Actors vpon the same Stage too: the vttermost part of the Earth are your Scene: Act ouer the Acts of the Apostles . . . (1–2)

Anticipating Of Grammatology, Donne cleaves strongly to the distinction between action – a category that includes oratorical performance, in the form of ‘propagat[ion]’ of the ‘Gospell’ – and written speech. The analogy to the commercial theatre emphasizes Donne’s classification of ‘Sermons’ as performances rather than written texts. He suggests that the missionary work of the Virginia Company should follow suit, comprising a series of iterative performances (and here Donne is more Derridean): ‘Act[ing] ouer the Acts of the Apostles.’ Imagining the New World as an expansive Marlovian stage, set for the theatrical performance of evangelism, Donne rejects the treatment of ‘Sermons’ as ‘Words.’ Following hard on the heels of the prefatory letter, which distinguishes the delivery of the sermon under ‘Invitation’ from its reluctant publication under ‘Commandement,’ this passage reiterates Donne’s misgivings about committing his sermon to print and his ‘Time’ to commodified form. Only later does the text explain why textual commodification occasions such anxiety. After inveighing against those, including the Pope, who seek temporal rather than spiritual kingdoms, Donne directs his critique pointedly at his audience: O, if you could once bring a Catechisme to bee as good ware amongst them as a Bugle [i.e., a bead: OED n.3], as a knife, as a hatchet: O, if you would bee as ready to hearken at the returne of a ship, how many Indians were conuerted to Christ Iesus, as what trees, or druggs, or Dyes that Ship had brought, then you were in your right way, and not till then . . . (13)

The Virginia Company has been too ‘ready to hearken at’ the news of material, commodity-based benefits amassed by New World settlers. Notice the auditory metaphor: Donne asks his audience to imagine themselves as sanguine English investors, running up to the dock to

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meet a ship returning from a Virginia voyage, shouting eagerly to the sailors, demanding news of their success. The answer to the question, too seldom asked for Donne’s tastes, ‘how many Indians were conuerted to Christ Iesus?’ is one that would require these investors to ‘hearken’ carefully; no material proof of such accomplishments would be forthcoming. Like Donne’s initial sermonic performance, these conversions happened on an occasion that has passed irretrievably by. Trees, drugs, and dyes, on the other hand, demand no such auditory care; the sailors Donne has conjured are presumably about to unload these wares from their ship, enriching the eager investors. Donne accuses his audience of misdirected ‘hearken[ing]’; they have listened eagerly to reckonings of New World commodities – whose material form belies the need for listening – while attending poorly to the stories that can be conveyed only qua stories: the accounts of conversions performed. Like their dockside counterparts, the adventurers in Virginia are misdirected. Tempting the natives with such European curiosities ‘as a Bugle, as a knife, as a hatchet,’ these delinquent missionaries neglect the verbal performance of the ‘Catechisme’: not only an elementary book or treatise ‘for instruction in the principles of the Christian religion, in the form of question and answer’ (OED 2), but the actual performance of instruction via structured interrogation, or question and answer (OED 1, 3, 4).25 To both settlers and investors, Donne advocates action over acquisition, performance over text, and oratory over print. Throughout the sermon, he asks his auditors to attend to the evanescent moment, and to eschew the fantasy of possessing ‘Time’ in commodified form. This distaste for commodification creates a conflict of interest for Donne as Virginia Company shill. When he hazards a rationalization of Jamestown’s most acquisitive endeavours, the rhetoric of the sermon strains to accommodate the ideological inconsistency: [I]f the Land be peopled, and cultiuated by the people, and that Land produce in abundance such things, for want whereof, their neighbours, or others (being not enemyes) perish; the Law of Nations may iustifie some force, in seeking, by permutation of other Commodities which they neede, to come to some of theirs. Many cases may be put, when not onely Commerce, and Trade, but Plantations in Lands, not formerly our owne, may be lawfull. And for that, Accepistis potestatem, you haue your Commission, your Patents, your Charters, your Seales from Him, vpon whose Acts any priuate Subiect, in Ciuill matters, may safely relye. (27)

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The first sentence allows for ‘some force’ in appropriating natural resources or commodities ‘produce[d] in abundance’ for international ‘neighbours, or others,’ so long as they are not ‘enemyes’ of the natives, and so long as these ‘neighbours, or others’ risk ‘perish[ing]’ in the absence of such appropriation. These were not conditions that Donne’s auditors could have claimed to satisfy. A vast archive of Renaissance pamphlets and tracts belies such necessity; seventeenthcentury manuals of medicine, international trade, and domestic economy railed against the libertinism, decadence, and degeneracy associated with the consumption of such imported luxury goods as coffee, chocolate, and tobacco. The succeeding sentence in the passage, lowering the bar, equivocates so fully that none in his audience could possibly fail Donne’s test. His toothless claim: many cases (which ones? how many?) may be put (in the obsolete sense of ‘argue, constitute a case for,’ OED 2b – but by whom? to whom? a compelling case?) according to which plantations in lands ‘formerly not our own’ (when were they not? are they now? how did we acquire them?) may be lawful (under what conditions? whose laws?). The sentence falls apart under its own tergiversations. Finally, as if in frustration, Donne punts: the legality of plantation can be verified by commission, patents, charters, and seals – a perfunctory catalogue, perhaps mocking the banality of royal bureaucracy – issued by the king, a ‘safely’ reliable source of civil authority, Donne concedes. In different ways, each of these three salvos fails to establish legitimate theological or political grounds for commodity acquisition. Unwilling to let the matter rest with this abdication, Donne finds instead something like a back door into the locked room of defensible ‘Temporall gayne.’ The post-posement of worldly desire, advocated earlier in the sermon, proves not only theologically sound, but argumentatively efficacious, removing the ethical taint associated with commodities and commodification: But then Accipietis potestatem, You shall receiue power, sayes the Text; you shall, when the Holy Ghost is come vpon you; that is, when the instinct, the influence, the motions of the Holy Ghost enables your Conscience to say, that your principall end is not Gaine, nor Glory, but to gaine Soules to the glory of GOD; this seales the Great Seale, this iustifies Iustice it selfe, this authorises Authoritie, and giues power to Strength it selfe. Let the Conscience be vpright, and then Seales, and Patents, and Commissions, are Wings; they assist him to flye the fastest. Let the Conscience be lame,

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and distorted, and hee that goes vpon Seales, and Patents, and Commissions, goes vpon weake and feeble Crutches. (27–8)

The verb tense changes from the past (Accepistis) to the future (Accipietis), and it seems at first as if the form of ‘power’ received has changed as well. This second kind of power is contingent on the presence of the Holy Spirit, and on the upright conscience of the possessor, who must subordinate desire for ‘Gaine’ and ‘Glory’ to missionary zeal. The auditor thus might expect to hear that this power is not the same political sort that ‘may iustifie some force, in seeking . . . Commodities,’ but rather one whose rewards are in the afterlife: the power of moral righteousness and Christian virtue. Instead, though, the passage turns toward the worldly perquisites of such virtue – namely, the legitimation of those commodities that Donne seemed to disdain only moments before. In fact, Donne supplies an image to gloss his earlier condescension: those ‘Seales, and Patents, and Commissions’ were ‘feeble Crutches,’ inadequate prostheses that fail to assist the lame. The ‘vpright’ conscience, however, transforms these surrogates into the genuine article, deserving of their worldly acclaim: ‘this seales the Great Seale, this iustifies Iustice it selfe, this authorises Authoritie, and giues power to Strength it selfe.’ The tautologies recall the paradox of Spenser’s Shamefastnesse or Milton’s Sin and Death:26 perfect realizations of imperfect, because worldly, entities. The tokens, fetishes, and commodities that amounted to feeble prostheses are thus transformed, by the conscience of the Virginia missionary, into Platonic ideals. Their transcendent worth, paradoxically, inheres in their materiality. Like the Calvinist whose material prosperity signifies Election, Donne allows for the righteousness of the commodity, so long as the conscience of the possessor is purified by missionary desire. The sermon is perhaps disingenuous here, still evading the question of how the sermonic performance, and subsequently the printed text, might influence the ‘conscience’ of the ‘adventurers.’ However fully he circumscribes his approval of the worldly ends sought by the Company, Donne’s delivery of the sermon to the Company amounts to condoning its materialistic mandate. Even the performance, then, risks transformation into a ‘Seale[],’ a ‘Patent[],’ a ‘Commission[]’: a commodity that verifies the legitimacy of the Jamestown settlement. Donne’s epistolary claim that only the printed text, and not the sermonic performance, risks commodification unravels under the pressure of colonial ambition. In the wind tunnel of New World ambition and primitive accumulation, anything can become a commodified wing.

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Wings, as it turns out, are exactly to the point. Thus transformed by the zealous missionary conscience into legitimate guarantors of ethical colonialism, these ‘Seales, and Patents, and Commissions, are Wings; they assist [the Virginia Company investor] to flye the fastest.’ In this religious context, the auditors’ first referent for these wings would be the conventional depiction of angels in early Christian art: these seals and patents, validated by the evangelical conscience, grant the colonists angels’ wings, signifying service to God.27 But the adverb suggests a different connotation: these wings will help the bearer not to fly straight, or upright, or true, but fastest. Donne thus predicts the rapid acquisition of precisely those rewards whose pursuit ought to be ‘Post-pose[d]’ according to the sermon’s earlier admonitions: wealth, power, and prosperity. In other words, the post-posement of the desire for temporal gain – by prioritizing evangelism, which strengthens the conscience, which transforms seals/patents/commissions into ‘wings,’ which hastens flight – entails, in the end, no post-posement at all. The ‘fastest’ attainment of material wealth will accrue to these evangelists, rather than to those ethical cripples who pursue material gain single-mindedly from the beginning. This kind of temporal sacrifice, Donne argues, will prove in the final analysis to be no sacrifice at all. Donne’s sermon thus suggests a via media between evangelical and mercantile motives for English colonialism by insisting that Virginia Company adventurers need not choose between the two. I join Andrew Fitzmaurice, then, in reading Donne’s sermon to the Virginia Company as relentlessly deconstructive, although we identify different binary distinctions at the heart of Donne’s hortatory rhetoric. Fitzmaurice reads Donne’s sermon as a programmatic challenge to the distinction between settlers who adventure the transatlantic journey to settle in Jamestown, on the one hand, and on the other, apologists in England, like Donne himself, who venture rhetorical and financial support for these colonial endeavours. Donne explains, ‘[N]ow I am an Aduenturer, if not to VIRGINIA, yet for VIRGINIA: for, euery man that Prints, Aduentures’ (A3r); Fitzmaurice situates this remark within the humanistic recuperation of classical rhetoric as integral to the civilizing process: ‘the Ciceronian vision of the crucial role played by oratory in the process of establishing the commonwealth.’28 And yet without slighting Fitzmaurice’s important argument about its indebtedness to classical rhetoric, I submit that Donne’s sermon is more invested in the opposition between oratorical performance and printed text than in the distinction between competing versions of the adventurer. The

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prefatory letter hesitates not in comparing the danger of oratory to that of transatlantic voyage, but in comparing oratory to text, performance to bibliographic commodity. Donne’s reluctance to submit himself to the printed word, I suggest, is absolutely specific to the colonial context of his sermonic performance. Unlike typical early modern authors – who, as Wendy Wall has so powerfully argued, struggled against the gendered and sexualized affiliations of being ‘A Man in Print’29 – Donne evinces discomfort with the objective form of the printed text itself. As a commodity that represents the materialization and spatialization of his ‘Time,’ the printed text of his delivered sermon belies the temporal recommendations therein. Despite his admonitions to ‘Post-pose’ material desires, Donne’s apparent capitulation to Virginia Company priorities, and his insistence that Company adventurers need not abandon their hopes to achieve ‘Temporall gayne’ the ‘fastest,’ undermines this initial behest. Attempting to mediate between evangelical and material apologiae for the Jamestown settlement, Donne reinstates the dynamics of commodity-seeking and commodification against which his sermon, and his stated reluctance to print, initially tend. This ambivalence, I propose, constitutes a plausible explanation for Donne’s eschewal of temperance as an explicit ideal. Having developed over the preceding century into an ideal of time-management, mercantile efficiency, and the commodification of time itself, temperance – like the printed text of the Virginia Sermon – would undermine the ideals of spiritual priority and material post-posement that the sermon aims to impart. At the same time, these very connotations, which seem to explain the excision of temperance from the text, resonate strongly with the sermon’s reluctant justification of material acquisition in the colony of Virginia. Omitted from the text of Donne’s Virginia Company sermon, temperance nevertheless remains an ineluctable presence: both a conspicuous, unmentionable taboo, and an implicit, insistent acquiescence. Christopher Brooke’s ‘Temperate Change’ Christopher Brooke served as an early investor in, legal counsellor to, and Parliamentary liaison for the Virginia Company – capacities in which he perpetuated his lifelong friendship with the Company’s ‘affectionate servant’ John Donne.30 A prominent London lawyer, Brooke studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, where he and Donne shared chambers, perhaps united by their shared poetic avocation. Although no longer widely read, Brooke achieved modest literary renown

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during his lifetime, publishing five works, most famously the long poem The Ghost of Richard the Third (1614).31 In the mid-1590s, Donne addressed a verse epistle and a poem entitled ‘The Storm’ to Brooke, and in 1601, Brooke served as a witness to Donne’s secret marriage to Anne More, the young niece of Donne’s employer Thomas Egerton.32 Around 1617, Brooke moved to a house across the street from Donne in Drury Lane, London, where he lived until his death in 1628. His last will and testament bequeathed a number of paintings to ‘my deere ancient and worthie freind D[o]c[t]or Dunn the Deane Pawles.’33 Biographical convergences notwithstanding, Brooke’s response to the 1622 Powhatan attack on the Jamestown settlement could not be more different from Donne’s sermonic plea for moderation. Among the 347 English victims were four of Brooke’s fellow-members of the Council on Virginia, and two close personal friends: Captains Nathaniel Powell and George Thorpe, both eulogized at length in Brooke’s poem. Thus carrying the torch of personal affront, Brooke composed A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia. With particular mention of those men of note that suffered in that disaster, which was printed in England in September of 1622. It was thus the second written account of the attack to reach the English public, following close upon Waterhouse’s official Company statement. For the dubious honour of most racist text of the Renaissance, Brooke’s poem would be a strong contender. The shocking vitriol of his response manifests itself in passages like this one, which recommends ‘extirpation of that Indian crew’ that attacked the colonial settlement: For, but consider what those Creatures are, (I cannot call them men) no Character Of God in them: Soules drown’d in flesh and blood; Rooted in Euill, and oppos’d in Good; Errors of Nature, of inhumane Birth, The very dregs, garbage, and spawne of Earth; Who ne’re (I think) were mention’d with those creatures Adam gaue names to in their seuerall natures: But such as comming of a later Brood, (Not sau’d in th’Arke) but since the generall Flood Sprung vp like vermine of an earthy slime, And so haue held b[y]’intrusion to this time: If these (I say) be but consider’d well,

Donne, Brooke, and Temperate Revenge (Father’d by Sathan, and the sonnes of hell,[)] What feare or pittie were it, or what sin, (The rather since with vs they thus begin) To quite their Slaughter, leauing not a Creature That may restore such shame of Men, and Nature?

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(C1v lines 9–26)

Brooke expels the natives from various categories of privilege: humanity, animality, Godliness, Nature, and biblical history. Perhaps most notable as a measure of his difference from Donne, though, is Brooke’s repeated exclusion of the natives from language itself. They possess ‘no Character / Of God,’ meaning at once no godly ‘feature or trait’ (OED 8a), and no imprinted alphabetic letter attesting to God’s authorship (OED 3a). Brooke thus implies that white western personhood results when a divine hand spells out one’s humanity on the text of the body, according to an heavenly orthography. Not for Brooke the ambivalence about printed and commodified texts that haunts Donne’s sermon: he considers printing a mark of cultural, spiritual, and ethical election. Brooke subsequently exiles the natives from spoken language as well, insisting that they ‘ne’re (I think) were mention’d with those creatures / Adam gaue names to in their seuerall natures.’ The poet refers here to the power of nomination granted to Adam by God in Genesis 2:19, often understood by seventeenth-century theologians as ‘the scriptural basis for an understanding of language in a prelapsarian state’: ‘a nomenclature of essences, in which word would have reflected thing with perfect accuracy.’34 Adam thus exercises the godly power of optative speech: the divine performative utterance, fiat lux, corresponds to Adam’s capacity to identify and fix the Edenic animals’ natures in their perfectly designative names. To say, as Brooke does, that the Powhatan were not named by Adam in Eden is most literally to say that they are not animals – at least, not among those animals who had a place in the prelapsarian world. By choosing to specify that they were not among those beasts who received names from Adam, though, Brooke emphasizes a linguistic failure: the Powhatan never participated in prelapsarian nomenclature, in which name corresponded perfectly to essence. For Brooke, there is not and never was a term that can designate the Powhatan precisely. While postlapsarian Europeans (and lions, and lambs, and so on) lack the Adamic privilege of speaking prelapsarian language, the Powhatan were never even described in prelapsarian

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language. Their natures, that is to say, partake only of fallenness: they were unknown, undescribed, and unspoken in the prelapsarian world. The Europeans of Brooke’s cosmos are contiguous with, if degraded from, the linguistically perfect speaking subject; the Powhatan, on the contrary, are discontiguous even with the objects of Edenic language. Thus arrogating linguistic privilege to European subjects, Brooke warns his English readers: ‘Let this Example (in the Text of blood) / Be printed in your hearts, and vnderstood / How deare ’twas bought’ (B2v line 31–B2r line 1). In this plea, the deaths of the Virginia settlers already constitute a text of history written in blood, and the heart of the reader provides a site for its recopying and imprinting. The reader is thus entrusted with the slaughtered colonists’ textual legacy, and assumes responsibility for transmitting their tragic narrative. A few lines later, the poem reuses this image in addressing the late Captain Powell: ‘thy Blood / In good mens hearts thy Name shall register, / And be a Rub[r]ick in Times Calender’ (B3v lines 28–9). Just as before, an English death inscribes itself both corporeally (‘[i]n good mens hearts’) and historically (‘in Times Calender’). This latter image, though, contributes an additional dimension to the inscription in history: Powell’s blood is a rubric or red-letter entry, establishing a comparison between the historical record and the church liturgy, where rubrics, printed in red ink, indicate the proper conduct of the divine service. In this context, Captain Powell’s death serves as a religious admonition, instructing readers about proper devotion. By comparing his own poem – itself an attempt to inscribe Jamestown settlers in ‘Times Calender’ – with such liturgical rubrics, Brooke claims religious sanction for his admonitions to revenge (‘quite their Slaughter, leauing not a Creature’). He thinks of revenge not as a defensible exception to Christian ethics, but a rightful application thereof. Invoking canonical liturgy, Brooke deploys these images of textuality and textualization as legitimizing gestures for his vengeful appeals. Brooke’s references to the moral and ethical grounds of his admonitions are not always metaphorical. He begins the poem in a more explicit vein, claiming for his poem an ethical impunity derived from the virtue of temperance. Brooke’s version of this virtue, however, authorizes recommendations that would be unimaginable prior to temperance’s semantic extension into the discourse of colonialism. Brooke’s poem is thus both an experiment in and a symptom of temperance’s radical ductility in the context of English political rationalization.

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The poem begins in a vein similar to that of Donne’s sermon: mapping out a discursive range recognizably related to temperance, without ever naming the virtue itself. Brooke opens with a description of the Christian church as a ‘twofold Fount of flowing Piety,’ sustained by joy and grief. ‘Christian hearts,’ Brooke explains, balance these two affects; they ‘keep true proportion, / And let their gladnesse, with compassion, / Hold equal poise’ (A3v lines 2, 7–9). According to traditional definitions of temperance, these ‘Christian hearts’ would be ideal practitioners of the virtue: avoiding affective excess, balancing the passions. The language of temperance becomes more explicit a few lines later, when Brooke describes an ordinary display of grief: ‘teares doe only shew / Affection in the meane; and sighes o’reblow / Those gentle showres; and then the Sun-like Eye / Quickly renewes the clearnesse of their Skie’ (A3r lines 1–4, emphasis added). ‘In the mean’ is an obsolete expression attested only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a short-lived abbreviation of ‘in the meantime’ (OED s.v. ‘mean n.3’ 11). Renaissance readers might also have heard in this line the contemporaneous expression ‘in a mean,’ which invokes the figure of the Aristotelian via media to signify ‘with moderation.’35 As I have argued, temperance’s semantic expansion in the decades leading up to Brooke’s poem adds a variety of temporal senses to the virtue’s traditional denotations. When Brooke claims that the tears of the average Christian mourner are ‘in the meane,’ he draws on two different idioms to invoke temperance as both affective moderation and temporal control. Finally, Brooke concludes by alluding to temperance in yet another discursive dimension, comparing the tears of the mourner to a brief rainstorm. In this case, temperance is a climatological term, as in The Tempest, where Prospero’s island is characterized by a ‘subtle, tender and delicate temperance.’ As the antithesis of the raging tempest, temperance in this sense again combines affective and temporal components: temporary and profound grief, Brooke implies, no more compromises the humoral temperament than a summer squall threatens the climate of a temperate region. Up until this point, Brooke seems to be taking a page from Donne’s book: invoking the discourse of temperance in affective, temporal, and climatological registers without ever naming the virtue itself. Temperance, though, soon makes its explicit entrance into the poem, announcing the advent of Brooke’s response to the massacre in surprising and unfamiliar terms. Even before naming temperance per se, Brooke disdains moderate grief as inadequate to his particular

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circumstances. Brooke’s narrator seems to feel constrained by extant discourses of grief; he describes himself as a faithful scribe ‘[w]ho from [his] heart . . . cop[ies] with [his] pen / This Abstract (from the Volume of [his] Cares)’ (A3v lines 14–15). Such discursive fidelity obstructs the narrator, who laments his want of ‘course’ – the ‘[f]aculty or opportunity of running, moving, flowing, passing current’ (OED 9) – which is integral to temperance in its various senses: humoral balance in the body, climatological moderation in the weather, and rhythmic reliability in the progression of time. In place of these forms of temperance, Brooke finds himself afflicted by what Renaissance physicians might call catalepsy, and modern ones shock. He is petrified – physiologically, affectively, and intellectually: But in a case extreame, where horror stops The milder course of those affections drops, That with amazement, sets the hayre on end; Contracts the Brow in wrinckles, makes it bend Downe to the Center; doth the Blood displace, Dim Natures Planets, and deformes the face; This is a griefe not easely ouerblowne, And by such Causes, like Effects, are knowne. And when I heard of that late Massacre, ... . . . my Passion rent my heart with sorrow, for that dyre euent; Amazement strooke me, horror ceaz’d my powres, Tearelesse as Tonguelesse; and for certaine howres I seem’d a breathing Statue: but when terror Was once digested, and my mazy error Was rectify’d by passages more plaine, Sense recollected, I, my selfe againe, My knowledge wrought in me a temperate change, ‘In Wisdoms eye ther’s nothing should seeme strange.

(A3r lines 5–26)

The narrator describes his response twice as ‘horror’ and twice as ‘amazement’: the former a pathological shuddering or shivering (OED 2a), the latter a mental paralysis or stupefaction (OED 1). Amazement seems to trump horror, for whatever the extent of the narrator’s involuntary shuddering, he remains frozen like ‘a breathing Statue,’ unable to speak or to cry. The Physicians Practice, a text translated into English

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in 1632 (ten years after Brooke’s poem), explains the symptoms that result from this condition, in which the body is deprived of ‘sence and voluntary motion.’ The individual thus afflicted experiences paralysis that exceeds the corporeal body; the ‘spirits are affected, for they are as it were frozen.’ Referring simultaneously to immaterial sentience and bodily humours (OED 11a, 16a), these ‘spirits,’ the tract explains, might ‘rest quietly in that part of the body, wherein they were when the fit begun to seize vpon the patient,’ a state called ‘catalepsis, or congealment.’ Alternatively, in the state of apoplexy, the spirits are ‘by stopping so hindered, that they cannot disperse themselues into the other parts of the body.’36 Brooke’s speaker seems to participate in both catalepsis and apoplexy; his petrifaction resembles the tract’s ‘congealment,’ while the seizure of the blood and the stoppage in ‘passages . . . plaine’ suggest the inability of the humours to ‘disperse themselues into the other parts of the body.’ In external comportment, humoral flow, affective expression, and intellectual formulation, Brooke’s narrator is absolutely arrested, prevented from the ‘course’ of motion requisite for all of the forms of temperance discussed above. The poem’s shift from metaphors of the body qua text to that of the body qua statue underscores this change; the forward motion of diegetic narrative gives way to the temporal present-ness of a statue, or other visually apprehended work of art. When this paralysis wears off, sound medical reasoning might explain the speaker’s invocation of temperance. ‘[P]assages more plaine’ reopen in his body, and the ‘spirits’ earlier prevented from ‘dispers[ing] themselues into the other parts of the body’ begin to flow easily, restoring humoral balance. The intervention of ‘knowledge,’ which reasserts control over the ‘[p]assion’ that has ‘rent’ the speaker’s heart, recalls the classical conception of temperance as reason’s restraint of the passions – allegorized in Plato’s figure of the charioteer bridling the furious steed, and later in the humanist figure of horsemanship and mane`ge.37 The narrator specifies the nature of this ‘knowledge’ by transcribing his first thought upon regaining possession of his faculties: “In Wisdoms eye ther’s nothing should seeme strange.

Although the expression does not appear to be proverbial – nothing similar is attested in Tilley or Taylor and Whiting38 – the typography sets the line apart as a sententia or apothegm: a pithy maxim that,

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whether or not expressed proverbially, articulates a purported truth. As Margreta de Grazia explains, not until the eighteenth century did quotation marks designate the proprietary remarks of an individual speaker: before that time, the quotation mark ‘was interchangeable with the pointing finger or indices: it pointed to or indicated an authoritative saying like a proverb, commonplace, or statement of consensual truth . . . [R]ather than cordoning off a passage as property of another, quotation marks flagged the passage as property belonging to all – “common places” to be freely appropriated.’39 Quotation marks serve this function, for example, when they mark each successive cliche´ in Corambis/Polonius’s speech to Laertes in Q1 of Hamlet. In Q1 of The Duchess of Malfi (1623), similarly, sententiae are distinguished either by opening quotation marks or by italics.40 In the case of Brooke’s poem, the pairing of two apparently redundant typographical techniques marks the narrator’s thought as doubly sententious. Following on the speaker’s purported muteness, this typography thus suggests the narrator’s momentary possession by the zeitgeist, which seems to reanimate the speaker’s astonished carcass. Typographically, the text thus designates and effects the reintegration of Brooke’s speaker into social discourse. At the same time, and to ironic if not paradoxical effect, the quotation marks designate the speaker as author, owner, and agent: the cultural spokesman possessed of the authority and the gravitas to claim for his own remarks a broad sententiousness, in excess of their particular context. Resurrecting the narrator as a sort of cultural spokesman and author, the quoted, italicized sentence thus reveals and reinstantiates his privileged relationship to textuality. By rescuing the speaker in his moment of shock and distress, the sententia performs a cultural validation (‘this is the sort of man for whom we speak’; ‘this is a man worth saving’); at the same time, the maxim subordinates itself to Brooke’s speaker, identifying him as its author and owner. He is simultaneously humbled and exalted. In de Grazia’s paradigm, the Brookeian narrator uses quotation marks to designate his comments as communal, ‘common places’; at the same time, however, the urgency and aggression of his ideology presages the culture of commodification and private ownership that the quotation mark will come to designate, and that Donne, as we have seen, views with ambivalence. The speaker’s ‘temperate change’ marks – concomitantly and paradoxically – his authorial prerogative and his subjection to his culture. As its physiological meaning would predict, temperance occasions the

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narrator’s reanimation, from petrifaction back into the ‘course’ of linguistic fluency and social sentience. In asserting the restoration of temperance in these lines, the narrator simultaneously confirms the virtue’s physiological definition and extends it into the new discursive territory of textuality, where temperance depends on the diegesis of narrative. As the poem proceeds, the narrator continues to emphasize textuality in his response to the massacre. Increasingly, though, the textual dimension of his ‘temperate change’ entails the attenuation of temperance’s more familiar characteristics. The speaker compares himself to the biblical Esdras, charged by God to transcribe divine law. In the book rendered as 2 Esdras in the King James Version, Esdras vows to ‘write all that hath been done in the world since the beginning, which were written in [God’s] law, that men may find [His] path, and that they which will live in the latter days may live.’41 It would be difficult to find a narrative template more ambitious than this one, but what seems to fascinate and compel Brooke’s speaker is not Esdras’s glory but his impunity as a providential mouthpiece. According to Brooke’s speaker, Esdras, demoralized by the Babylonian captivity, ‘was bold . . . / . . . / T’expostulate with GOD . . . / . . . / Assaying with the waxen wings of sense / To flye vp to the Deitie’ (A3r line 31–A4v line 4). The waxen wings recall Icarus, who falls to his death after flying too close to the sun; the narrator thus seems to acknowledge the frailty of his ‘[s]ense recollected,’ and perhaps the charges of affective and political excess that his vengeful rhetoric could provoke. As the narrator pursues his identification with Esdras, he cultivates this oblique recognition of his potential intemperance, in the sense of affective excess: ‘Out of my griefe (which yet makes reason lame, / And quite disioynts my Intellectuall frame) / I moue this speach’ (A4v lines 7–9). His grief, the speaker acknowledges, compromises his reason, which controls the passions. To similar effect, the disjointing of a ‘frame’ – a word Spenser too applies to the poetic text and the human body as structures of temperance42 – implies corporeal dislocation, thereby registering the ongoing disruption of the body whose humoral balance, or temperance, has been disturbed. As Brooke’s narrator turns to the massacre itself, his ‘temperate change’ proves to lead further and further away from temperance in its traditional guise. The speaker blames God for allowing evil – ‘Rapes, Incest, Murder, / And all the Spawne of sinne’ – to ‘Prosper, and not be strangled in [its] Birth’ (A4r lines 7–9). As we have seen, he also spews invective at the natives themselves. But he saves his most

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impassioned outcries for the English settlers and their successors in Virginia, decrying the very attitudes and behaviours that would traditionally qualify as temperate. Admonishing vigilance, Brooke’s speaker scolds: Bend not your selues to Mammon, let not ease Rock yee in sensuall slumbers, so to ceaze Your vnderstanding parts; but let fear’d danger Be present Centinell to absent anger; Which may ensue more fearefull if yee bee Stupid, and senselesse in securitie. Securitie; the Calme, before a Storme, That hugs a fearefull Ruine in her Arme: Security; boarding to States most harmes, In softned spirits, and disuse of Armes: Security; the Heauen that holds a Hell, The bane of all that in this slaughter fell; For euer be thou ban’d and banish’t quite From Wisdomes Confines, and Preuentions light.

(B2v lines17–30)

The ‘securitie’ disparaged in this passage shares characteristics with the narrator’s stricken condition earlier in the poem. The colonist in the thrall of ‘ease’ proves ‘[s]tupid, and senselesse’; his/her ‘sensuall slumber[]’ is not so much a sleep characterized by sensuality (e.g., pleasant or evocative dreams) as a slumber of the senses, a condition of senselessness. Intellection and rationality too are compromised, he explains: ease ‘ceaze[s]’ the ‘vnderstanding parts.’ These descriptions echo the speaker’s own shock after hearing about the massacre, when horror ‘ceaz’d [his] powers.’ Not until undergoing his ‘temperate change’ did the speaker find his ‘[s]ense recollected.’ ‘Securitie,’ in this scenario, is analogous to the speaker’s former state of statuary paralysis.43 The antidote to such catalepsies: allowing ‘fear’d danger’ to ‘[b]e present Centinell to absent anger,’ a policy of anticipatory hostility. The danger that has not yet presented itself, existing in the present only a possibility to be ‘fear’d,’ according to the speaker, should act as a ‘Centinell’ to the affective response that it would produce. A sentinel is a watchman who sounds an alarm to warn of imminent danger, calling unwitting residents to defensive action. The speaker thus admonishes prolepsis: the danger that is not yet present should provoke the ‘anger’ heretofore ‘absent.’ Invoking anticipatory ‘anger,’ the

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speaker thus calls the English colonists to a retaliation that is not, paradoxically, retaliatory, since it anticipates the advent of danger. Such prolepsis, according to the speaker, cures the pathology of ‘securitie,’ which produces a stupor akin to what he suffered earlier. The anticipatory anger that the narrator advised, in turn, corresponds to the antidote that cured his catalepsies: knowledge as the harbinger of a ‘temperate change.’ By the speaker’s logic, then, temperance entails preemptive anger – a definition that precisely reverses the mandates of the virtue as it traditionally had been defined. No longer entailing the moderation and prudent delay of the passions, temperance here comprises affects and actions anticipated in the future and transplanted into the present, where they constitute aggressive rather than defensive gestures. To use Donne’s language, Brooke advises the colonists against post-posing their desire for immediate gratification – here, a gratification for vengeance rather than material goods. Insofar as this speaker recognizes the temporal dimensions of the virtue, he implies the intemperance attendant on his so-called ‘temperate change.’ This radical appropriation of temperance, and the accompanying challenge to traditional conceptions of the virtue, acquire momentum with the poem’s eulogies for Virginia’s slain leaders. The first of four men singled out for praise, Captain Nathaniel Powell had inhabited Jamestown since April of 1607, having left England on the same ship that carried Captain John Smith. In the colony, he served the Virginia Company as explorer, cartographer, deputy governor, and member of the Council of State for Virginia. By 1622, Powell had been joined in Virginia by his wife Joyce, ne´e Tracy, ‘Whose womb [was] now promising fruit of [her] chast Bed’ (B3v line 1); Joyce Powell was killed in the massacre alongside her husband and seven of their tenant-servants. According to Virginia Company records, Powell was decapitated during the attack,44 and his head taken as a ‘Trophee of such Honor’ to the Powhatan king – perhaps because, as Brooke specifies, he was the first European killed in the ambush (B3v line 26). The strain of writing about the loss of the esteemed man takes its toll on the narrator, who experiences an attenuated version of his initial shock, threatening the continuation of the poem: Heere do I wet my Paper with my teares, My very Incke doth sympathize with feares, And thickens in my Pen, as loath t’expresse My tearefull griefe, and carefull heauinesse. Heere do I force my heart with bloody straine,

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(Which pants in Passion, and doth feele a paine Like to the pangs of Death) to shew the rest, Where lyes more ruth, then can by me b’exprest.

(B3v lines 3–10)

No statuary here, but the ink thickening in the pen ‘sympathize[s]’ with the speaker, as if imitating the humours that threaten to cease flowing in his ‘passages . . . plaine.’ Only ‘force’ and ‘straine’ allow him to eke out the story of Powell’s murder, and then only amid such signs of affective intemperance as ‘pant[ing] . . . Passion’ and pain ‘[l]ike to the pangs of Death,’ with the alliterative plosives representing the speaker’s breathless faltering. The passage concludes with the speaker’s doubts about whether he can find language to express his excessive ‘ruth.’ As in the initial scene of paralysis, language itself – the very capacity that Brooke identifies with European subjectivity – falters under affective pressure. Despite these professed uncertainties, though, the iambic metre and the rhyming couplets persist without interruption, perhaps belying the speaker’s alleged distress. Contingent on the speaker’s humoral composition (temperament), the ink in the pen imitates his freely flowing tears. Protestations of grief notwithstanding, the narrator continues to experience his ‘temperate change,’ and neither he nor his pen threatens to return to the intemperate state he called ‘Teareless as Tonguelesse.’ Brooke issues this reminder about the effects of the ‘temperate change’ alongside his remarks on Captain Powell’s ‘temper,’ observations with which he pursues his appropriation of temperance on behalf of English colonialism. Captain Powell, Brooke explains, never quailed when the settlers’ prospects seemed dim, unperturbed by ‘bitter letts, and sowre affronts’; by ‘danger with his forked stings . . . shoot[ing] at [him]’; by ‘Ruines broadest wings’ that ‘[t]hreatned to couer all’; by ‘Famine’; by ‘malignant Fate’ (B2r lines 13, 15–17, 20, 21). Such steadfastness Brooke attributes to native humoral composition: ‘Whose temper (put vnto the Test) was showne / For currant mettle; theirs, for drosse was knowne’ (B2r lines 23–4). The image of ‘currant mettle’ is a rich one with respect to temper(ance). In referring to the Powhatan temper, Brooke speaks geohumorally, referring to their native character as determined by their humoral composition, but also metallurgically, to their hardening through heating and cooling, as of a piece of steel (OED s.v. ‘temper, v.’ 14). Rather than being improved by tempering, though, the Powhatan are cast off as ‘dross’: the ‘scum, recrement, or extraneous matter thrown off from metals in the process of melting’ (OED 1).

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Powell, on the other hand, is well-tempered; when Brooke speaks of his ‘currant mettle,’ he invokes two French-derived definitions: ‘running, flowing’ (OED 1, attested 1300–1830); and ‘smoothly flowing; running easily and swiftly; fluent’ (OED 2, attested 1587–1818). The same melting process that casts off the Powhatan as dross, in other words, keeps Powell smoothly flowing, rendering him well-tempered in several ways. First, unlike the narrator at the outset of the poem, his readily flowing humours are unlikely to find themselves paralysed or frozen in their ‘milder course’; already temperate, Powell would not require the ‘temperate change’ that re-opened the speaker’s ‘passages . . . plaine.’ Second, Powell’s mettle – his ‘character, disposition, or temperament’ – will be hardened into ‘courage, strength of character’ through the heating and cooling that produce metallurgical temperance (OED s.v. ‘mettle’ 1, 2; s.v. ‘temper’ 14). Third, Powell is temperate in the sense of well mixed, as when gold or silver is tempered with an alloy to produce a metal of standard and reliable value (OED s.v. ‘temper’ 3, 4). The Powhatan temperament is thus figuratively described as poorly tempered or drossy, according to Brooke; Powell’s, by contrast, is temperate. The phrase ‘currant mettle,’ though, introduces other connotations that complicate and compromise this claim about Powell’s purported temperance, requiring a redefinition of the virtue to breach the borders of its already expansive discursive terrain. Starting in the late fifteenth century, money – present here in the homophonic pun on mettle and metal – can be pronounced ‘current’ when it is in general use as a medium of exchange, ‘flowing’ from hand to hand; and when it is authentic or genuine, accepted as a valid means of purchasing goods or services – that is to say, not counterfeit (OED 4, 5). In this sense, Powell is temperate because he has purchasing power, because his presence in the New World has assisted in amassing the wealth desired by the Virginia Company and its investors. Brooke thus transforms Donne’s begrudging acceptance of material accumulation into an occasion for explicit encomium and memorialization. One additional detail might underlie Brooke’s emphasis on Powell’s financial ‘currency’: early European explorers wrote with a mixture of admiration and condescension about native tribes lacking official currency, and using spices or other commodities instead to facilitate exchange. Peter Martyr and Francisco Herna´ndez, among others, interpreted the native use of cacao seeds as money as a sign of economic and cultural primitivism; as Edmund Campos observes, ‘The idea of Indians naively counting cacao instead of their abundant gold and silver

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helped justify Christian conquest and the exploitation of American mineral wealth.’45 Captain Powell’s ‘currant mettle’ qua currency, then, only underscores his absolute difference from the Powhatan whom Brooke disparages. Powell’s temperate temperament, according to the logic of Brooke’s metaphorical language, turns on his intimate relationship to profit and purchasing, as opposed to the natives’ ignorance of currency and monetary value. Scholars of Christianity might reasonably object that the presence of an economic metaphor does not necessarily limit discourse to venal rather than spiritual or ethical concerns. Medieval and Renaissance texts, both popular and devout, frequently refer to the Christian Passion in mercantile terms: Christ dies in order to repay the debt of sin incurred by humankind during the Fall, buying the commodity of divine forgiveness. In his martyrdom, then, Brooke’s Captain Powell imitates Christ insofar as his death purchases successful colonial settlement among Virginia Company investors, just as Christ’s death purchases salvation for the faithful. Brooke’s analogy calls as much attention to the differences as to the similarities between Powell and Christ, though, suggesting the appropriation of Christological debt for worldly gain. In this appropriative vein, the relentlessly material vocabulary of this passage – which resonates in physiological, metallurgical, and monetary registers, but not in spiritual ones – clearly insists that Powell’s ‘currency’ should motivate not only continued acquisitiveness in the colonies, but also revenge: an ethical choice that resonates both with the talionic logic of the Old Testament and with the mercantile vocabulary of accounting and repayment (as I suggested in my reading of Guyon in chapter 2). Brooke agrees with Waterhouse rather than with Donne, advocating ‘possessing the fruits of others labours’ rather than ‘Post-pos[ing] the consideration of Temporall gayne.’ Even more radically, though, he insists that exercising that prerogative of primitive accumulation amounts to a temperate venture. The temperance that interests Brooke requires the immediate pursuit and acquisition of profit, and the extermination of whatever native peoples might hinder such achievements. In a context where temperance can signify profitability, is it any wonder that Donne chose a different vocabulary to recommend moderation and delay? Perhaps not. But the consequence of Donne’s omission of temperance from his ethical plea is the concession of that virtue to the discourses of colonialism and primitive accumulation. In the chapter that follows, I mine an archive of texts not traditionally

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included as part of the literary canon, pursuing the term ‘temperance’ into the new geographical and discursive territory that has been mapped by its rhetorical mobility and momentum during the preceding century. In a vein anticipated by Brooke’s polemical verse, temperance undergoes in these seventeenth-century texts some of its most radical and far-flung displacements from its traditional formulations. And yet as in Spenser, where Medea mourned and Grill grumbled; as in Shakespeare, where the tempest accomplished ambivalent historical erasures; as in Donne, where moderation requires ‘post-posement’ of precisely the rewards sought in temperance’s name; these seventeenth-century writers addressing New World commodities and their effects on English culture begin immediately to regret the mobility of various habits, commodities, and ideologies acquired and developed in the New World. In their poems, tracts, and polemics, these writers continue to participate in and rely on the mobility of temperance, while raising questions about the cultural consequences of the virtue’s colonial deployment.

5 Globalizing Temperance in Seventeenth-Century Economics

In his 1601 tract Saint George for England Allegorically Described, the English ‘bullionist’ Gerard Malynes introduces his polemic against usury, unregulated currency exchange, and the importation of foreign luxury goods with an elaborate adaptation of the opening sentence of The Canterbury Tales. Before reading that adaptation, though, a moment’s pause and puzzlement over the Chaucerian template: Why not reach instead for Spenser? Like Malynes’s polemic, The Faerie Queene chooses St George – patron saint of England since the time of Edward III; namesake of the humble, homegrown husbandsman (L. georgius) – as its first chivalric hero. Also like Malynes’s tract, The Faerie Queene offers prescriptive advice that is, notoriously, ‘clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises.’1 Perhaps, on the one hand, Malynes’s Chaucerian gesture serves as a bid for national and cultural legitimacy, appealing to the poet whom Dryden would later honour as the ‘father of English poetry,’ having ‘taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the various manners and humors . . . of the whole English nation.’2 On the other hand – and on the contrary – perhaps the force of this Chaucerian imitation is satiric, for Malynes’s tract, like The Canterbury Tales, is concerned not so much with traditional English heroism as with its ironic debasement. All three writers manipulate the metaphor of the human body in the service of political commentary; but while the body that preoccupied Spenser was inviolate – the virginal hortus conclusus as a figure for Elizabeth’s unimpeachable sovereignty – Malynes shares with Chaucer an interest in the body whose integrity is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Like its Chaucerian precedent,3 Malynes’s tract begins with an elaborate metaphor that identifies the English springtime climate with

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health, promise, and harmony, and establishes a clear correspondence between the cosmic revolution of the heavenly bodies and the natural life-cycles of the flora and fauna below. hauing with his sweete showers moystened the drought of March, bathing euery veine of the rootes of trees & ingendring floures, Zephirus with his pleasaunt breath prouoking tender crops by vertue of young Phebus, holding her course in Aries. Abstinence in Lent performing her accustomed race feeding on waterie creatures, the Moone being entred into the aquatike signe of Pisces, and my bloud increasing with the nource of digestion, caused me to slumber, and no sooner did I discharge some part of that tribute due vnto nature, when suddenly falling into most strange dreames, or rather visions, which seemed to dimme my sight, I was partly amazed, and partly rauished with such admirations: which by apprehension haue left such deepe impressions in the treasurie of my braines, as I am now compelled to co[m]mit some of them to the generall recorder, whose bodie (after the amputation of his head) called for blacke drinke to staine the ouerbeaten clouts, to ease my fatigable memory, the receptacle whereof is otherwise barred from all succeeding matters, like a trammell replenished with fish, which can containe no more then her full (as it were) naturall imbibition.4 APRILL

Not only the Chaucerian imitation, but also the increased emphasis on the aquatic quality of this tableau, suggest a particularly English form of nationalism, for geohumoral discourse of this period imagines the English temperament, already cold and moist because of its northernness, as additionally water-logged because of England’s insular formation. While some writers of the period fret over the naturally watery constitution of the English, linking it to effeminacy and inconstancy,5 Malynes betrays no such anxiety. The fatigue derived from ‘feeding on waterie creatures,’ rather than on the English beef that sustains the troops of Shakespeare’s history plays,6 testifies not to effeminacy but to the pious and timely observation of Lent; sleep is not a sign of weakness but a tribute rightfully paid to nature; and the fatigable memory is not faulty but replete with fish, the earthly instantiations of Pisces’s influence from the zodiac above. In short, the humoral temperament of the English strikes Malynes, unlike many of the geohumoral theorists in Mary Floyd-Wilson’s analysis, as harmoniously attuned to the macrocosmic and religious calendar. The speaker’s, though, is not the only corporeal presence in this passage. Stepping in to relieve the overburdened ‘treasurie’ of the speaker’s

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‘braines’ is ‘the generall recorder’ of print, figured in the archaic technology of the quill pen.7 Although Malynes describes the pen undergoing a potentially violent decapitation, he chooses the word ‘amputation,’ as if this surgical operation were a therapeutic act; once the head is amputated, this pen ‘called for black drinke,’ like a patient awakening with a promising appetite after a long illness.8 Malynes’s speaker seems to identify with the pen: the thirsty quill sucks up the ‘blacke drinke,’ while the speaker experiences the relief of ‘eas[ing]’ his ‘fatigable memory.’ More important than the pen’s palliative effects for this individual speaker, though, is the implied promise it holds out for the commonwealth as a whole. Malynes describes his ‘braines’ first as a ‘treasurie’ and then as a ‘trammell’ (or fishing net) stuffed to capacity with a plenteous bounty. While the tract that follows imprecates various economic practices – foreign investment, international trade, importation of luxury goods – for diminishing England’s store of gold and silver coin, this purging of the ‘treasurie’ and the ‘trammell’ appears to be salutary, clearing some much-needed space in which to store future yields. The full trammel, additionally, suggests England’s wealth of natural resources and its capacity for lucrative exportation – a reading Malynes substantiates elsewhere, when he describes fishing as integral to the origins of international commerce: ‘first, on the Land in the maine Continent, and then extensiuely vpon the Seas, both for fishing and negotiation.’9 The ‘generall recorder’ and the textual production it enables, then, help to empty the ‘trammell’ of the mind on both individual and national levels, clearing the way not only for individual intellection, but also for national prosperity – the apparent result of international commerce. As a whole, the polemic of Saint George for England bewails the indigence that will result, Malynes predicts, if England continues to bleed bullion from the body politic in the name of international trade and investment. This Chaucerian passage, though, imagines a nation of undiminished plenty sustained not by economic protectionism, but, on the contrary, by economic internationalism, figured multiply as the purging of the mind, the fishing net, and the national treasury. Discursive and textual dissemination, in this adaptation, seems to license economic practices to which Malynes is elsewhere opposed, and to restore the health of the ailing body politic. I start with this intriguing passage for three reasons. First, by revealing deep ambivalence at the outset of this otherwise protectionist polemic, the passage is symptomatic of England’s conflicted sense of national identity and political priorities in the context of seventeenth-

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century colonial expansion. If it is a cliche´ to remark on the logical incoherence of colonialist ideology, it is nevertheless remarkable to find such incoherence or ambivalence in work as polemical as that of Malynes, often understood to be the most radically conservative voice in the mercantile debates.10 Malynes purports to abhor various economic practices that were contingent on England’s increasing investment in the colonial New World: usury, newly legitimate in the guise of ‘venture’ and ‘investment’;11 unregulated currency exchange, newly legitimized by the prominence and popularity of Gresham’s Bourse, also known as The Royal Exchange, in London;12 and the seemingly insatiable appetite, among the English, for foreign luxury goods, especially consumables such as tobacco, coffee, sugar, and chocolate.13 Despite these professed antipathies, though, Malynes’s opening sentences betray his susceptibility to the lure of economic internationalism, and ventriloquize an ideological ambivalence: a split between the material temptations to foreign investment and consumption, and the nationalist fear of cultural contamination and impoverishment. The surprising presence of such ambivalence in the otherwise polemical work of this economic protectionist testifies, I think, to the persistence and the ubiquity of this ideological conflict in seventeenth-century English culture. My second reason for beginning with this passage is more central to my analysis of temperance and its discursive proliferation in the period: its dependence on the figure of the temperamental body to articulate these economic and political concerns. In part 1, and to a lesser extent in chapter 4, I considered the ways in which artistic representations of temperance – poetic, dramatic, and visual – often signify in political, and especially colonial, registers. From the late fifteenth through the early sixteenth centuries, I argued, temperance acquired a number of significations related to England’s colonial aspirations. In turning away from ‘artistic’ productions, and toward texts produced explicitly as meditations on colonialism and its economic consequences, this chapter serves as a test case for the narrative of temperance’s discursive diffusion that I have developed thus far. If temperance functions as an important representational tool for artists interested in English colonialism, is it similarly important to thinkers dedicated to theorizing these investments in a more straightforward way? To what degree has temperance migrated into the discursive context of colonialism? In my readings of seventeenth-century economic texts, I posit affirmative answers to these questions, arguing that these texts use temperance as a cultural and ethical ideal – both implicit and explicit – by

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which to gauge the health or illness of the body politic. Having undergone the semantic and discursive extensions I have rehearsed in the preceding chapters, temperance is available to these writers as an explicit term of economic evaluation, with which to judge the financial and cultural implications of colonial settlement in the New World. Third and finally, I begin with this passage because it raises but does not answer the question of whether temperance can be attained and maintained in the context of colonial expansion. As we have seen, the text identifies the pen with corporeal purgation: the restoration of temperance to a body troubled by excesses of food, sleep, and memory. In imitation of the Chaucerian source-text, this metaphor implies the salutary effects of literary production. Malynes’s text will restore temperance to the speaker’s weary body, just as the tales of Chaucer’s pilgrims, structurally speaking, ought to facilitate the spiritual healing implied by the journey toward Canterbury. But Chaucer’s pilgrims are, of course, notoriously inattentive to their ostensible spiritual goal, as the fragmentary status of the Tales attests. The bodies wending their way toward Canterbury are, at best, corrupt analogues of the zodiac’s cosmic models; the Tales ultimately represent the spiritually deleterious, rather than salutary, effects of narrative. Malynes’s passage, similarly, seems to celebrate the restoration of temperance enjoyed by the speaker when he enlists the help of the quill pen. The Chaucerian source, though, undercuts the speaker’s sanguinity, and calls attention to darker features of this extended metaphor: the threatening proximity of the speaker’s own ‘braines’ to the scene of decapitation; the suggestion of both melancholia-inducing black bile and poisonous or intoxicating liquor in the phrase ‘blacke drinke’; and the gruesome ‘staines’ on the ‘ouerbeaten clouts,’ which may evoke the bloodstained clothing of a battered man more readily than rows of orderly handwriting on a fresh sheet of paper. If Dryden’s canonization of ‘the father of English poetry’ dulls the knife-edge of Chaucerian satire, Malynes’s adaptation serves as a kind of whetstone, sharpening our appreciation of Chaucer’s satirical acumen, and of the political reality that undergirds English nationalism. These dark prognostications help to belie the assumption of England’s guaranteed colonial success (a solecism too easily committed by the citizen of twenty-first century America – still the leading imperial power in a global economy, but all too aware of the precariousness of its position). Malynes’s anti-colonial invective, though, reveals the friction over English

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international expansion already extant in the seventeenth century, and explodes the fantasy that the English beat an easy path, paved with gold, to the door of imperial success. As this chapter will show, reservations about the ethics of colonial settlement are restricted neither to those disenfranchised by colonialism themselves, nor to those privileged with hindsight, but inheres in England’s self-conception from the outset of its imperial endeavours. This analysis proceeds in two parts, divided along chronological and conceptual lines. The first section considers writers from the first half of the seventeenth century who deploy temperance – or try to – in the service of anti-colonialist, nationalist, and protectionist ideology. Beginning with James I’s famous 1603 Counterblaste against Tobacco, I consider the invocation of temperance to advocate a return to habits of consumption understood to be natural to the English climate and temperament. But precisely because temperance has achieved such discursive fluency over the preceding century, I argue, these invocations are counterproductive, for temperance resonates not only in the national context, but internationally – indeed globally – to imply the potential health and vigour of a global body politic. The second half of this section turns from polemics against commodity consumption to critiques of the economic practices entailed in international commerce, especially usury. Returning to Saint George for England, I argue that Malynes’s anti-usury invective provides new insight into, first, temperance as a national ideal in Renaissance England; and second, the body politic metaphor as it evolves to accommodate England’s colonial expansion in the seventeenth century. Malynes, I will show, decries usury not in Ariostotelian or Thomistic terms – as a sodomitical practice in which naturally barren money ‘breeds’ – but as a failure of temperance, in the sense of both time-management and humoral crasis. Like James, though, Malynes finds his metaphor of the temperate body politic alternating vertiginously among national, international, and global contexts, undermining his dire warnings about the importance of economic protectionism to the vitality of the English nation. The second half of this chapter focuses on the latter part of the seventeenth century, and on writers more reconciled to England’s colonial investments, who also rely on temperance to articulate their imperialist apologiae. In colonial medical manuals of the 1670s, William Hughes and Thomas Trapham, writing enthusiastically about the West Indies and Jamaica, invoke temperance in its full semantic and

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discursive range to advocate English settlement in the Caribbean, and primitive accumulation of its natural resources, for medicinal and nutritional purposes. Relying on humoral, temporal, and climatological discourses, Hughes and Trapham use temperance to argue that English settlers will find the West Indies hospitable because they are conducive to the values already extant in England. Although Hughes lauds the botanical novelties he has discovered in Jamaica, and Trapham insists on the danger of trying to preserve ‘northern chilly propensities’ in a southern locale, temperance remains for both writers a non-negotiable cultural ideal, the horizon of English adaptability.14 As I suggested above, English protectionists cede the inevitability of certain forms of colonial exchange when they invoke a temperate body politic that cannot help but signify globally as well as nationally. Inversely, these writers who favour colonial settlement reveal their underlying conservatism when they interpret Jamaica’s value in terms of England’s humoral ideal. As late as the dawn of the long eighteenth century, then, writers continue to express their ambivalence about England’s national and cultural identity, and about the ethical implications of increasing colonial activity, as functions of the same virtue that preoccupied Spenser a full century before. Temperance continues to play a crucial ideological role in helping these writers to navigate the ethical, political, and economic complexities of a globalizing world. Good for the Head, Evil for the Neck: The Body Politic Smokes Tobacco The moralization of tobacco consumption and distribution, a familiar ideology for contemporary Americans, has an august history in early modern Europe, as historians of the period have long recognized. Seventeenth-century writers depict tobacco consumption as a threat to Englishness itself, and especially to the temperate ego-ideal that England has so carefully fashioned during the preceding centuries. Henry Peacham, for example, historicizes tobacco-taking in this way when he laments the recent English tendency to ‘excesse in eating and drinking (let me also adde Tobacco taking).’ ‘Within these fiftie or threescore yeares,’ Peacham opines, ‘it was a rare thing with vs in England, to see a Drunken man, our Nation carrying the name of the most sober and temperate of any other in the world.’ But apre`s c¸a, le de´luge, Peacham laments, and now Englishmen travelling abroad must take special care to ensure

Globalizing Temperance 167 Preseruation of your minde, from Errors, and ill manners; of your bodie from distemperature, either by ouer eating, drinking, violent or venereal exercise. For there is not any nation in the world more subiect vnto surfets then our English are, whether it proceedeth fro[m] the Constitution of our bodies, ill agreeing with the hotter climates, or the exchange of our wholsome diet and plentie, for little and ill drest; or the greedinesse of their fruits and hotte wines, wherewith onely wee are sometime constrained to fill our bellies, I am not certaine.15

According to Peacham, tobacco’s ingress into the English diet – along with that of other commodities (including ‘their fruits and hotte wines,’ with its indeterminate but accusatory possessive pronoun) – has jeopardized the temperate constitution of the entire nation. With a verbal echo in ‘distemperature,’ Peacham establishes an analogy between tobacco’s disruption of the English constitution and the anomie experienced by the English traveller abroad. The derangement of temperance caused by tobacco and other products – most likely New World commodities, judging from the ‘hotter climes’ and the racial othering suggested by ‘their’ – seems for Peacham to amount to complete cultural dislocation. In a quasi-allegorical projection, Peacham attributes this moral downfall to the commodities themselves: the ‘greedinesse’ belongs to the tropical, novel ‘fruits and hotte wines.’ In Peacham’s formulation, the English colonists alone (‘onely wee’) are ‘constrained’ by these commodities to intemperate consumption, in a bizarre disavowal of the historical truth of colonial sovereignty. The animus of Peacham and his partisans, as we know, did not effectively dissuade the English from investing in tobacco plantation, importation, and consumption. Following the first successful crop of tobacco harvested in the Jamestown colony in 1614, tobacco began a ‘remarkable’ and ‘rapid incorporation . . . into [the] agrarian structure’ of England and its colonies.16 The failure of anti-tobacco polemics of the period to inhibit English consumers may be attributed in part to temperance – or at least to writers’ tendency to invoke that virtue as the ethical foundation of their antipathy. The most famous of these polemics exemplifies this unsuccessful rhetorical strategy; James I’s 1604 A Counterblaste to Tobacco relies on the temperate body politic as a self-evident ideal whose preservation is assumed as the unimpeachable future and an incontrovertible good.17 As I have argued in previous chapters, though, temperance has by this time achieved a kind of discursive extensibility,

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resonating as an ideal not only of Galenic crasis, but also of temporal efficiency and economic profitability. When anti-tobacco writers invoke the temperate body politic in nostalgic or elegiac registers, as Peacham does, they simultaneously, if unintentionally, call forth other semantic contexts for the virtue – contexts in which tobacco importation and consumption would work to sustain rather than to undermine the English temperate ideal. No longer restricted to Aristotelian moderation, temperance seems to defy the pamphleteer’s attempt to restrict its ideological force to a single polemical purpose. A Counterblaste begins by elaborating the familiar analogy between the individual human body and the national body politic, founded on an ideal of temperance in the Galenic sense: ‘As euery humane . . . how wholesome soeuer, is notwithstanding subiect, or at least naturally inclined to some sorts of diseases, or infirmities: so is there no Common-wealth, or Body-politicke, how well gouerned, or peaceable soeuer it bee, that lackes . . . popular errors, and naturally enclined corruptions.’18 To cure these ‘diseases’ and ‘corruptions,’ James vows to purge these excesses and restore a temperate ideal: Peace and wealth hath brought foorth a generall sluggishnesse, which makes vs wallow in all sorts of idle delights, and soft delicacies . . . For remedie whereof, it is the Kings part (as the proper Phisician of his Politicke-body) to purge it of all those diseases, by Medicines meete for the same . . . (A4v, emphasis original)

Suggesting that he will counter excessive consumption with forcible purgation, James invokes temperance as an ideal of early modern humoralism: a state of crasis in which the corporeal humours achieve a harmonious balance, maintaining the body in a state of perfect health. According to James’s analogy, the body politic as a national collective has incorporated the intemperance of its individual members, who ‘wallow in all sorts of idle delights, and soft delicacies.’ To redress these problems, then, the ‘Phisician of [the] Politicke-body’ must imitate the practice of the ordinary medical practitioner seeking to restore humoral balance to his patient: when . . . any part of our bodie growes to be distempered, and to tend to an extremitie beyond the compasse of Natures temperate mixture, that in that case cures of contrary qualities, to the intemperate inclination of that part, being wisely prepared and discreetely ministred, may be both

Globalizing Temperance 169 necessarie and helpefull for strengthning and assisting Nature in the expulsion of her enemies: for this is the true definition of all profitable Physicke. (B4v, emphasis added)

In accordance with Galenic theory, James’s imaginary physician here practises a kind of compensatory medicine. The inverse of homeopathy or vaccination, which turns the maleficent substance itself into a cure, this ‘profitable Physicke’ prescribes certain ‘contrary’ substances to counterbalance the dominant humour in a ‘distempered’ portion of the body. A mustard plaster, for example, bearing calefacient properties, might bring relief for digestive disorders, which humoral medicine blames on excessive cold. Just as the physician aims to restore temperance to the disordered part of the body, James vows to overcome the imbalance that afflicts the body politic – one presumably inflicted by tobacco consumption, the title implies – and to restore it to a national state of crasis – that medical term itself derived from the Greek for ‘mixture, combination,’ and designating the proper balance of humours in the body. Temperance in its Galenic, humoral sense is the articulated aim of all medical meddling. The tract prepares its audience for the king’s novel prescription, his introduction of a substance that will ‘counterblaste’ the tobacco that has created an imbalance in the body politic, facilitating its ‘expulsion’ therefrom. As he turns his attention more specifically to tobacco, though, James begins to hedge about the applicability of this humoral logic, in an argumentative turn that changes the nature of the temperance he advocates. Tobacco, James explains, has been introduced to England by ‘barbarous . . . beastly . . . wilde, godlesse, and slauish Indians,’ not by ‘wise, virtuous, and temperate spirits’ (B2v, B1r, emphasis added). James’s outrage is culturally possessive and xenophobic: he rails against the way in which advocates of smoking have perverted the European humoral paradigm. By invoking the temperate ideal of humoral medicine, James asserts, tobacco’s apologists defend this ‘vile and stinking . . . custome’ on ‘false,’ ‘erroneous,’ and ‘deceitfull grounds’ when they suggest that the dry heat of ‘this stinking Suffumigation’ may healthfully countervail the ‘braines of all men, being naturally colde and wet’ (B1r–B3r). James explains this misappropriation, which solecistically claims that tobacco provides a healthful counterbalance to the cold, wet English brain: For man beeing compounded of the foure Complexions, (whose fathers are the foure Elements) although there be a mixture of them all in all the

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parts of his body, yet must the diuers parts of our Microcosme or little world within our selues, be diuersly more inclined, some to one, some to another complexion, according to the diuersitie of their vses, that of these discords a perfect harmonie may bee made vp for the maintenance of the whole body. (B3r, emphasis original)

To treat the distemper of only a single part of the body is to miss the big picture, James explains, thereby departing from his claim that the physician applies a counterbalancing humoral remedy when ‘any part of our bodie growes to be distempered’ (B4v, emphasis added). This emphasis on the whole corpus rather than its constituent parts requires, and facilitates, a shift in James’s governing metaphor. The human body is now analogous not to the nation, the traditional body politic, but – as a ‘little world’ in and of itself – to the entire cosmos. Now, the ethical and medical call for crasis within the individual human body is the equivalent, writ small, not of the edicts and admonitions of a monarch, but of the meteorological climates across the globe: the interactions of the ‘foure Elements.’ This comparison itself is not innovative or profound, of course – men are little worlds made cunningly long before John Donne says so19 – but this change in register entails a corresponding change in the ideal of temperance, which no longer signifies the national equilibrium that has been disrupted by tobacco’s dry heat. The shift becomes apparent as James develops the cosmic analogy further, extending the rhetoric of particularism – that is, the individuation of the parts of the body as ‘diuersly . . . inclined, some to one, some to another complexion’ – to different geographical regions. With due condescension, he concedes that tobacco has its uses – exceedingly distasteful ones – for New World natives: Tobacco being a com[m]on herbe, which [(]though vnder diuers names) grows almost euery where, was first found out by some of the barbarous Indians, to be a Preseruative, or Antidot against the Pockes, a filthy disease, whereunto these barbarous people are (as all men know) very much subiect, what through the vncleanly and adust constitution of their bodies, and what through the intemperate heate of their Climat: so that as from them was first brought into Christendome, that most detestable disease, so from them likewise was brought this vse of Tobacco, as a stinking and vnsauorie Antidot, for so corrupted and execrable a Maladie, the stinking Suffumigation whereof they yet vse against that disease, making so one canker or venime to eate out another. (B2v, emphasis original)

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The ‘intemperate heate’ of the New World produces a humoral constitution that James describes as ‘adust.’ Derived from the Latin adurere, to burn, ‘adust’ is attested mostly in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, and used to describe a humoral state characterized by ‘dryness of the body, heat, thirst, black or burnt colour of the blood . . . atrabilious or “melancholic” complexion’ (OED 3). Against the geohumoral convention that would make the New World natives, like the English, tend toward a cold, wet, ‘Scythian temperament’ corresponding to their northern latitude, James characterizes these ‘Indians’ as hot and dry, intemperate in a way equal and opposite to that risked by the English; they represent his subjects’ geohumoral and temperamental opposites.20 For the ‘Indians,’ in their contemptible state, he admits, perhaps the ‘canker of venime’ of tobacco is permissible as the lesser of two evils, since their weak constitutions render them susceptible to the ‘filthy disease’ of the ‘Pockes’ (syphilis).21 But this usage, James insists, must not license European use of tobacco: ‘shall we, I say, without blushing, abase our selues so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians, slaues to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Couenant of God?’ The intemperance of one part of the global body – the New World and its inhabitants – does not license similar intemperance in another. Despite the xenophobia of James’s invective here, his temperance discourse has some remarkable consequences for our understanding of racial and ethnic identity as understood in early modern English culture. Unlike the racial hatred penned by Christopher Brooke – who denied the Powhatan the right to claim not only human but even animal status (see chapter 4) – James here uses temperance to suggest that differences between the European colonizers and the colonized Indians is a matter of degree, not kind. However ‘vncleanly and adust’ the natives’ constitutions might be, however ‘intemperate’ the ‘heate of their Climat,’ they are nevertheless men, ‘compounded of the foure Complexions, (whose fathers are the foure Elements)’: little worlds whose temperaments are determined by their political, nutritional, and climatological conditions, just as the Europeans’ are. The figure of temperance posits a radical continuity among the races of the world; we might read James’s furious insistence on the barbarity, filth, and ‘vncleanly’-ness of the natives as an attempt to disavow the theory of racial sameness that his own discourse of temperance has initiated. A theory of comparative racial identity emerges here as a new and crucial register in which the discourse of temperance expands to explain the political complexities of English colonial expansion.22

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Insistent on the distinction between tobacco as New World syphilis cure and as European vice, James returns to his original medicinal rhetoric, but in the global rather than the national register: And what greater absurditie can there bee, then to say that one cure shall serue for diuers, nay, contrarious sortes of diseases? It is an vndoubted ground among all Phisicians, that there is almost no sort either of nourishment or medicine, that hath not something in it disagreeable to some part of mans bodie, because . . . the nature of the temperature of euery part, is so different from another, that according to the olde prouerbe, That which is good for the head, is euill for the necke and the shoulders. For euen as a strong enemie, that inuades a towne or fortresse, although in his siege thereof, he do belaie and compasse it round about, yet he makes his breach and entrie, at some one or few speciall parts thereof, which hee hath tried and found to bee weakest and least able to resist; so sickenesse doth make her particular assault, vpon such part or parts of our bodie, as are weakest and easiest to be ouercome by that sort of disease, which then doth assaile vs . . . (C2r–C3v, emphasis added)

If salutary for New World natives, tobacco is nevertheless poisonous to Europeans, James insists: ‘That which is good for the head, is euill for the necke and the shoulders.’ In this analogy, England is no longer an integral, internally temperate body, whose crasis is threatened by foreign contaminants like tobacco. Instead, Britain is merely one part of a global body, useless without the coordinated efforts of the other nations of the world. As in Peacham, ‘our Nation’ no longer ‘carr[ies] the name of the most sober and temperate of any other in the world’; it is instead, James says, only one of the many ‘diuers parts of our Microcosme or little world . . . inclined [either] to one, [or] to another complexion.’ Each of these ‘diuers parts’ considered on its own is characterized by ‘discord’; the parts create a ‘perfect harmonie . . . of the whole body’ politic only when considered in concert with other, differently inclined polities (B3r). Other changes in diction emphasize this metaphorical shift, and the corresponding change in the temperate ideal. In earlier passages, the parts of the body had tempers, and suffered distemper. Here, though, they suffer distemperature, suggesting a climatological rather than a humoral discursive register.23 The body that contains multiple temperatures – which may be individually extreme or ‘discord[ant]’ while nevertheless contributing to a collective temperance – is a body

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of global, not national proportions. Although James has railed at length against the unsalutary climate of the New World, it assumes here a rightful place as a single constituent of a potentially temperate whole. Notice too that James’s analogy, strictly construed, renders the territory of the ‘barbarous Indians’ as the ‘head,’ rather than arrogating for England the privilege of sovereignty thereby implied. England assumes the supporting role of the neck and shoulders, or perhaps of only one of these – one of several European nations, only vaguely differentiated from one another, playing their small and subsidiary parts. In this context, the national ideal of crasis, in whose name James excoriates the importation and consumption of tobacco in England, retreats into obsolescence, leaving in its wake something like an antecedent to laissez-faire economics. The dry heat of the New World climate and the tobacco it produces, the damp cold of the English constitution: these extremes, James’s global metaphor implies, will play their respective parts in contributing to a temperate homeostasis if allowed to circulate freely, like humours in the global body. Just as James’s racist invective represented an attempt to ward off the knowledge of racial similarity between Europeans and ‘barbarous people’ of the New World, this passage tries to put the horse back in the barn. Fighting against the implications of his own metaphor, and of the New World’s potential supremacy as a global ‘head,’ James adduces the image of a fortressed town under siege: a testament to the desire to resist this incursion into the ideology of European exceptionalism and superiority. As quickly as it appears, though, this fortressed town suffers a ‘breach’; temperance’s discursive mobility seems to endow it with enough momentum to disarm entirely James’s attempts to arrest the radical political implications of his own metaphorical language. Counter to James’s every stated intention, then, his polemic, through the dynamism of the body politic metaphor, legitimates tobacco’s ascendancy in the English colonial economy. A Counterblaste to Tobacco thus models the way in which temperance facilitates changes to the ideology of English nationalism that are central to the colonial and imperial development of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘The Guts Do Carry the Belly’: Gerard Malynes In The Center of the Circle of Commerce (1623), an allegory of England as a diseased body sickened by international trade, Gerard Malynes issues a point-by-point refutation of the argument mounted earlier that

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same year by Edward Misselden in The Circle of Commerce. Or, The Ballance of Trade. In content, tone, and metaphorical expression, Malynes’s tract is in many ways an echo of James I’s Counterblaste against Tobacco. Like James, Malynes excoriates the English appetite for foreign luxury goods; also like James, Malynes represents his economic concerns using the metaphor of an intemperate human body, claiming that the outflow of bullion from England has rendered the national ‘braine (Exchange, wanting sleepe) . . . distempered, whereby the body is ouertaken with a Trepidation or shaking, shewing the very Symptomes of death.’24 ‘Exchange,’ in this context, refers both to international trade and to foreign currency exchange. Throughout The Center of the Circle of Commerce, Malynes attributes its wakefulness to two principal causes: excessive importation of foreign commodities such as tobacco, velvet, silk, and claret;25 and ‘the vndervaluation of our moneys in exchange, and the inhauncing of moneys beyond the Seas,’ circumstances that deprive this ‘braine’ of much-needed ‘rest by the Basis of true valuation.’26 If ‘rest’ is, in this context, a consummation devoutly to be wished, restfulness, Malynes warns, must be avoided at all costs. Malynes scorns that ‘Emp[i]ricke’ (a quack or charlatan, OED 2) who would opine that England ‘(by a surfet, or ouerballancing of forreine commodities) is fallen into a consumption: yet that nature is so strong, that (without Phisicke) she will recouer againe her former health in progresse of time’ (129). So rebarbative, to Malynes, are this imaginary ‘Emp[i]ricke’ and his belief in the curative ‘progresse of time’ that he chastises them with a parable of a virtuous Spaniard – what more humiliating rebuke for a seventeenth-century Englishman brought up in the shadow of the Black Legend? The proponent of the ‘progresse of time’ approach, Malynes warns, shall finde himselfe as much deceiued, as the Spaniard was (who being to go a iourney on foote) resolued to go fasting, conceiuing he should go the lighter: but fainting by the way, cryed out, Aora hallo que las Tripas lle[v]an el vientre, y no el vientre las Tripas: now do I find that the Guts do carry the Belly, & not the Belly the Guts, whereupon he vsed afterwards meate and drinke for his sustenance vpon the like occasion: and found on the contrary, that the abuse thereof did cause surfeits in the Body naturall: euen as the abuse of money and exchanges doth in the Body of Traffique, whereunto Phisicke must be ministred vpon necessitie, according to the disease.27

What is most surprising about this anecdote is that Malynes’s Spaniard errs not through gluttony – as do, for example, the Spaniards of

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de Bry’s engravings, whose goldlust is represented as insatiable thirst28 – but through asceticism. In his initial misprision, this Spaniard cedes primacy to the ‘belly’ (literal, bodily appetite) rather than the ‘guts’ (seat of courage or will)29 – that is, he imagines that the satisfaction or denial of his animal appetite, rather than his wilful conviction, will determine the success of his journey. He subsequently learns, as the ‘Emp[i]ricke’ has not, that ‘meate and drink’ may be ‘vsed’ both healthfully and ethically. Their ‘abuse’ must still be avoided, but so too must the abuse of abstemiousness; the food and drink in this anecdote serve as the ‘Phisicke’ that must be ‘ministred’ to avoid ‘fainting by the way.’ The Spaniard learns something like a temperate mean between gluttony and asceticism. Malynes thus echoes Peacham in suggesting that temperance, once a point of English pride, is now more readily learned from a profligate, Catholic Spaniard than from a native Briton; the keenness of this rebuke is meant to underscore the mortal seriousness of the ‘consumption’ caused by ‘a surfet, or ouerballancing of forreine commodities,’ and to advocate for immediate political intervention to protect English bullion and to cease importation. As in James’s Counterblaste, Malynes’s metaphor of the (in)temperate body politic defies easy conscription into a protectionist, nationalist paradigm. His medical metaphor begins promisingly, when the ‘consumption’ he laments evokes both the wasting disease suffered by the body politic and the English appetite for foreign groceries; he thus decries simultaneously this pathology and the alimentary consumption that is its cause. The ‘physicke’ he prescribes to cure this malady, though, complicates this dual denigration. Linked by the anecdote of the Spaniard to ‘meate and drink,’ this ‘physicke’ implies that consumption – the ‘action or fact of eating or drinking something’ (OED 3rd ed. 5, first attested 1552), or even a ‘wasteful expenditure (of time, money, etc.)’ (OED 3rd ed. 6, first attested 1613) – can cure consumption, in the sense of ‘abnormality or loss of humours, resulting in wasting (extreme weight loss) of the body; such wasting’ (OED 3rd ed. 2, first attested 1398). Consumption is both the disease and its cure. This contradiction is underscored by the fact that many of the commodities whose importation prompts Malynes’s censure – in addition to tobacco and claret, Malynes singles out cinnamon, pepper, and cloves for special contempt30 – are initially sold and cultivated in England for their medicinal properties, as elements of ‘physicke’ in their own right.31 Dietary proscriptions, and the simple protectionism

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that would support them, prove in Malynes’s metaphor to be inadequate cures for the national economic ‘distemper.’ If the dietary and humoral senses of temperance do not serve Malynes’s purposes fully, though, the temporal sense of the term allows him to reassert his protectionist priorities, while also exploiting and developing some of temperance’s discursive mobility. In place of the ‘Emp[i]ricke’s’ foolish belief that the body politic might recover from its distemper without intervention ‘in progresse of time,’ Malynes substitutes the administration of proper food/medicine ‘vpon the like occasion’ (emphasis added). Derived from the Latin occasio and corresponding to the Greek kairos, as we have seen, ‘occasion’ refers to the ‘fullness of time,’ the climactic moment of realization, as opposed to the diachronic time of patient delay (L. tempus, Gk. chronos). In Renaissance emblem books, the allegorical Occasion resembles the traditional medieval Fortuna, with the addition of one salient detail: a head that is entirely bald except for a single forelock, representing the time for action that must be seized at once, lest it pass irrecoverably by.32 In opposition to the time of tempus, ‘occasion’ serves as a rebuke to the theorists discussed in previous chapters who adduced temperance as a virtue of patient delay to defend England’s colonial endeavours. As I have argued, English apologists such as Richard Eburne and John White defend England’s late entry onto the colonial scene of the New World, and distinguish English settlement from the Spaniards of the Black Legend, by referring to the ‘temperate’ – in the sense of patient, long-term, temporally dilatory – nature of English colonial investments. In his anecdote of the Spaniard, Malynes – like Spenser, in my reading of the Cave of Mammon – seems to object to this temporal rendering of temperance. The grounds of Malynes’s objections, though, are radically different. While Spenser appeals to the anti-mercantile logic of divine grace, Malynes advocates ‘occasion’ as a time of economic action, intervention, and accumulation. Temperance-as-tempus does not go far enough, for Malynes; his temperate ideal entails the active seizure of ‘occasion’ for economic profit and political protection. Extending the temporal logic of temperance in this way, Malynes’s rhetoric is simultaneously a celebration of the intellectual expansion of the virtue into the economic realm, and an alarmist caveat about the inadequacy of temperance, in anything less than its most radically economic formulation, to protect the English culture and economy from ruinous contamination and depletion. Malynes’s idealized, temperate body politic thus looks simultaneously back to traditional

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Galenic humoralism and forward to a capitalist ethos of efficiency, the conversion of time itself into a commodity. As my introduction to this chapter suggested, Malynes’s Chaucerian proem to Saint George for England, Allegorically Described invokes the Galenic formulation of temperance as humoral balance in a nostalgic and idealizing vein. Throughout that tract, temperance persists in signifying in this medical idiom, referring both to crasis and to the alimentary appetites sustaining such humoral balance. The Chaucerian springscape of the proem has been ravaged, Malynes explains, by ‘a terrible cruel Dragon, which deuoureth and destroyeth daily the inhabitants of this (otherwise) flourishing Iland’ by providing foreign ‘commodities which please mens humors,’ giving ‘ability to intemperance the daughter of excesse, which maketh men slaues to the mouth and belly, bringing them both wayes to destruction’ (Saint George for England, 5, 45–6). Like the pre-conversion Spaniard of The Center of the Circle of Commerce, these afflicted men confront a ‘belly’ that has exceeded its prescribed place and assumed a ghastly agency: carrying the Spaniard’s ‘guts’ or will, and enslaving these commodity-sodden men. The dragon himself exacerbates this sense of bodily and appetitive disorder, for he ‘deuoureth’ these men, who, because they are rabid consumers, are also consumed, according to a quasi-Dantean logic. Malynes even gives the metaphor digestive specificity when he stipulates that the dragon, in providing these foreign commodities, brings the men ‘both wayes to destruction.’ The antecedents for ‘both wayes’ are ‘the mouth and the belly,’ the latter designating the bowels (OED 6); thus intemperance characterizes both ends of the alimentary canal, both consumption and excretion,33 a detail that explains with noxious specificity the ‘insupportable loathsome smell’ that assaults the ‘fortresse’ of the narrator’s nose, first alerting him to the dangerous predicament of his dreamscape (Saint George for England, 4). Intemperance in the sense of alimentary chaos seems, finally, to reduce these men to nothing more than appetitive beasts.34 In the meantime, Malynes’s dragon bring[s] in superfluous commodities at a deare rate, and [causes] the[m] to feede vppon our natiue soile, to the common-wealthes destruction . . . He carieth out our treasure in bullion and money, empouerishing our commonweale, in giuing vs chalke for cheese, making vs like vnto Æsops dog, going ouer a bridge to snatch at the shadow of the flesh, loosing the flesh it selfe. (Saint George for England, 42–3)

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Like the ‘deuouring’ dragon, the commodities ‘feed vppon’ the ‘natiue soil’ like vampiric alien species; they are not consumed by the English so much as they consume. As if in mockery of Pico della Mirandola’s famous humanistic exhortation against sensory enslavement, the estate of beasts, Malynes’s dragon makes the English into uncomprehending dogs, who fail to distinguish the proper appetitive object – English beef and ale, perhaps – from the insubstantial image of foreign luxury. Once again, ironically, alimentary consumption is the cause of its own undoing. A voracious appetite for foreign luxury goods has left the English, like Aesop’s dog, going hungry, while the dragon and his animated, agentive commodities usurp their appetitive prerogative. If temperance were to be restricted to its traditional bodily denotations, as a virtue governing the appetites, this passage implies, it would prove completely inadequate to control the rapacious appetites of both the native English inhabitants for foreign luxury goods, and of the luxury goods depicted as metonymic avatars of insidious foreign powers. While temperance and its serpentine destruction signify corporeally throughout Saint George for England, the virtue persists in its relentless discursive mobility, expanding Malynes’s didactic range into contentious political, economic, and colonial territory. The tract alludes to temperance’s signifying breadth from the beginning, when, in the prefatory letter, this hateful dragon is described as a newcomer to England, having been altogether banished in the old time, when least corruption of life appeared amongst men. For he ouerthroweth the harmonie of the strings of the good gouernment of a common-wealth, by too much enriching some, and by oppressing and impouerishing some others, bringing the instrument out of tune: when as euery member of the same should liue contented in this vocation and execute his charge according to his profession. (Saint George for England, A6r)

In this instance, the governing metaphor of temperance refers not to the healthful balance among the four humours of the body, but to the harmonious tuning among the strings of a musical instrument. Although not explicitly mentioned in this sentence, temperance circulates in this miniature allegory in two relevant senses: first, in a technical or mechanical sense, referring to the ‘keeping of time in music’ (OED 3c, first attested 1549); also relevant here is the cognate verb ‘to

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temper,’ meaning ‘[t]o tune, adjust the pitch (of a musical instrument),’ and ‘[t]o bring into harmony, to attune’ (OED 15, 16, first attested 1300, 1374).35 More crucial to an understanding of the mobility of temperance, though, is the way in which this metaphorical shift relocates the virtue from the human body to the object world, from a consuming agent to a material commodity itself. As we will see, this shift represents a crucial stage in temperance’s discursive migrations during this period: its convergence with time itself as a site of ethical discipline, and its lending of its own ethical cachet to time as a publicly administered and proto-capitalistic commodity. A similar relocation of temperance from the body to the object world attends the developing representation of the dragon, the villain who has spoiled the Chaucerian utopia of England. In the prefatory letter ‘To the louing reader,’ the dragon – along with the entire apparatus of the romance narrative – is anatomized and allegorized: This dragon is called Foenus politicum, his two wings are Vsura palliata and Vsura explicata, and his taile inconstant Cambium. The virgin is the kings treasure: the champion Saint George is the kings authoritie, armed with the right armor of a Christian: who with the sword of the spirit of Gods most holy word, explained and corroborated with seuerall other lawes, signified by the Pybal horse whereon he was mounted: did destroy the cruell dragon, rescuing the kings daughter, and deliuering the commonwealth, as by the circumstances of the historie may appeare . . . (Saint George for England, C8r)

‘Usura palliata’ and ‘usura explicata’ – literally, ‘cloaked’ and ‘plain’ usury – refer to two different mercantile practices that Malynes blames for depleting England of monetary stores. ‘Usura explicata’ is what we commonly understand as usury: moneylending at interest.36 Usury is ‘cloaked’ or ‘palliata,’ for Malynes, when interest rates much higher than the legal limit of ten per cent are hidden in the guise of exchange transactions.37 The dragon’s tail, ‘inconstant Cambium,’ harms the commonwealth by undervaluing English coin in foreign currency exchanges. The body of the dragon represents the foreign (fantastical, mythical, exotic) threats to England’s economic health, while the virgin whom St George protects from corporeal violation represents England’s restoration to political and economic autonomy. The prefatory letter, that is to say, suggests that a corporeal definition of the temperate ideal subtends the protectionist polemic. But the

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referential ground shifts precipitously as the tract continues, affecting both the tenor (usury) and the vehicle (embodied dragon) of this unusual figure. As Jonathan Gil Harris has argued, usury loses its specificity for Malynes in the tract, and begins to refer not to moneylending at interest but more generally to the ‘making of money a merchandize’ (Saint George for England, 42): the commodification of money itself.38 Similarly, the dragon becomes unmoored from the body that is described with such allegorical precision in the passage above. In an eerily oracular passage from Saint George for England, the dragon’s body loses its original allegorical purchase, replaced by something more ubiquitous and looming, if less materially present: time itself, the x-axis of monetary accumulation in usurious transactions. Although the dragon still ‘hath two wings to fly withal,’ Malynes explains, it chooses instead, passively, to ‘rid[e] vpo[n] the wings of time,’ wings that clearly work to its advantage: [H]e omitteth no time, albeit he seemeth with the index of the dyall not to moue, when he is continually moouing, and stirred in such sort, that when men begin to perceiue his motion, and pretend to runne from him: he doth so allure them, that the more they runne, the more he seemeth to follow them, as the moone doth to the little children, whereby his motion is the lesse regarded. (Saint George for England, 57–8, emphasis original)

Malynes’s dragon has conscripted time into his airborne battalion. Louring above, casting a shadow over the men who scurry below like ‘little children,’ both the dragon and time mock the futility of mortal attempts to measure, mark, or control the latter according to the crude measurements of the man-made ‘dyall.’ Comparing the dragon to the ‘moone,’ this passage recalls the tract’s opening Chaucerian adaptation, with its analogy between zodiacal and mortal bodies. The direction of the analogy, though, is inverted, as the serpentine body ascends and assumes a heavenly omnipresence. While the Chaucerian passage narrates a fall from the heavens to the earth below, the dragon moves in the other direction, reversing the theological Fall – turning back the lapsarian clock, so to speak – as Malynes specifies elsewhere in the tract: ‘[T]his serpentine dragon . . . creepeth not vpon his belly, as the serpent of Paradise was condemned to do . . . And whether euer that serpent went skipping vpon his taile before the curse, I know not: but I am sure this beareth his taile aloft like a conquerer, riding in his triumphant chariot. The curse of the Scripture denounced against him

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is neglected’ (Saint George for England, 11–12, emphasis original). This dragon is everywhere, temporally as well as spatially speaking. The particularity of the dragon’s body fades from view here as it transcends the constraints of time and space and assumes the form of a maleficent god. Submerging the humoral resonances of England’s economic predicament, formerly described as a national distemper or a failure of appetititive temperance, this passage redefines usury and other deleterious forms of monetary exchange as sins against a temporal order. The temporal register remains important to Malynes as a means of representing both usury and the specific forms of political intemperance it entails. In his magnum opus, entitled Consuetudo, vel, Lex Mercatoria, Malynes develops further the association between temporality and temperance in a passage that omits the metaphorical body of the dragon altogether, and replaces it with the image of a mechanical clock. Complaining once again about the perniciousness of usury, Malynes excoriates the system of indebtedness that requires pawn brokers, for example, to charge three-digit interest rates in order to make payments to their own usurious moneylenders. Usury thereby breeds usury, he explains: so that one thing driueth or inforceth another. Like as in a clocke where there be many wheeles, the first wheele being stirred driueth the next, and that the third, and so forth till that the last that moueth the instrument that strikes the clocke: or like as in a presse going in at a straight, where the formost is driuen by him that is next him, and the next by him that followes him, and the third by some violent and strong thing that driues him forward, which is the first and principall cause of putting forward all the rest afore him; if hee were kept backe and staied, all they that goe afore would stay withall. This is therefore called causa efficiens; and so is Vsurie Politike, vnlesse the biting of it bee hindered as shall bee declared. (Consuetudo, 337)

Judith Anderson remarks that the mechanical instruments in this passage are ‘proto-Dickensian’ in their association of ‘relentless cruelty’ with ‘the products of human invention.’39 As a bloodless signs of the mechanization of humanity, the clock is indeed nightmarish. To similar effect, the human analogue to the clock in this passage is the ‘presse’ or crowd: a mass of persons absorbed into the unthinking mob, deprived of their humanity and rationality, and governed only

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by the simplest law of physics, the causa efficiens. (Perhaps there is even an oblique pun on the printing press, further suggesting the mechanization of a formerly organic body.)40 In context, this mechanistic representation represents an enormous shift in ideological, representational, and political history. Malynes’s image of the clock contains only the faintest echo of the virtuous clocks attributed to the allegorical Temperance in the Rouen iconography (see chapter 1). In such echoes as well as in its novelty, Malynes’s clock attests to the mobility of temperance, and of conceptualizations of the virtues as English colonialism continues to develop. As scholars of the period have long recognized, medieval and Renaissance objections to usury generally draw on Aristotle and Aquinas, who insist that money ‘cannot breed because it is naturally barren, its natural telos being merely to faciliatate exchange.’41 Malynes’s penchant for the romance narrative as allegorical vehicle certainly provides an opportunity to critique usury in this tradition as a corporeal sin, a failure to ‘use’ the body’s sexual capacities and rather to ‘abuse’ them (to recall his diction about the Spaniard’s appetites in The Center of the Circle of Commerce). But Malynes departs entirely from this moral tradition, invoking instead the clock: a figure that was privileged in the late sixteenth century, as we have seen, to represent temperance as a novel virtue of time management and mercantile efficiency. In this case, though, the clock’s mechanical precision no longer symbolizes ‘virtuous’ technological progress, which Lynn White, Jr identifies with late-medieval depictions of the hourglass and mechanical clock.42 Rather, this clock seems to be the ancestor of the twenty-first-century science-fiction nightmare: the technological instrument that appropriates the consciousness, the ambition, and the will of its creators. At certain moments in Malynes’s oeuvre – as with the voracious dragon in Saint George for England, or the hungry Spaniard in The Center of the Circle of Commerce – temperance and temporal control are the province of the incorporated agent and his appetite; despite Malynes’s incendiary rhetoric, the solution to England’s economic problems, in these cases, seems as easy as regulating the alimentary appetite, restoring a balance of humours in the body. But when the dragon begins to ride ‘vpon the wings of time,’ and the wheels of the clock begin to ‘driue[] or inforce[]’ one another, temperance has moved outside of the body, to the mechanical commodity, or, even more abstractly, to the inexorable march of time itself. No longer ‘the self-control that authorizes individuality,’43 temperance has migrated into an impersonal realm of

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mechanized commodity-exchange, where its temporalization represents not a testament to human achievement but a threatening loss of human agency. For Malynes, finally, this is the tragedy of England’s entanglement in international trade, colonial investment, and consumption of foreign goods: the sacrifice of the prerogative of temperance by the embodied, virtuous subject – and, by analogy, the ’embodied’ political state – to a mechanical abstraction on which the English have no special purchase, to which they can make no special claim. They have sacrificed their agency, along with their virtue, to the inexorable mandates of the lex mercatoria. The ruthless efficiency of the clock displaces the archaic technology of the quill pen, with its anthropomorphic head and its humoral purging of ink onto the page. Malynes’s jeremiad for temperance comprises this progressive mechanization – of figures, of metaphors, but most importantly of temperance itself: once a subjective virtue, now arrogated into the service of international commercial exchange in New World goods, and of the colonial endeavours that are its enabling condition. Coffee, Chocolate, and Efficiency in the New World As England approaches the final quarter of the seventeenth century, antagonism toward importation of New World commodities remains strong. In 1672, J[ohn] H[ancock], ‘a Well-wisher to thy Health,’ issues a volume comprising King James’s Counterblaste as well as other texts lambasting consumption of foreign luxury commodities. The parting shots of J.H.’s fusillade take the form of ‘Witty Poems against Tobacco, by Josh. Sylvester.’44 These satiric verses include appeals to temperance in its most xenophobic, nationalist, and racist formulation, drawing on the revisionary geohumoralism of Renaissance England, which arrogates for the English the privileges of temperate climates, temperaments, and virtues. This national, proprietary conception of temperance underlies, for instance, one poem’s depiction of tobacco as a global ‘black Sea of smoke’ that ‘reaches well-nigh round, from Pole to Pole / Among the Moors, Turks, Tartars, Persians, / And other Ethnicks full of Ignorance / Of God and good . . . / . . . / If then Tobacconing be good, how is’t, / That lewdest, loosest, basest, foolishest, / The most unthrifty, most intemperate, / Most vitious, most debaucht, most desperate / Pursue it most[?]’45 In this case, intemperance designates the perverse and excessive appetite for tobacco, as well as the

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humoral composition associated with Asian and African populations whose imbalanced temperaments, according to Renaissance geohumoralism, derive from their native climates. The poem that concludes the volume, however, departs in one crucial way from this by now familiar diatribe. Rather than being directed ‘against Tobacco,’ this final instalment in the doggerel collection is entitled ‘A Broad-side against Coffee: or, The Marriage of the Turk.’ As the title implies, the verse allegorizes the preparation of a cup of coffee as an ill-fated marriage between a ‘Turkish renegade’ and a feminine personification of ‘Christian water.’ The motivation for this allegorical choice appears to be geographical, England owing its introduction to coffee to Near Eastern travel narratives.46 At first, the allegory seems to proceed along similarly empirical lines: ‘Coffee so brown as berry does appear, / Too swarthy for a Nymph so fair, so clear.’ The adverb ‘too,’ and its critique of miscegenation, reveal a racist ideology; at the same time, the comparison maps neatly onto an empirical observation (coffee being darker than the water in which it is brewed). The allegory proceeds along these lines, alighting on vehicles that combine racism with descriptive precision: The melting Nymph distills her self to do’t, Whilst the Slave Coffee must be beaten to’t: Incorporate him close as close may be, Pause but a while, and he is none of he; Which for a truth, and not a story tells, No faith is to be kept with Infidels. Sure he suspects, and shuns her as a Whore, And loves, and kills, like the Venetian Moor; Bold Asian Brat! with speed our confines flee; Water, though common, is too good for thee. Sure Coffee’s vext he has the breeches lost, For she’s above, and he lies undermost[.]47

The narrative dramatizes the steps of coffee preparation in some detail: the grinding of the coffee beans (‘Coffee must be beaten to’t’); the stirring of the grinds and the water together (‘Incorporate him close as close may be’); the delay for the grounds to settle to the bottom (‘Pause but a while’); the process of such settling (‘he . . . shuns her as a Whore’); and finally, the cup of coffee ready to drink, with the water on top and the grounds below (‘For she’s above, and he lies undermost’).

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At the same time, without sacrificing technical precision, the poem conveys an impressive range of racist stereotypes. The ‘Slave Coffee’ begins as a recalcitrant, atavistic figure who must be ‘beaten’ into compliance (in contrast to his watery English bride, whose extraordinary virtue is further refined, through distillation, as she prepares for this ignominious wedding). In the next sentence, this bestial slave turns into a wily Arab trickster: even kept ‘close as close may be,’ he proves not-himself (with a possible reference to the way in which the depleted coffee grounds lack their original pungency). Classing the Arab among the ‘Infidels’ – who are by definition unfaithful (L. in-fidelis) – the poem underscores his wiliness by tautology. In the next imagistic turn, this slave cum trickster transforms himself into the tragically deceived Othello, an exemplar of the intemperate African prone to the passions of anger and jealousy. In the conclusion to the passage, though, Coffee proves unlike Othello, whose unfounded suspicion causes his tragedy; this potable Othello, on the contrary, finds himself truly emasculated by his cuckolding bride who lords ‘above’ him, like a ‘common’ woman, lacking Desdemona’s refinement, deference, and innocence. In its final claim that the ‘Asian Brat . . . has the breeches lost,’ the poem articulates Orientalism’s twin tropes of feminization and infantilization. Although coffee does not hail from England’s colonial territories, it clearly shares with tobacco a susceptibility to virulent racist diatribes and paranoid defences of England’s cultural and humoral purity. Without specifically invoking temperance, this poem decrying coffee imprecates the substance as a bad mixture, which the Greeks would describe as acrasia: badly mixed, intemperate (and the name, of course, of the arch-villainess in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss). Sylvester’s poem, and its anthologization decades after his death, thus attests to the continued diffusion of temperance into the realm of emergent discourses of commodity exchange, globalization, race, and miscegenation. Sylvester’s poem in fact raises the anxieties about racial pollution, already apparent in James’s Counterblaste, to a new pitch. In his prefatory letter ‘To the Reader,’ James describes tobacco, ironically, as an insubstantial foe: ‘[S]ince the Subiect is but of Smoke, I thinke the fume of an idle braine, may serue for a sufficient battery against so fumous and feeble an enemy’ (B1v).48 Sylvester’s poem describes the English confrontation with the foreign commodity as a messier process. The poem describes the settling of the coffee to the bottom of the cup in terms of sexual suspicion and impurity: coffee ‘suspects, and

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shuns her [water] as a Whore, / And loves, and kills, like the Venetian Moor.’ The invocation of Othello seems to be dictated by racial stereotype rather than technical accuracy; why would the coffee ‘suspect’ the water with which it mixes in a single cup? With whom might the coffee grounds be competing (that is to say, who plays Michael Cassio in this caffeinated Othello)? As bizarrely unmotivated as this dramatic analogue may seem to be, it represents the poem’s attempt, however unsuccessful, to provide narrative justification for coffee’s ‘shun [ning]’ of the water: the way the grounds precipitate to the bottom, rather than dissolving to create a uniform solution. This separation seems to trouble Sylvester, compelling him to provide an awkward narrative rationale, representing as it does the failed marital ‘incorporation’ of these two entities into a single body or substance. At the same time, though, the suggestion that Coffee ‘kills’ his paramour – alongside her implied infidelity, and thus her defilement, in this allegory of sexual purity – underscores the incompleteness of this separation. Neither fully married nor fully shunned, Coffee and Water, in this narrative, render each other unrecognizable. Coffee becomes alienated from itself – ‘he is none of he’ – and the formerly pure Water becomes ‘common,’ a ‘Whore.’ As a result of these transformations, the poem’s directive to the ‘Bold Asian Brat’ – ‘with speed our confines flee’ – rings hollow; such a separation would be no more possible than the Counterblaste’s recommended fortification of the English body politic, whose internal temperance has been compromised by the flow of goods throughout a global body. Although most of a century has passed since the initial publication of the Counterblaste by the time Sylvester publishes, both the xenophobic desire to insulate England from foreign influence, and the metaphorical collapse of this possibility, persist in his ‘Witty Poem.’ The verse’s pun on ‘incorporate’ exemplifies this continuity. The verb signifies literally, applying to the coffee grounds and the water (‘to mix or blend thoroughly together,’ OED 1a); figuratively, designating the marriage of the Nymph and the Turk (and in this sense, OED 1b cites Romeo and Juliet: ‘You shall not stay alone, / Till Holy Church incorporate two in one’);49 and politically, commenting poignantly on the fear of coffee’s irreversible darkening, poisoning, or defiling of English culture (‘to receive or adopt into a . . . body politic,’ OED 3b). James’s wilful pretence that tobacco would prove a ‘feeble . . . enemy’ eventually falters on the metaphor of the temperate body politic; Sylvester’s poem, even more radically, obviates coffee’s capacity ‘with speed our

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confines [to] flee.’ As much as the verse laments coffee as a defilement of the English, watery temperament, it acknowledges this effect as a fait accompli. James’s tract at least held out the possibility of ‘temperate mixture’ and ‘cures of contrary qualities’ as a potential, if ultimately unsustainable, salutary effect of international exchange (B4v). Sylvester, on the contrary, imagines transnational commodity exchange causing wild oscillations from one intemperate extreme to another, and thus serving as a nail in the coffin of English temperance. Temperance and its violation, for Sylvester, justify ideologies of economic and political protectionism and insularity. Sylvester’s glum acquiescence to the national intemperance occasioned by international trade and foreign commodity consumption finds many analogues in the latter decades of the seventeenth century. As England’s economic and ideological investment in New World colonial settlement continues apace, some writers begin to depart from the protectionist polemic, taking advantage of temperance’s expansive conceptual range to consider foreign commodities and influences in a more sympathetic vein. Gaining a foothold in the English market later in the century than tobacco, coffee and chocolate reaped the benefits of the growing appetite for, and familiarity with, foreign import products, along with the promises and paranoia they inspired. As was the case with tobacco, their arrival and consumption in England are frequently theorized in the language of temperance. Although their political and dietary recommendations contrast sharply to those issued earlier in the century by James I and Gerard Malynes, the pro-coffee and -chocolate writings I consider here share with their predecessors the newly broadened field of semantic possibility afforded by that virtue, and evince an astonishing resourcefulness in marshalling temperance under their own polemical banners. Writing between 1672 and 1685, William Hughes, Thomas Trapham, and John Chamberlayne all draw on first-person experience and observation in the New World colonies, under both English and Spanish control,50 to praise these commodities specifically for sustaining temperate constitutions, habits, and behaviours. The version of temperance that links these three texts, moreover, is more radically mercantile than any of its predecessors: a virtue of temporal control and efficiency that organizes activities ranging from metabolic function to physical exertion to intellectual labour. While James’s Counterblaste bore witness to the failure of the traditional, humoral formulation of temperance in the colonial context; and Malynes’s tracts subsequently relocated temperance

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from the body into the mechanical, amoral figure of the clock; these writers more sympathetic to colonialism represent not a departure from but a logical extension of this conceptual transformation. Hughes, Trapham, and Chamberlayne reserve special praise for chocolate and coffee, among other healthful New World products, because they encourage temperance in the sense of efficient temporal management: wakefulness, productivity, vigilance against sloth – the whole variety of attitudes and practices that will finally evolve into something recognizable as a capitalistic ethos. These writers muster the full force of temperance as a mercantile virtue to advocate for continued amassing and importation of New World goods – in short, for colonialism and primitive accumulation. Careful readings of these texts, I will show, lay the foundation for a crucial ideological and ethical pre-history of economic development during the subsequent centuries. William Hughes’s 1672 tract The American Physitian is essentially a botanical dictionary compiled from Hughes’s observations and experiments in Jamaica, which he esteems ‘to be as temperate, healthful, and beneficial, as most places are in the Temperate Zone, as well for us English men, as others.’51 The use of temperance here seems to be undistinguished: drawing on familiar affiliations, in geohumoral discourse, between temperate climates and temperate humoral constitutions. The rest of the introductory epistle ‘To the Reader,’ though, creates an instructive gloss on this definition, comprising as it does a series of exhortations to the English about how to position themselves in relation to this temperate clime. Hughes explains that he had hoped to make one more voyage to the Caribbean, in which my endeavours should not have been wanting for the bringing and fitting of Roots, Seeds, and other Vegetables, to our Climate, for to increase the number of Rarities which we have here in our Gardens already; in the which I perceive much may be done, if further industry were used: but I have yet met with no opportunity to accomplish the same; and therefore hope that some others who have conveniency will do something herein, for the promotion of further knowledge in these and many other excellent things which those parts afford, and we are yet unacquainted with.52

The motives for continued exploration are twofold: the desire for knowledge and the desire for goods, with the expectation that the latter will lead to the former; botanical ‘Rarities’ should be brought back

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to ‘our Gardens’ in England, forming a living archive in which to research medical and commercial uses for these plants. In this passage, Hughes offers a proto-Enlightenment apologia for the avarice of Renaissance colonialism, a perspective that has been adopted by a number of recent Renaissance scholars, who have interpreted humanism and consumerism as two sides of the same coin, simultaneous symptoms of European acquisitiveness and ambition.53 The desire for goods, according to Hughes, is nothing more than an objective correlative of the desire to know. In the same breath with which he designates Jamaica ‘temperate’ and hospitable to the English temperament, Hughes identifies it as a warehouse of goods for the taking, a treasure trove that can sustain England’s colonial and material success. If this praise of the ‘Temperate Zone’ implies a Galenic interest in the humoral temperament, and an expectation that Jamaica’s botany will allow ‘The American Physitian’ to discover new means to promote and maintain bodily temperance, the urgency of Hughes’s admonitions implies another dimension to the virtue: Let us press on therefore whilst we are here, and be no more idle . . . Man, letting the Reins of his Will run at random, not imploying his time in some honest Exercise, by the allurements of the world, having much converse therein, is in great danger, by little and little, of being wholly corrupted, daily walking amongst our Enemies who seek to devour us; and being once taken and intangled in their Net, it will be hard for us to get free from it again, until we sink down, and are drowned.54

The ‘Reins of the Will’ are a trope of temperance, as suggested by the frequent attribution of a bridle and bit to Temperance in medieval and Renaissance allegories (see chapter 1). Originally derived from readings of Plato’s Phaedrus – where ‘the charioteer of the soul tr[ies] to control the violent, ugly steed of passion and to encourage the glorious steed of rational aspiration’55 – the reins symbolize temperance in texts ranging from Sidney’s Arcadia, where it represents moderation in governance, to Walsingham’s advice to James VI of Scotland to ‘bridle’ his ‘passions’ by ‘temperance and wisdom.’56 This passage simultaneously invokes temperance with this traditional imagery and assimilates that virtue to a model of temporal efficiency; ‘letting the Reins of his Will run at random’ amounts, in Hughes’s formulation, to ‘not imploying his time in some honest Exercise.’ Temperance is the virtuous restraint not just of the passions, but of the temptation to waste time;

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moderation and the productivity of ‘honest Exercise’ here become indistinguishable. While Hughes, warning his would-be temperate readers to avoid entanglement in the ‘Evil Net of the sensualities of this World,’ ventriloquizes English suspicions about foreign commodity consumption, The American Physitian as a botanical compendium excludes Jamaica’s natural resources from the category of such ‘sensualities,’ seeming to be interested in temperance less as alimentary moderation than as temporal efficiency.57 Hughes devotes an entire chapter to ‘the vertues of the Drink called Chocolate’ – ‘vertues’ that are tantamount to the efficiency and temporal economy that Hughes has elaborated in his introductory epistle. Chocolate’s principal virtue, from Hughes’s perspective, is its capacity to sustain vigorous labour. As a ‘very good aliment . . . that nourisheth super omne alimentum,’58 chocolate sustains the labour of all classes of people: This most Excellent Nectar . . . throughout the greatest part of America . . . all of them unanimously, of what rank or quality soever, take a mornings drink of it; yea, even the meanest servants, before they go forth to work, do take a draught thereof, or else they are hardly able to hold out and perform their tasks until eleven a Clock, their usual time of going to dinner . . .59 It is an exceeding nourishing [sic] to all such as require a speedy refreshment after travel, hard labour, or violent exercise, exhilarating and corroborating all parts and faculties of the body: And doubtless there is no laborious man here in perfect health and strength, that hath taken much pains, and fasted long, but findeth himself much refreshed, and also more active and lively after a good dinner received; and certainly so it is with those that drink this liquor, for much more vigour is obtained thereby . . .60 This Drink . . . is generally used by the Nobility, Gentry, and most observing persons of several Nations; by people of all Ranks and Qualities, young and old, of both Sexes, especially amongst the Spaniards, Natives, and other Inhabitants there, who esteem it their chief aliment, and take it for sustenance at any time, without limitation, especially after travel, or being tired with much exercise or business, Nature requiring then more refreshment then ordinary . . .61

Chocolate serves as a social leveller in these passages, sustaining American labourers irrespective of regional, cultural, and class

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identity. Echoing Hughes’s earlier admonition to his English readers to ‘press on therefore whilst we are here, and be no more idle,’ this passage recommends chocolate to all who would avoid sloth, while seeming to efface distinctions between the colonizer engaged in primitive accumulation and the colonized subject labouring in his service, implying a sort of common cause. The American Physitian thus announces its dramatic departure from the Counterblaste, which – clinging desperately to the belief that commodities salutary to the New World natives could poison English consumers – idealized England as a walled-off fortress, and the English as temperamentally exceptional. Hughes, instead, focuses on the temperamental similarities of the English and the colonized Americans. This strategy is of course self-serving – distinguishing the English from the Spanish villains of the Black Legend – but also radical in its implications. Hughes insists that corporeal responses to chocolate, including the body’s capacity for labour, transcend nationality, race, and class – a possibility that the Counterblaste too approached, but quickly disavowed, as we have seen. Following as they do on Hughes’s introduction to Jamaica as a climatologically temperate locale, these remarks on chocolate’s universal effects resonate with temperance in the humoral sense, suggesting the healthful flow of chocolate through any and all bodies, of whatever ethnicity or nationality. Once again, however, just as Hughes’s rhetoric begins to invoke temperance – this time, via the humours, rather than the bridle – the text turns toward temporality. Temperance’s most important consequences, Hughes thus implies, are economic, resulting from the use of time in vigorous and productive labour. Although his tone is immeasurably more optimistic, Hughes echoes Malynes, invoking the mechanical clock as a figure for temperance qua temporal discipline. Just as the relentless forward motion of the gears of Malynes’s clock obviated the capacity for human empathy and reason – forcing usurious borrowers to pass along high interest rates to their debtors in turn – here the individual body is not allowed to rest until the clock strikes the hour for dinner. Hughes praises chocolate for its ability to make the Galenic body, with its fluid temperament, adjust to the exacting demands of the mechanical clock. As the virtue that underlies Hughes’s encomium, temperance thus expands beyond the parameters of personal time management and into the discourse of colonial labour. This particular conceptual extension marks something a break with the Galenic paradigm that underlies so many conceptions of

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temperance in the period: calibrated to the clock, temperance refers not to the internal homeostasis of the labouring body, but rather to the external markers of its striving against idleness, its material productivity. Scholars who have worked to historicize the nascent popularity of chocolate and coffee during this period in English history have frequently cited seventeenth-century religious controversy to explain these changing habits of consumption. For such critics, coffee and chocolate map neatly onto the most famous religious division of the late Renaissance in western Europe. Eric R. Wolf and Wolfgang Schivelbusch, for example, offer versions of the same binary reading: coffee is ‘the liquid manifestation of the Protestant ethic that lay beneath the economic modernization of northern Europe’; chocolate, on the other hand, ‘represented the Baroque, Catholic acknowledgment of corporeal being as against Protestant asceticism.’62 Some seventeenth-century writers do indeed understand chocolate as a fundamentally Catholic commodity. Early Spanish travellers and conquistadores wrote about chocolate consumption as a metaphorically cannibalistic act, because the ruddied lips of Indian consumers – dyed bright red by the ground annatto seed used to flavour the drink – appeared to be stained with blood. In the Spanish imagination, both actual cannibalism and its vegetarian, chocoholic counterpart represented perversions of the Catholic Eucharist, the divinely sanctioned consumption of human flesh.63 With the zeal of the convert, sixteenthand seventeenth-century English Protestants commonly extended such charges of cannibalism to Catholicism itself, not only to ‘perversions’ thereof. To make inroads into English culture in the seventeenth century, Edmund Campos explains, chocolate relies on its Catholic affiliations, ‘for the first Englishmen to acquire a taste for chocolate were “hispaniolized” Englishmen, or Catholic dissidents who had adopted Spanish habits in Hispanic exile.’64 As attested by Hughes’s encomium, though – and by the wide availability of chocolate in England by mid-century (although it never rivalled coffee and tea in popularity)65 – chocolate was not contemporarily understood as a substance suitable only for Catholic temperaments. Drawing from the rich storehouse of semantic possibilities that temperance acquired over the course of the English Renaissance, these writers advocate chocolate consumption partly on the grounds of temperance qua temporal control, a virtue that English Protestants wished to claim as peculiarly their own.

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Thomas Trapham’s A Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica (1679) accomplishes such an ‘Englishing’ of New World chocolate by reconciling the commodity to the ethos of efficiency delineated so carefully by Hughes. Trapham follows Hughes in aligning temperance and temporal efficiency, and in laying some of the groundwork for the ethos of English efficiency that continues to flourish as the early modern period evolves into the Enlightenment. Trapham does offer a slight adjustment to Hughes’s recommendations about the best disposition for the English subject acclimating to the New World. He expresses his hope that he ‘might happily awaken [his] Country-men’ visiting the Americas to the risk of surprisals, which of all is the greatest evil the English usually lay open to, through too hardy a courage rather then remiss supineness: they being too prone to slight their lives rather than be curious in their preservation; a temper happy and agreeable enough to the northern Climes, but unsutable to the torrid Zone, where through the great activity of Nature most sudden changes are effected, a sound health oft precipitated into Distemper, and such Distempers posting to the Grave, ere the sluggish observer be awakened to prevention.66

The very disposition that Hughes espouses is Trapham’s primary cause of concern. While the former urged, ‘Let us press on therefore whilst we are here, and be no more idle,’ the latter finds that ‘too hardy a courage’ and a tendency to ‘slight their lives’ can throw English expatriates into a state of ‘Distemper.’ ‘Lives’ in this context means ‘that which is necessary to sustain life’ (OED 3rd ed. 1c); Trapham here re-evaluates the English tendency to vaunt abstinence (from food, drink, alcohol, sleep) as a virtue. Like Spenser’s Guyon, who faints in the Cave of Mammon ‘For want of food, and sleepe, which two vpbeare, / Like mightie pillours, this fraile life of man’ (2.7.65.3–4), Trapham’s countrymen, he opines, risk a surfeit of austerity, overshooting the Aristotelian mean of temperate consumption. As Trapham explains this recommendation further, his fundamental agreement with Hughes re-emerges from this comparatively superficial contradiction. Spartan self-denial might work well enough in England, Trapham concedes, but the New World is characterized by ‘great activity of Nature’ and ‘sudden changes.’ America’s basal metabolism is simply faster than Europe’s, according to Trapham, and the habits of self-denial that are adequate for a life in England will

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render a transplanted subject in Jamaica ‘sluggish,’ needing to be ‘awakened’ before his sleep drives him into the ‘Grave.’ Along with Hughes, Trapham advocates increased consumption, and thus the English appetite for primitive accumulation and foreign importation, as appropriate responses to the rigours of colonial settlement and ambition. Trapham claims, in fact, that increased consumption in the New World facilitates and instils temperance more effectively than do the ‘Customs and Manners of living’ in England, confirming the semantic recalibration of temperance during the latter seventeenth century. I confess it is deeply natural, where ere we are, to adhere to our earliest implanted inclinations, wherefore though we change our place we seem loth to change our ingeny . . . [and so] we transport northern chilly propensities, and customs thereon depending, into the southern hot Climes, and [find them] most improper and destructive to health, at least long life . . . The quantity, times and quality of our English Drink and Food, ought, according to the best of my reason, to be wholly changed for other more natural and agreeable to the clime and circumstances of living. As for the quantity we neither ought to eat so much or so little as may well agree in England, for excess in either cannot so suddain threaten life there as here, for Nature is not so yare with her delinquents in the cold northern Tracts as between the Tropicks, where all motions being necessarily more quick, the punishment of all Intemperances afford less time for Repentance.67

Life in the American ‘Tropicks,’ Trapham says, encourages and even requires greater temperance than does life in England, Nature being ‘yare’ – ‘Alert, nimble, active, brisk, quick’ (OED 2) – to exact physiological tribute for intemperate acts in warmer climates. Trapham thus assumes a perspective on English contact with colonial populations and products diametrically opposed to the position James staked out in the Counterblaste at the beginning of the century, identifying New World colonialism and primitive accumulation, rather than traditional English asceticism, as the natural medium for cultivating temperance. Because warmer climates like Jamaica’s are more exacting in demanding temperance from their inhabitants, Trapham claims, Europeans transplanted to these colonial locations must adjust the ‘quantity, times, and quality’ of their consumption to suit their new surroundings. The relationship of ‘quantity’ to temperance is clear

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enough – ‘neither . . . so much or so little’ – in a sense consistent with Trapham’s earlier reliance on the Aristotelian mean. ‘Time’ and ‘quality’ as Trapham explains them, though, are less Aristotelian than temporal, in keeping with the novel Renaissance registers of temperance’s semantic range. ‘Time’ as it affects consumption is a major preoccupation for Trapham; much of his chapter ‘Of the Customs and Manners of Living’ comprises a precise schedule for the European who needs to synchronize his patterns of consumption with his new surroundings. Trapham recommends drinking chocolate upon rising in the morning; eating a light meal – lighter than a typical English breakfast – around ten in the morning; another drink of chocolate around four in the afternoon; and finally a plentiful supper between seven and eight in the evening. Water, followed by candied warm fruits and roots, should be consumed frequently between meals, and always before drinking chocolate, but never afterward.68 This detailed, prescriptive timetable is not merely a trope of the manuscript diary genre whose ascendancy in seventeenth-century English culture has been so compellingly chronicled by Stuart Sherman.69 It is also, by 1679, when Trapham publishes his Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica, a trope of English New World travel literature. Consider, for example, the similarly precise daily schedule of personal chocolate consumption provided in Thomas Gage’s 1648 The English-American, His Travail by Sea and Land, or, A New Survey of the West-India’s. Gage details the timing of his four daily cups, adding, ‘when I was purposed to sit up late to study, I would take another cup at about seven or eight at night, which would keep me waking till about midnight.’70 Like the other writers I discuss here, Trapham and Gage link chocolate not only to good health, but also to productivity, which requires the regimentation of the body according to the hours ticked off by the mechanical clock. Trapham’s very inclusion of time as a crucial axis of alimentary regulation attests to the semantic extensibility of the virtue of temperance. In his tract, as in Hughes’s, temperance includes not only the way in which food, in both quantity and quality, affects the homeostatic temperament of the individual body, but also the way in which that body may be synchronized with external demands for productive labour in the colonial context, in accordance with personal, national, material, and/or ethical ambitions.71 The final text in this trio, John Chamberlayne’s The Manner of Making of Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate as It Is Used in Most Parts of Europe, Asia,

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Africa, and America, with Their Virtues, Newly Done out of French and Spanish (1685), represents even more ambitious claims for chocolate as a temperate substance conducive to temporal efficiency and productivity.72 Chamberlayne’s description of cocoa entails a rush of the language of temperance, suggesting that he associates the consumption of this decidedly New World product with the virtue formerly understood as specifically English. In explaining the intrinsically temperate composition of chocolate, in the humoral sense, Chamberlayne deploys analogies that attest to the larger ethical, political, and colonial resonances of this virtue. [O]f two medicaments of contrary qualities, we artificially compose one, which is temperate, and moderate, just so by the action and reaction of the cold parts of the Cacao, the Chocolate receives a temperate and moderate quality, very little different from a mediocrity or mean between both, and . . . we shall venter to say that . . . it is purely temperate . . . [A]ll the parts of the Cacao [a]re not cold; for we have shew’d, that the buttery and oyly parts, which are in great number are hot, or at least temperate. Then although it be true, that the quantity of the Cacao put into the Chocolate is greater and stronger than all the other ingredients together . . . it remains somthing allayed, by the grinding, or rubbing together, by the means of the hot and buttery parts of the Cacao, and again on the otherside by the other ingredients that are hot in the second and third degree, it must needs be reduced to a mediocrity. Just as we see in two persons, that joyn their hands together, whereof the hands of the one are cold, and the others hot, those that are hot grow cold, and the cold hot, and finally both the one and the other, remain without that excess of heat, or cold which they had before, and at last become temperate. Like this does it happen to those that wrastle, at first they have their Forces strong and entire, but at last, by the action and reaction of the two adversaries striving together, they enfeeble and weaken themselves, so that the wrastling being ended, they remain weakned both the one and the other. ’Tis the opinion of Aristotle . . . that every Agent suffers as the Patient, so that we see, that which cuts is blunted by the thing that is cut, that that which heats is cooled, and that which pusheth or thrusteth is in some manner thrust back and repulsed. Hence I gather, that it is better to make use of the Chocolate sometime after it has been made than to take of it whilst new and fresh, but you must let it stand at the least a whole month together, for I judge so long time to be necessary, and very expedient, to the end that the contrary qualities may weaken and spend

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Beginning with a humoral vocabulary, Chamberlayne explains that the hybrid nature of cacao itself, alongside the native habit of mixing cacao with ‘hot’ ingredients (chili peppers, cinnamon, cloves, aniseed), results in a product that is itself ‘purely temperate,’ balanced between hot and cold. As he explains, chocolate conveys this internal equilibrium to the humoral body that ingests it: ‘for (I coming very much heated to visit one of my Patients, when I desired some water of them to cool my self) they advised me to take a Dish of Chocolate, with which I quenched my thirst, but taking it the next morning fasting it heated me and fortified my Stomack.’74 Temperance seems to refer both to the humoral constitution of a human body and to comestibles that can adjust that temperament toward the ideal of crasis. Just as Trapham and Hughes locate temperance both inside of the humoral subject and externally, in the commodified clock, so Chamberlayne locates temperance both in the consumer and in the commodity itself. Immediately following this humoral analysis, though, in a shift familiar from James’s expansive metaphor of the body politic, Chamberlayne increases the breadth of temperance’s semantic purchase. The humoral heat that is balanced within the cup of chocolate, and within the body of the chocolate consumer, corresponds to the attenuation of heat between ‘two persons, that joyn their hands together.’ This image of amity between two people of different ‘temperatures’ – a disparity that suggests different countries of origin, given the tenets of geohumoral discourse – represents a dramatic corrective to James’s xenophobic representation of the ‘adust constitution’ of ‘Indian’ bodies and ‘the intemperate heate of their Climat,’ which he adduces as reasons for the English to shun New World tobacco. While James perceived temperamental difference as a threat to English temperance, Chamberlayne represents chocolate consumption, and the ingestion of foreign cultural influence that it signifies, as a congenial reinforcement of that very virtue. Chamberlayne’s subsequent analogies – two wrestlers engaged in an energetic bout, an ‘Agent’ and a patient, a sharp blade and the material it cuts – reintroduce agonism into this colonial encounter, from a perspective more politically palatable, from a twenty-first-century vantage, than the xenophobia of earlier seventeenth-century texts. Recall that in

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the Counterblaste, James depicts England as a ‘fortresse’ and New World influence as the ‘strong enemie’ looking for weaknesses in its defences; while, on the other hand, contemporaneous English settlement in the New World substantiates the converse possibility: that America represents the fortress that has been invaded by the English. The latter possibility, in my reading, attests to the metaphorical instability that creeps into the Counterblaste under the cloak of the multivalent term ‘temperance,’ which the beleaguered James is unable to confine, semantically, to the insular English body politic. Chamberlayne’s analogy, on the contrary, acknowledges this multivalence at the outset. The wrestlers, regardless of who wins the match, both find themselves exhausted of aggressive energy; the cutting blade is dulled just as the cut surface is incised; ‘Agent’ and ‘Patient’ find themselves exchanging and sharing roles. Temperance, that is to say, seems in this instance to name a dynamic of mutual and inextricable influence played out in a global scene. Like coffee and water in Sylvester’s poem, the English and New World roles in this scenario are mutually constitutive; unlike Sylvester, though, Chamberlayne depicts this influence as productive, rather than perverting, of temperance. This implied expansion of temperance into an international and political register leads neatly into an admonition about time management, in which Chamberlayne urges patience and temporal delay on would-be chocolate consumers. Those who hope to improve their own temperate constitutions by drawing on chocolate’s ‘temperate and moderate quality . . . must let it stand at the least a whole month together’ before ingesting, by which time the product will be ‘reduced to a convenient temperament and mediocrity.’ Temperance in the sense of humoral balance is contingent on temperance in the sense of temporal delay. The temporal register makes itself felt only in this final, subtle gesture of Chamberlayne’s discussion of chocolate’s material composition, but other sections of The Manner of Making of Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate focus explicitly on the convergence of temperance with the virtues of efficiency and time management. The substances that occasion Chamberlayne’s interest in temporal efficiency are coffee and tea – the latter a commodity less ubiquitous in seventeenth-century New World travel narratives than are coffee and chocolate, but one that Chamberlayne identifies specifically with the Dutch East Indies, and thus with the growing international trade attendant on European exploration and colonialism.75 Although caffeine would not be isolated as an independent substance common to coffee and tea until

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the early nineteenth century, Chamberlayne articulates the primary benefits of these beverages using a single vocabulary. He thinks of coffee and tea not in ‘predominantly humoral terms,’ as ‘psychoactive’ substances, as Jordan Goodman’s account would predict,76 but as ethical substances. Temperance thus resonates in the Aristotelian register once again, while retaining its humoral, mercantile, and colonial connotations. To put a finer point on it: these beverages facilitate temperance qua temporal discipline. As with chocolate, Chamberlayne begins his discussion of coffee and tea by characterizing them as Galenically temperate substances, which in turn produce temperance in the body of the consumer. Coffee is ‘temperate in respect of cold, by reason of some heat, which is found mingled therewith: For this grain is composed of two different substances; to wit, the one gross and terren, whereby it strengthens and corroborates, and the other is thought to be made up of warm parts, by which it heats, cleanses, and opens.’ Chamberlayne also prescribes coffee to remediate the effects of intemperate behaviour, for ‘[i]t is an extraordinary ease . . . [a]fter having eat or drunk too much.’77 Tea also ‘heats moderately,’ and it too is sufficiently temperate to neutralize profound symptoms of intemperance, including drunkenness: ‘it disintoxicates those that are fuddl’d . . . eas[ing] the burden of those inconveniences which this brutal excess brings along with it, by reason that it dries and cleanses all the superfluous and peccant humours, and that it disperses the vapours which cause sleep and overcome a man when he desires to be waking.’78 The humoral account of temperance, however, proves inadequate to express the virtues of these stimulating beverages, and Chamberlayne, like the writers considered above, turns to the temporal register. Among the many virtues for which the Turks praise coffee, Chamberlayne explains, is its ability to sustain wakefulness and productivity: ‘They also say that after Supper it hinders drowsiness, and for that reason those that would study by Night do then drink thereof.’79 Several pages later, Chamberlayne removes the qualification of hearsay, corroborating this claim with European authority: This drink is good to hinder the fumes which rise from the stomach into the head, and by consequence to cure the indisposition thereof, and for the same reason ’tis good against sleeping. When our French Merchants have a great many Letters to write, and intend to labour all night, they take in the evening a dish or two of this Cahue [coffee], it is good also to

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comfort the stomach and help disgestion [sic]; in a word if you will beleive [sic] the Turks ’tis good against all indispositions whatever, and assuredly it has at the least as much virtue in it, as is appropriated to Tea.80

Chamberlayne repeats the same pattern when he turns his attention to tea, beginning with anecdotal evidence of tea as a boon to the ethos of temperance qua efficiency: For my part I have experimented [with] it often enough, when I have been compelled to sit up all night about some extraordinary business, I needed to do no more but to take some of this Tea when I perceived my self beginning to sleep, and I could easily watch all night without winking, and the next morning I was as fresh as if I had slept my ordinary time; this I could do once a week without any trouble.81

This anecdotal evidence subsequently gains the authority of fact, in a passage that begins by citing ‘the common vogue and opinion of this Country,’ but proceeds to offer information that proves ‘so evidently’ the truth of such opinions: And indeed ’tis the common vogue and opinion of this Country, that there is nothing more Soveraign then this plant, as well for the prolonging of our days even to an extream old age, as for dissipating all that may be an hindrance or obstacle to our health, and that it not only renders the body more vigorous . . . [but] it so evidently hinders sleep, that those persons who drink of the said decoction pass sometimes whole nights without sleeping, and overcome without any trouble, or tediousness the necessity of sleep, which otherwise were insupportable: for it heats moderately, and contracts the upper orifice of the Stomach, it retains and suppresses so well the vapours necessary in the creating sleep which rise from below, that those who have a desire to spend th[e] whole night in writing, or studying, do thereby find no manner of trouble or disturbance.82

The sleep whose necessity is obviated by these beverages bears little relation to that consummation devoutly to be wished in the tradition of sixteenth-century verse. For the tortured insomniac Macbeth, sleep ‘knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,’ serving as ‘The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, / Chief nourisher in life’s feast’; for Sir Philip Sidney’s

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Astrophil, it commands the apostrophic deference due to a Muse, or a God: ‘Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace, / The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe, / The indifferent judge between the high and low.’83 Chamberlayne’s passage indulges in no such encomia, lauding tea for eliminating sleep altogether. The ‘insupportable . . . trouble . . . disturbance’ and ‘tediousness’ of which he writes refer literally to the experience of simultaneous sleep- and tea-deprivation, but his irregular punctuation also implies that the very ‘necessity of sleep’ constitutes such a burden. As historian Roger Ekirch has influentially argued, poetic idealizations notwithstanding, pre-modern sleep in England was indeed marked by ‘trouble’ and ‘disturbance,’ as it represented ‘a condition of unparalleled vulnerability,’ susceptible to ‘[t]hreats to body and soul’ alike: fleas, bedbugs, thieves, drafts, demons, and nightmares (‘widely thought to be imps seeking to suffocate their prey’).84 As Chamberlayne tells it, tea facilitates the replacement of sleep, which is vulnerable to such disturbances, with wakeful and productive scholarly labour.85 Asserting both that one could repeat the all-night vigil ‘once a week without any trouble,’ and that caffeine can ‘prolong[] . . . our days even to an extream old age’ by ‘render[ing] the body more vigorous,’ Chamberlayne boasts of having discovered, in these eupeptic wonders, additional time: extra hours in the night, nights in the week, and years in the life in which to labour. Conclusion This assemblage of economic, political, and medical texts, and their interpretation through the lens of temperance, supplies scholars of intellectual, ethical, rhetorical, and political history with several important insights and perspectives. First, temperance’s semantic ductility and its discursive mobility serve as reminders of the real political effects caused by linguistic precision and imprecision alike. This study thus attests to the importance of using humanistic methodology to interpret texts not traditionally considered for literary or rhetorical analysis. Second, these texts’ repeated relocation of temperance outside of the human subject constitutes a powerful prehistory of the dynamics of depersonalization, which scholars have often located in later political, historical, and economic periods and formulations (for example, capitalism per se, industrialism, alienated labour). The relocation of the scene of ethical conduct from the subject to the commodity

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testifies to an early modern epistemological paradigm that challenges the adequacy of narratives about the Enlightenment’s newly empowering discourses of rationalism, individualism, and self-legislation. Third, and relatedly, the laudatory association of temperance with the capacity for physical labour suggests that the colonized New World subject, rather than the European colonizer, serves, at least in part, as an exemplar of this virtue, which was so purposefully and possessively designated as English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Without obscuring the cruelty, racism, or imperialism of European conduct in the colonial New World, my analysis of the role of temperance in these seventeenth-century tracts affords new insight into the culturally and ethically appropriative dynamics of colonial exchange. As the virtue sustained by New World commodities, and exemplified by the colonized servants who performed so much of the physical labour of colonial construction, temperance instances the ideological as well as the material indebtedness of English culture to the influence of its colonized subjects and territories.

Coda

Toward the beginning of the period now designated the ‘long eighteenth century,’ Thomas Tryon published a tract entitled A Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness, or, A Discourse of Temperance.1 Enormously popular, A Discourse of Temperance went through seven editions following its initial 1683 publication, making it the most popular of Tryon’s six advice manuals.2 Tryon’s early advocacy of vegetarianism constitutes his most enduring ethical legacy, his influence extending over several generations of transatlantic literary personages: Ben Franklin identified himself as a ‘Tryonist’ early in his career; Percy Bysshe Shelley consulted Tryon when writing ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’ and ‘On the Vegetable System of Diet’; Aphra Behn allegedly stopped wearing animal skins under Tryon’s influence (and her Oroonoko may be indebted to Tryon’s critiques of slavery in Barbados, on which more below).3 As such dietary preoccupations might predict, Tryon’s interest in temperance is more restricted than that of many of the writers considered in this book. Although Tryon does exploit the various discursive resonances of the term – including the alchemical, humoral, and climatological senses – his tract is dedicated principally to advocating alimentary temperance as a foundation for ethical, intellectual, and social self-regulation more broadly speaking.4 His aim, he explains, is nothing less than to bring Men acquainted with themselves, and recommend Temperance, the most excellent (though most neglected) Virtue in the World, to their Practice: In a word, to perswade them to be kind to their own Healths, their own Lives, their own Souls.5

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Tryon’s tripartite list is precise: to practise alimentary temperance is to nurture (and to restore to nature, the secondary resonance of ‘kind’) the physical, social, and spiritual self. In returning temperance to relative stasis after the dramatic discursive mobility I have documented here, Tryon’s attempt to put the genie back in the bottle seems at best conservative, at worst naively Sisyphean. But as Tryon reveals the motives underlying A Discourse of Temperance, he also manifests a profound understanding of the rhetorical distance temperance has travelled during the preceding years, and a politically sensitive rationale for trying to return it to a single discursive home. When he implores his readers to recommit to temperance in their bodily regimens, Tryon attributes the decline of temperance to English colonialism and the increased internationalism consequent thereon: Nor should a little Trouble . . . [or] some small Inconveniencies divert us from getting our selves possest of this Jewel Temperance, the true Philosophers-Stone, which turns all into the Golden Elixir of Health, Content and Serenity, since we see none of the little perishing Goods of this World are to be obtained without trouble and difficulty; do not Youths serve seven years, enduring hard Labour and many other Inconveniencies for a Trade, whereby to get an outward Livelihood? Do not Men Travel by Sea and Land through a thousand Miseries, even to the hazarding of their Lives and Liberties for Meat, Drink and a little Rayment? And those few that do obtain their desired ends, if Temperance be wanting, the enjoyment of them proves not only burdensom, but so full of Snares, that they had better been without them; for Plenty has destroyed more than Necessity (some say, than the Sword) . . . What a deal of pains and charge are People at to please their Liquorish Pallates? The Indies must be sent to for Rarities, and the utmost parts of the Earth for Dainties; such abundance, such variety provided, as if all the Beasts and Fowls in Noah’s Ark, with an addition of all the Fishes in the Waters, and Vegetables of Earth, were scarce enough to furnish one Luxurious Board! And then what Curiosity in Sawces? What fantastick Humors for Dressing? The more extravagant and unnatural, the more genteel, and acceptable forsooth! Whereas those things that are necessary to support and preserve the Body in perfect Health, are easily procurable, of small Charge, soon made ready, and with very little Trouble; they are in most places ready and familiar, to be obtained with ease and pleasure, without violating Justice, or hazarding either your Conscience or your Liberty.6

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Temperance’s discursive migrations over the preceding centuries are still visible at the margins of this passage. Tryon professes his respect for the long-term investment of labour, which, as we have seen, apologists for New World plantation identified with temperance; he grants, obliquely, the merit of a seven-year apprenticeship necessary to secure a professional future as a tradesman. By granting a place to this imaginary apprentice in his diatribe, Tryon implicitly acknowledges the temporal dimension that temperance has acquired in the context of English colonialism. But apart from these concessions, Tryon rails against the ideology and practice of colonial expansion as mortal threats to the temperance of the English individual. Paramount among the virtues, temperance would indeed merit sustained and onerous exertions, but does not require them, for the simple dietary fare needed to sustain the body in temperate balance is available locally and plentifully, ‘ready and familiar.’ The geohumoral redefinition of England as a temperate, rather than a northern-Scythian climate, has fully taken hold of Tryon’s imagination. Temperance in this passage is consistent with a provincialism perhaps not developed enough to be called xenophobia, but one certainly convinced of England’s sufficiency to provide for the cultural and alimentary needs of its subjects. As Nigel Smith remarks, Tryon parts company with ‘some of the gentleman scientists associated with the Royal Society, such as John Evelyn, [who] published plans to cure London of pollution and started with designs based on the city as a whole,’ insisting instead that social reform begin and end with the individual.7 Refusing the metaphorical deployment of temperance, which risks the heroic characterization of commerce as a humoral balancing-act in the body politic, Tryon instead remains focused on temperance as a virtue and a mandate of the individual English subject, locally fed and humorally rooted to the national soil. Tryon’s defence of temperance, in Smith’s words, ‘constitutes an attack upon the economics of western Europe and the colonies belonging to west European nations, especially the English,’ and his admonitions to temperance are offered ‘as solutions to the problems that commercial society and imperialism had created for the well-being of people.’8 Tryon thus balances his nationalistic conviction regarding England’s self-sufficiency with his committed anti-imperialism. In contrast to Malynes, Tryon evinces sympathy and respect for expatriated African slaves in Barbados, and imprecates their cruel treatment by

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European colonists.9 A Discourse of Temperance ends with ‘A Dialogue between an East-Indian Brackmanny, or Heathen Philosopher, and a French Gentleman,’ originally published as a pamphlet in 1683.10 In measured and carefully elaborated arguments, the East-Indian speaker slowly leads his Continental interlocutor toward his concluding wish that ‘our Christianity [were] embellish’d with the real practice of your Virtue, Temperance, and Moderation.’11 This embodiment of the very qualities Tryon advocates sets the Brahman apart from Europe’s intrepid heroes of martial and imperial conquest, who ‘[f]or the most part . . . love to eat to Gluttony, and think that day ill spent whererin they are not drunk . . .’12 The Brahman, on the contrary, advances an anti-imperial ideology: ‘[I]f men considered the weight and cares of Empire, those that are without it, would rather fly from, than fight for it. And that Prince’s Dominions are wonderous small, that cannot imploy all his Vertues in meliorating his own Subjects, rather than in invading, oppressing, and ruining those of his Neighbours.’13 Ventriloquizing the Brahman, Tryon here carefully circumscribes ‘Vertue[]’ – synonymous with temperance, in this tract – limiting its application to the domestic context alone. To exceed the boundaries of the national body politic, for Tryon, is to violate the temperate mandate of the individual, physiological body. Tryon, obviously, draws the short straw in imperial history; England does not arrest but augment its colonial efforts during the eighteenth century. But the fervency of his political objections, and their interleaving with his advocacy of a strictly alimentary conception of temperance, stand as an historical record of the cultural capital that accrued to this cardinal virtue in the early stages of English colonialism. Although I do not condone Tryon’s xenophobia, his moral absolutism, and his naive semiotics, I share his understanding of temperance’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mobility into the theatre of colonial conquest, primitive accumulation, ambition, acquisitiveness, and empire. Tryon’s plea to his readers to reinvigorate the integrity of the appetitive English body bespeaks his panicked sense that both the virtue and its would-be practitioners have sailed irretrievably past England’s Pillars of Hercules. At the same time, Tryon’s hopes for temperance’s restoration suggest that having helped to adjudicate two centuries of colonial debate, temperance is relieved of political responsibility, and can resume a less contentious career governing individual alimentary conduct. In Colonial Virtue, I have aimed to describe the mobility that occasions Tryon’s panic and motivates his

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call for a renewed commitment to temperance in its more traditional sense. And yet despite these reservations, when Tryon pines for moments of temperance’s faithful exercise, he thinks not of Picts, Celts, Scythians, or other British ‘antiquities’ – the term comes from The Faerie Queene 2.pr.1.9 – but of a ‘Brackmanny.’ Despite his nostalgia for a model of virtue that predates England’s colonial expansion, Tryon’s idealized image of English virtue takes the form of foreignness. The Brackmanny is situated not outside, but merely across the political divide of English colonialism. Perhaps despite himself, Tryon implies that temperance’s mobility cannot be undone, and may yet have a role to play, accompanying, defending, and critiquing England as it perpetuates its imperial endeavours in the decades and centuries to come.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton, Longman Annotated English Poets (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 2.12.83.4. All subsequent citations of The Faerie Queene refer to the Hamilton edition and appear parenthetically in the text. 2 OED s.v. ‘temperance,’ n. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of the OED refer to the 1989 second edition, accessed online. 3 ‘Early modern’ is at present a more popular term than ‘Renaissance’ among scholars of this period. Both terms have their shortcomings: ‘Renaissance’ attributes a kind of cultural death to the Middle Ages, while ‘early modern’ suggests the absolute alterity of medieval culture to everything that follows, as well as a teleological movement of Western culture toward modernity. While I use both terms, I rely more heavily on ‘Renaissance’ for two reasons. First, I wish to stress the intellectual history of the virtue of temperance as it develops out of classical and medieval philosophy and iconography; ‘Renaissance’ serves as a reminder of such continuity even as it attempts to proclaim a rupture with that past. Second, the teleology implied by ‘early modern’ is especially problematic in discussions of early European colonialism, such as those I will undertake in subsequent chapters. As Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan eloquently explain, ‘the notion of modernity itself imposes a teleological narrative that privileges the narrative about western European dominance. If we name the period with the word that calls up comparison with the classical past – Greek and Roman empires – we do not thereby banish Eurocentrism, but we are at least in a better position to see the construct of empire as a conceptually different form of social organization, specific to a local site and

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history and not in the service of current (postmodern) Anglophone world dominance and global capitalism. By using a term that privileges the past as a past, which understands its crucial informing pressure on the present, we [try] to resist (however successfully) the way modernity itself colonizes previous human experience, turning it into a primitive version of the present.’ Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, Introduction to Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 23. 4 In addition to devising the term temperantia, Cicero was the first to distinguish clearly between tempus and occasio: ‘Tempus autem est . . . pars quaedam aeternitatis cum alicuius annui, menstrui, diurni, nocturnive spatii certa significatione . . . Occasio est pars temporis, habens in se alicuius rei ideoneam faciendi aut non faciendi opportunitatem . . .’ (‘Tempus is a certain part of eternity, with some fixed limitation of annual, or monthly, or daily, or nightly space . . . Occasio is a part of time, having within itself a suitable opportunity to do, or not to do, a particular thing . . .’) De Inventione, I.26–7, translation mine, cited in Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Chance, Time and Virtue,’ Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 4 (1938): 313, and n. 4. 5 Harry Berger, Jr, was the first to suggest that Guyon might be culpable; see The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of ‘The Faerie Queene,’ Yale Studies in English 137 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 16–23. In the succeeding decades, critics have continued to struggle with Guyon’s ostensible intemperance: see, e.g., Madelon Gohlke, ‘Embattled Allegory: Book 2 of The Faerie Queene,’ English Literary Renaissance 8, no. 2 (1978); Lauren Silberman and Theresa M. Krier (response), ‘The Faerie Queene, Book II: A Surfeit of Temperance,’ in Spenser at Kalamazoo, 1984, ed. Francis G. Greco and Hugh Maclean (Clarion: Clarion University of Pennsylvania, 1984), 49– 67; Lauren Silberman, ‘The Faerie Queene, Book II, and the Limitations of Temperance,’ Modern Language Studies 4 (1987): 9–22; Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), chapter 2; Paul Suttie, ‘Moral Ambivalence in the Legend of Temperance,’ Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 19 (2004): 125–33. 6 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘To Fashion a Gentleman: Spenser and the Destruction of the Bower of Bliss,’ in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157–92. Subsequent postcolonial readings include Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from ‘Utopia’ to ‘The Tempest,’ The New Historicism 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Willy Maley,

Notes to pages 6–7

7

8 9

10

11

12

13

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Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity, ed. Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe, and Denise Riley, Language, Discourse, Society (London: Macmillan, 1997); Shannon Miller, Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World, New Cultural Studies Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); David T. Read, Temperate Conquests: Spenser and the Spanish New World (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000); Jean Feerick, ‘Spenser, Race, and Ire-Land,’ English Literary Renaissance 32, no. 1 (2002): 85–117. Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Early instalments of this argument appeared in Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘Temperature, Temperance, and Racial Difference in Ben Jonson’s the Masque of Blackness,’ English Literary Renaissance 28, no. 2 (1998): 183–209; Mary Floyd-Wilson, ‘Transmigrations: Crossing Regional and Gender Boundaries in Antony and Cleopatra,’ in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 73–96. The more complete version of the argument was published as Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity. Also in conversation with Floyd-Wilson is Feerick, ‘Spenser, Race, and Ire-Land.’ John Gillies, ‘Shakespeare’s Virginian Masque,’ English Literary History 53, no. 4 (1986): 673–707. See also David Scott Wilson-Okamura, ‘Virgilian Models of Colonization in Shakespeare’s Tempest,’ English Literary History 70, no. 3 (2003): 709–37. Lorna Hutson, ‘Chivalry for Merchants; or, Knights of Temperance in the Realms of Gold,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26, no. 1 (1996): 29–59. Read, Temperate Conquests. An earlier instalment of this argument appeared as David T. Read, ‘Hunger of Gold: Guyon, Mammon’s Cave, and the New World Treasure,’ ELR 20, no. 2 (1990): 109–32. ˆ ge en France: E´tude sur l’iconoE´mile Maˆle, L’art religieux de la fin du Moyen A ˆ graphie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration, 2nd ed., rev. (Paris: Librairie A. Colin, 1922); Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Helen North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek

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Literature, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 35 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966); Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 14 Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity; Thomas Scanlan, Colonial Writing and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Shankar Raman, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love: Money, Gender, and Colonialism in Donne’s Erotic Verse,’ Criticism 43, no. 2 (2001): 135–68. 15 A complete list of critics who model this approach would have to include all practitioners of New Historicism and all of the critics whom they influenced. Finkelstein, Harris, and Anderson represent a particular subset of critics who precede me in using seventeenth-century economic texts to contextualize traditional literary analyses; I draw on their work principally in chapter 5. Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 1. Temperance’s Renaissance Variations 1 See http://www.franceswillardhouse.org/ (accessed 10 August 2010). 2 Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘Letter to Frances Willard,’ (Reel 13: WCTU Series Microfilm, 1883). 3 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, cited in Charles M. Young, ‘Aristotle on Temperance,’ Philosophical Review 97, no. 4 (1988): 531. 4 Ibid; Howard J. Curzer, ‘Aristotle’s Account of the Virtue of Temperance in Nicomachean Ethics III.10–11,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 35, no. 1 (1997): 5–25. 5 Richard Kraut, ‘Aristotle’s Ethics,’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/ entries/aristotle-ethics/: 2009), 5.1, accessed 13 January 2010; Lesley Brown, ‘What Is “the Mean Relative to Us” in Aristotle’s Ethics?’ Phronesis 42, no. 1 (1997): 77–93.

Notes to pages 17–21 213 6 Baldassarre Castiglione, Thomas Hoby, and Walter Raleigh, The Book of the Courtier, The Tudor Translations (London: D. Nutt, 1900), book 4. Accessed at http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/courtier/courtier4 .html, 1 July 2011. 7 Ibid., book 1. 8 For a critical history of this question, see Harold L. Weatherby, ‘Spenser’s Legend of Enkrateia,’ Studies in Philology 93, no. 2 (1996): 207–9. Critics of the last century generally concur that Spenser observes no meaningful distinction between temperance and continence; early and late representative examples include Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity, 66; Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, 84. 9 Helen North, ‘Temperance (Sophrosyne) and the Canon of the Cardinal Virtues,’ in Dictionary of the History of Ideas (New York: Scribner, 1972–3), 370. 10 Weatherby, ‘Spenser’s Legend of Enkrateia,’ 210. 11 Ibid., 213–14. 12 Here and throughout, quotations from the Geneva Bible preserve the orthography of the edition printed by Christopher Barker in London in 1583 and available via the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database: The Bible. Translated According to the Ebrew and Greeke, and Conferred with the Best Translations in Divers Languages. With Most Profitable Annotations vpon All the Hard Places, and Other Things of Great Importance, as May Appeare in the Epistle to the Reader. 13 Weatherby, ‘Spenser’s Legend of Enkrateia,’ 216. 14 The note on the relationship between temperare and tempus appears s.v. ‘temper, v.,’ citing Alois Walde’s Lateinisches etymologisches worterbuch (1938–54). 15 For an argument about the Renaissance ‘discovery’ of time as an ‘antagonist,’ provoking ‘energetic, even heroic’ resistance among humanists, see Ricardo Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 31 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 3. 16 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, 1st ed. (New York: Odyssey, 1957), 168. 17 Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,1980), 14–15; Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1972), 51. 18 Leon Battista Alberti, Della Famiglia, ed. and trans. Guido A. Guarino, Bucknell Renaissance Texts in Translation (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1971), 180–1.

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19 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1:310–11 (IV.i.184–202). 20 Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, 30. Also relevant here is the more recent work of Joel Kaye, writing about the ‘monetization’ of natural philosophy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: ‘its preoccupation with measurement, gradation, and the quantification of qualities.’ Kaye’s work historicizes the quantification and commodification of both time and temperance – medieval developments that precede and enable the political deployments of temperance that concern me here. Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, 4th ser., vol. 35 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. 21 Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, 35, 30. Le Goff does not argue that the temps du marchand replaces the temps de l’e´glise in a zero-sum transaction. Instead, he investigates the ways in which ‘[n]atural time, professional time, and supernatural time were . . . [b]oth essentially distinct and, at particular points, contingently similar’ in medieval European culture (38). The ascendancy of the temps du marchand, rather than its negotiations with other models of temporality, is what concerns me here. For a critique of Le Goff’s narrative as premised on a reductive model of historical displacement, see Nancy Mason Bradbury and Carolyn P. Collette, ‘Changing Times: The Mechanical Clock in Late Medieval Literature,’ Chaucer Review 43, no. 4 (2009): 352. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum advocates using the term ‘measured time’ rather than ‘temps du marchand,’ on the grounds that the nascent interest in temporal precision was not restricted to commercial activity: Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 226–31. 22 Helen North, From Myth to Icon: Reflections of Greek Ethical Doctrine in Literature and Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 201–2. 23 T.H. White, The Book of Beasts: Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1954), 80. Cf. also the reproduction of the woodcut designated ‘Camels as a Symbol of Temperance’ from the fifteenth-century German Buch der Tugend (Book of Virtue), in The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 85, German Book Illustration before 1500: Anonymous Artists, 1484–1486, ed. Walter L. Strauss (Norwalk, CT: Abaris, 1983), image 97. 24 James G. McManaway, ‘ “Occasion,” Faerie Queene II.iv.4–5,’ Modern Language Notes 49, no. 6 (1934): 391–3; Frederick Kiefer, ‘The Conflation of

Notes to pages 30–5 215

25

26 27 28

29 30 31

32 33

34

35

Fortuna and Occasio in Renaissance Thought and Iconography,’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 9, no. 1 (1979): 1–27; David W. Burchmore, ‘The Medieval Sources of Spenser’s Occasion Episode,’ Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 2 (1981): 93–120. North, ‘Temperance (Sophrosyne),’ 375. Cf. Rosemond Tuve, ‘Notes on the Virtues and Vices,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963): 278. The nomenclature comes from Maˆle, L’art religieux de la fin du Moyen ˆ ge en France: E´tude sur l’iconographie du Moyen A ˆ ge et sur ses sources d’inspiA ration, 311. In the following images of temperance in the new iconography, I aim to provide an illustrative rather than a comprehensive set of examples. For additional instances, see Tuve, ‘Notes,’ 278–90; Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 353–4n9. Tuve, ‘Notes,’ 276. Maˆle, L’art religieux, 316. Lynn White, Jr, ‘The Iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology,’ in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E.H. Harbison, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 213. Julie Singer, ‘Clockwork Genres: Temperance and the Articulated Text in Late Medieval France,’ Exemplaria 21, no. 3 (2009): 232–3. Tuve, ‘Notes,’ 279. For more instances of the deus artifex figure, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 544–6. White, Jr, ‘The Iconography of Temperantia,’ 208–11. Charity Cannon Willard, ‘Christine De Pisan’s Clock of Temperance,’ Esprit Cre´ateur 2 (1962): 150. Translation is my own. Willard cites the text from Bibliothe´que nationale ms. fr. 606, fol. 2v, which includes an illustration by the Master of Christine de Pisan comparable to the one represented in Figure 8. The same illuminator depicts the clock in the British Museum’s Harley 4431, fol. 96v. An anonymous illustrator in the third quarter of the fifteenth century was impressed enough by the Master of Christine de Pisan’s illustrations to devote an entire page to a precise imitation of the earlier image, despite his very different artistic style; see MS. Bodl. 421, fol. 4v (available via http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ and ARTstor). Tuve, intriguingly, proposes that Christine may be the author of this translation, but concedes that additional evidence would be required to substantiate this possibility. Singer, ‘Clockwork Genres,’ 238. For the importance of the service apre`s vente and the origin of clock-keeping as a profession, see David S. Landes,

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37

38 39

40

41

42

Notes to pages 37–9

Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. and enl. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 206. Singer observes that the earliest examples of the mechanical clock with the verge and foliot escapement are large public installations; not until the fifteenth century did smaller versions such as Temperance’s ‘new iconography’ headpiece become available. Singer, ‘Clockwork Genres,’ 236. The rowel spurs and eyeglasses were developed in the late thirteenth century, the mechanical clock and tower-mill windmill in the fourteenth. White, Jr, ‘Iconography,’ 216. Ibid., 219, 217. H. Arthur Klein, Graphic Worlds of Peter Bruegel the Elder: Reproducing 63 Engravings and a Woodcut after His Designs (New York: Dover, 1963), 132. In medieval woodcuts and illustrations, devils often wield bellows to fan the flames of hell, as in the mid-thirteenth-century French Bible moralise´e, MS. Bodl. 270b, fol. 45v; the late fourteenth-century French manuscript of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose, Bodleian MS. Douce 332, fol. 178v; and Ernest Schoen’s late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century German woodcut, depicting the devil injecting evil thoughts into the head of a Roman Catholic priest using a bellows (Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 13, German Masters of the Sixteenth Century, image no. 146 [Norwalk, CT, Abaris Books]). But the bellows could also represent the inflammation of individual passion, as in Martin Schongauer’s fifteenth-century woodcut ‘Les apprentis orfe´vres’ (The Metalsmith Apprentices), in which the bellows occupy the foreground of an image of two blacksmiths fighting, a symbol for the apprentices’ inflamed tempers. The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 8, Early German Artists, image no. 158 (Norwalk, CT, Abaris Books). See also the nearly identical woodcut by Wenzel von Olmutz in The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 9, Early German Artists, image no. 56. The other six liberal arts depicted in the painting are also situated in complex and sometimes paradoxical relation to temperance. The organ accompanying the musicians, for instance, appears to be powered by another bellows, suggesting an intemperate potential in music; the geometers assemble an arsenal of weapons as they seek to apply their calculations to ballistics, a field that does not lend itself easily to temperate conduct. I have focused on Bruegel’s mathematicians because they are occupied most explicitly with the profit-based applications of temperance that concern me here. See Christopher Brown, ‘The Strange Case of Jan Torrentius: Art, Sex, and Heresy in Seventeenth-Century Haarlem,’ in Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Art

Notes to pages 39–43 217

43 44 45 46

47 48

49

50

of Their Time: Recent Perspectives, ed. Roland E. Fleischer and Susan C. Scott, Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 228. Ibid., 226. In chapter 5, I consider at length the seventeenth-century controversy over tobacco consumption, and the part played by temperance therein. Brown, ‘The Strange Case of Jan Torrentius,’ 225–6. The mathematical/musical sense of temperance goes back as far as Plato, although it seems to re-emerge with a particular force in seventeenthcentury Europe. Plato, as James Carscallen explains, ‘transmits the Pythagorean emphasis on the mathematical or musical character of harmony,’ a quality Carscallen sees in Edmund Spenser’s mathematical vocabulary for temperance in book 2. James Carscallen, ‘Temperance,’ in A.C. Hamilton, The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 681. Dennis P. Weller, ‘Molenaer, Jan Miense,’ in Grove Art Online (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Van Thiel explains, ‘In Dutch we have a special name for someone who is always peering in the jug to see what is to drink; we can him a kannekijker, a word which is synonymous with ‘tippler’ or ‘soak.’ In Holland, therefore, someone peering into a jug in fact generally symbolizes the sin of Gluttony – in Latin, Gula. Usually the kannekijker simply represented a glutton, since it is but a short step from glutton to soak.’ P.J.J. van Thiel, ‘Marriage Symbolism in a Musical Party by Jan Miense Molenaer,’ Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 2, no. 2 (1967/8): 93. Jane R. Stevens, ‘Hands, Music, and Meaning in Some SeventeenthCentury Dutch Paintings,’ Imago Musicae 1 (1984): 81. For cheironomy and the Guidonian hand, see Grove Music Online, s.v. Guido of Arezzo, solmization, cheironomy. Van Thiel, ‘Marriage Symbolism,’ 98. Van Thiel observes that the only known precedent for the image of the embracing monkey and cat is Cornelis van Haarlem’s 1592 Fall of Man (original at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), where the animals sit at the foot of the Tree of Knowledge just as the original couple prepares to eat the forbidden fruit. While van Haarlem’s Adam and Eve are, in their prelapsarian state, perfectly temperate (if not for long), the monkey and the cat are created mortal, sinful, and humorally intemperate – at least according to the Scholastic doctrine that connects the fall from grace to humoural theory. Molenaer is likely to have known van Haarlem’s Fall of Man; it hung in a public building in Haarlem during his lifetime.

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51 For the specifically bourgeois character of music education in seventeenthcentury northern Europe, see Kristine Forney, ‘ “Nymphes Gayes En Abry Du Laurier”: Music Instruction for the Bourgeois Woman,’ Musica Disciplina 49 (1995): 156 and passim. 52 See, e.g., David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Origins of Empire, ed. Wm. Roger Louis, Nicholas Canny, and Alaine Low (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 102. 53 John C. Appleby, ‘War, Politics, and Colonization, 1558–1625,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 62. 54 Nicholas Canny, ‘The Origins of Empire: An Introduction,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 3. 55 John C. Appleby, ‘War, Politics, and Colonization, 1558–1625,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 55. 56 Canny, ‘Origins,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 4. 57 Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan, Introduction to Rereading the Black Legend, 1, emphasis original. The term ‘Black Legend’ was coined in 1912 by the Spanish journalist Julia´n Juderı´as in protest of an enduring bias against Spain as a nation of barbarity and superstition, culturally resistant to modernization and civilization. William Maltby’s 1971 monograph popularized the term, and focused attention on the English Renaissance as an ideological crucible for the development of the Black Legend: William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660, Duke Historical Publications (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971). The 2007 collection edited by Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan carefully resituates the Black Legend within twenty-first century scholarly discourses of race, nationalism, postcolonialism, and imperialism. 58 Canny, ‘Origins,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 4. 59 Jay Stubblefield, ‘ “I Have Taken a Contrary Way”: Identity and Ambiguity in John Donne’s Sermon to the Virginia Company,’ Renaissance Papers 58 (2001): 88. 60 Appleby, ‘War, Politics, and Colonization,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 66. 61 Canny, ‘Origins,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 20. 62 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Ideas in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66. 63 Ibid., 64–5. Hakluyt, unlike Purchas, was inattentive to internal divisions and conflicts within the Protestantisms of the Three Kingdoms. Armitage suggests that Purchas’s preoccupation with such diversity may explain his

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64

65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

comparative obscurity; by acknowledging rifts within British Protestantism, Purchas rendered his writing a less formidable tool of empire, if a more nuanced account of history, than that of his mentor. Richard Hakluyt, Diuers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of America, and the Ilands Adiacent Vnto the Same Made First of All by Our Englishmen, and Afterward by the Frenchmen and Britons: And Certaine Notes of Aduertisements for Obseruations, Necessarie for Such as Shall Heereafter Make the Like Attempt, with Two Mappes Annexed Heereunto for the Plainer Vnderstanding of the Whole Matter (London: [Thomas Dawson] for Thomas Woodcocke, 1582), Dedicatory Epistle, 3v. Richard Hakluyt, A Particuler Discourse Concerninge the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties That Are Like to Growe to This Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoueries Lately Attempted, Written in the Yere 1584, by Richarde Hackluyt of Oxforde, Known as Discourse of Western Planting, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn, Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, extra ser., vol. 45 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), 4. Henceforth the title of this work will be abbreviated in the notes as Discourse of Western Planting. Hakluyt, Diuers Voyages Touching the Discouerie of America, 1r, emphasis added. Ibid., A2r. Anthony Pagden, ‘The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of Empire in the Atlantic to c. 1700,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 39. Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, 4. Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan, Rereading the Black Legend, 5–6. Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, 55, 56. Ibid., 55, 52. Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Ibid., passim, esp. 23–47. See, e.g., Maley, Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity; Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience; Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature, Irish Literature, History and Culture (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Dympna Callaghan, ‘Irish Memories in The Tempest,’ Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (2000): 97–135; Patricia Coughlan and Nicholas P. Canny, Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cork: Cork University Press, 1989).

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Notes to pages 52–4

76 Albert Russell Ascoli, Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 85. 77 Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 10–12. One relevant example: Ludovico Ariosto’s first English translator (and godson to Queen Elizabeth), John Harington. Harington follows Boccaccio, a diligent classicist, in claiming that authors conceal the ‘deepe mysteries of learning’ with ‘the vaile of fables and verse’ so ‘that they might not be rashly abused by prophane wits, in whom science is corrupted, like good wine in a bad vessel.’ Only ‘prophane wits,’ ignorant of textual allegory, believe the literal truth of the text. G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1967), 2:203. 78 More precisely, Spenser borrows this ironic admonition to credulity from the proem to canto 7 of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and so seems to exchange classical for Renaissance authority. While parroting the Ariostan narrator, then, Spenser’s proem controverts not only the classical disdain of credulous readers, but also the classicizing impulse of Harington, Ariosto’s first translator (see previous note). 79 Hutson, ‘Chivalry for Merchants,’ 29, 40. 80 The English often moralized the Spanish desire for gold as a physical appetite. See e.g., Theodor de Bry’s copper engraving in part 4 of Historia Americae (1591, 1594), depicting New World natives of current-day Panama pouring molten gold into the mouths of Spanish explorers, a talionic punishment for their excessive thirst for gold. 81 Read, Temperate Conquests, 13. Read thus depicts Spenser’s Knight of Temperance, Guyon, as a ‘passive character,’ and Spenserian temperance as a ‘vacant construct’ (78, 115). 82 Ibid. Cf. Hutson’s observation that literature participates in the process by which ‘the Spanish discovery and conquest of the Americas becomes an event which can only be fully realized when it is retrospectively Anglicized.’ Hutson, ‘Chivalry for Merchants,’ 29. 83 Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, 72. Hakluyt transcribes the Italian from Augustino de Cravalis’s 1556 Italian translation of Francisco Lo´pez de Go´mara’s General History of the Indies. The English translation of the Italian is from Lesley Byrd Simpson’s translation of the 1553 Spanish edition. See ibid., 172, n. to page 72. 84 Ibid., 55, 52. 85 Maltby, The Black Legend in England, 12; Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan, ‘Introduction,’ 6.

Notes to pages 55–64 221 86 Richard Eburne, A Plaine Path-Way to Plantations (London: G.P. for John Marriot, 1624), 105, emphasis original. 87 Ibid., 32–3. 88 The Biblical injunction to preach the gospel to all nations was the most commonly cited religious justification of English colonial activity in the New World; see Harrison, 6. 89 Eburne, A Plaine Path-Way to Plantations, 5–6. 90 White and Eburne both beg the question of the temperance of English colonialism, in the temporal sense of the term, by describing their ambitions not as ‘colonization’ but as ‘plantation.’ As Nicholas Canny explains, such diction was typical of English writers of early New World colonialism, who used the ‘gentler horticultural associations’ of ‘plantation’ to dissociate themselves further from the aggressively colonial Spanish. Canny, ‘Origins: An Introduction,’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, 8. 91 John White, The Planters Plea: Or the Grounds of Plantations Examined, and Vsuall Objections Answered Together with a Manifestation of the Causes Mooving Such as Have Lately Vndertaken a Plantation in New-England: For the Satisfaction of Those That Question the Lawfulnesse of the Action (London: William Iones, M. Flesher, and J. Dawson, 1630), 5, emphasis added. 92 Later phases of English colonial settlement in the New World witnessed frequent stereotyping of Native Americans as intemperate consumers of European liquor; indeed, historians have long recognized that European liquor and abuse thereof constitute part of the European legacy to Native America in the Columbian Exchange. See, e.g., Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). White’s anticipation of this stereotype is coincidental, if eerily prescient; according to Mancall, the European liquor trade did not reach Native American communities until the latter half of the seventeenth century. 2. Edmund Spenser’s ‘Blood Guiltie’ Temperance 1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Quintin Hoare, trans. Ben Fowkes, 3 vols., Pelican Marx Library (New York: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), 1:874–5, 886; Thomas More, A Fruteful, and Pleasaunt Worke of the Beste State of a Publyque Weale, and of the Newe Yle Called Vtopia . . ., trans. Raphe Robynson (London: [S. Mierdman for] Abraham Vele, 1551), C7r–C8v. 2 Marx, Capital, 1:915, 925. 3 Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan, ‘Introduction,’ 3.

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Notes to pages 65–8

4 Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 8. 5 Literary critics have used Marxist theory to powerful effect as an historically inflected interpretive paradigm for Renaissance literature. Compelling examples include Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); John Parker, ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man: Shakespearean Drama as Marxian Fetish, the Fetish as Sacramental Sublime,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34, no. 3 (2004): 643– 72. David Armitage, however, warns against such deployments of not only Marxist theory, but any historicist theory of the British Empire, claiming that ‘the impress of Empire upon English literature in the early modern period was minimal, and mostly critical where it was discernible at all, while contemporaries understood literature and empire, what Bacon called res literaria and imperium, in terms far different from those adopted by modern scholars . . . [T]o apply modern models of the relationship between culture and imperialism to early-modern literature and Empire demands indifference to context and inevitably courts anachronism.’ Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire,’ 102. 6 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 10–11. 7 Ibid., 37. 8 Marx, Capital, 1:873–5. Richard Halpern points out that Marx is here engaged in a strong misreading of Smith, who, like Marx himself, ‘seeks a structural and not an ethical understanding of economic behavior.’ Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 85–7. 9 Marx, Capital, 1:926. 10 Marx, Capital, 1:875. 11 This reading of the Cave of Mammon episode as a critique of colonialism generates some obvious tension with the familiar narrative about Spenser as the quintessential ‘poet of empire, military might, and expansionist Puritanism,’ on which see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Introduction: The Relevance of Edmund Spenser,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3 and n. 12. For a thoughtful analysis of the limitations of the ‘poet of empire’ claim, including an analysis of the ways in which opposition to empire inheres in Renaissance humanism from at least Erasmus onward, see Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire.’ My claims in this chapter are not claims about Edmund Spenser’s personal convictions, ethics, or ideology; I mean only to

Notes to pages 68–72 223

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15 16

17 18 19 20

argue that this particular episode of the text betrays an ethical ambivalence about a colonial endeavour premised on temperance. Berger, The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of ‘The Faerie Queene,’ 1–37 and passim. Paul Alpers, The Poetry of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 252 and chapter 8 passim. In the Berger-esque tradition, see Gohlke, ‘Embattled Allegory: Book 2 of The Faerie Queene,’ 123–40; John C. Bean, ‘Cosmic Order in The Faerie Queene: From Temperance to Chastity,’ Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900 17, no. 1 (1977): 67–79; Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision, chapter 2. In the Alpers tradition, cf. Maurice Evans, ‘The Fall of Guyon,’ in Spenser: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Harry Berger, Jr, Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 88–96; Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 22–3; Bart van Es, Spenser’s Forms of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 1 passim. The only other cardinal virtue treated in The Faerie Queene, justice, prompts similar disagreements about Spenser’s attitude toward his self-righteous hero. On the analogy, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 351–71; Maureen Quilligan, ‘On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2001): 15–39. Rene´ Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1989), 56–7, 52 (part 2, articles 70 and 53). Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Wonder,’ American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (1997): 11. On early modern ‘wonders,’ see Stephen Mullaney, ‘Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,’ Representations 3 (1983): 40–67; Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, Studies on the History and Society of Culture 20 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting, 72. Hutson, ‘Chivalry for Merchants.’ David Landreth, ‘At Home with Mammon: Matter, Money, and Memory in Book II of The Faerie Queene,’ ELH 73 (2006): 250, 254. This transition can be traced to the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which simultaneously denounced the ordeal trial and formalized the necessity of

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annual confession by all members of the Catholic laity. Jamie K. Taylor, ‘Fictions of Evidence: Proof and Personification in Late-Medieval Literature’ (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2006). Mary Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 85. Ibid., 98. The traumatic event is defined by ‘the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.’ Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction: Trauma and Experience,’ in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4–5, emphasis original. Oliver, Witnessing, 90. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 181, n. to 2.1.59. Castiglione, Hoby, and Raleigh, The Book of the Courtier, book 4. Accessed at http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/courtier/courtier4. html, 1 July 2011. I consider the Aristotelian distinction between continence and temperance at greater length in chapter 1. Clare Gittings, ‘Urban Funerals in Late Medieval and Reformation England,’ in Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600, ed. Steven Basset (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 173. Susan Zimmerman, similarly, shows how both Reformation iconoclasm and nascent anatomical science regulated the threateningly permeable boundaries between the living and the dead. For reasons I go on to discuss, the funeral rite seems in this passage to achieve this kind of affective closure. Other critics, though, have written persuasively about the insufficiency of Reformed funeral rites in England to provide affective closure commensurate with that offered by Catholic theology. Stephen Greenblatt argues that the doctrine of Purgatory did not disappear but rather migrated to the theatre, while Ralph Houlbrooke shows how anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep’s classical formulation of the three phases of any rite of passage – separation, transition, and incorporation – are all weakened in the transition from Catholic to Reformed burial practices. Susan Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 8–10; Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ralph A. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750, Oxford Studies in Social History (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1998).

Notes to pages 74–7 225 28 Janet Adelman, ‘Hugh Maclean Memorial Lecture: Revaluing the Body in The Faerie Queene I,’ Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 36, no. 1 (2005): 16, 24n2. 29 For a discussion of the hair/heir pun, see Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1993): 264–6. I owe this reading to Jeffrey Masten and his inimitable ear. 30 R.L. Kesler, ‘Time and Causality in Renaissance Revenge Tragedy,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 59, no. 4 (1990): 475, 492. 31 Charles Whitney, ‘Ante-Aesthetics: Towards a Theory of Early Modern Audience Response,’ in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 40–60. 32 On the desire for revenge as part of the Old Testament lex talionis, ethically insupportable according to Elizabethan Christianity, see Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 83–4. Blank’s entire monograph, on the inadequacy of quantitative discourse to human experience, is broadly relevant here. 33 Cited in Eugene D. Hill, ‘Revenge Tragedy,’ in A Companion to Renaissance Drama, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 328. 34 Alexander Hume, Ane Treatise of Conscience Quhairin Divers Secreits Concerning That Subiect, Are Discovered, as May Appeare, in the Table Following (Edinburgh: Robert Walde-grane, 1594), 56. 35 Nicholas Stratford, A Dissuasive from Revenge in a Discourse Upon These Words, Recompense to No Man Evil for Evil, Rom. 12:17 (London: Richard Chiswell, 1684), 8, emphasis original. 36 For a full critical history, see Carol Kaske, ‘Amavia, Mortdant, Ruddymane,’ in A.C. Hamilton, ed., The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 25. Analogously, in the secular realm, the ‘bloody hand’ was understood as a sign of guilt in Renaissance Forest law, betraying illegal hunters who had already hidden (or eaten) their prey; see OED s.v. ‘bloody’ 2b, and Hamilton’s note to The Faerie Queene 2.3.2.8. 37 Read, Temperate Conquests, 72–82. See also Read, ‘Hunger of Gold,’ 109–32. 38 Quilligan, ‘On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery,’ 15–39, esp. 20–4. Q.v. Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 56, 56n45. For compelling objections to colonialist readings of book 2, see Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 68 and 40–73 passim. 39 Landreth, ‘At Home with Mammon,’ 254. 40 Edmund Valentine Campos, ‘West of Eden: American Gold, Spanish Greed, and the Discourses of English Imperialism,’ in Rereading the Black Legend, ed. Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan, 263.

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41 Hutson, ‘Chivalry for Merchants,’ 34. 42 Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser, 56. 43 See, for example, Berger, The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of ‘The Faerie Queene,’ 30. One notable exception is Frank Kermode, ‘The Cave of Mammon,’ in Elizabethan Poetry, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 2 (London: E. Arnold, 1960), 151–73. 44 Quilligan, ‘On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery,’ 22–3. 45 See, e.g., Theodor de Bry’s engravings of Pictish warriors, based on the sketches of John White and included in Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Frankfurt: Ioannis Wecheli, 1590), chapter 23. For more on the ways in which the Elizabethan experience of the Irish inflected views of native Americans, see Quilligan, ‘On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery,’ 27–31; Read, Temperate Conquests, 83–92, esp. n. 32. 46 For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as ‘a time for the renascence of slavery in the economics of many western European powers (if not actually in northern Europe itself),’ see Maureen Quilligan, ‘Freedom, Service, and the Trade in Slaves: The Problem of Labor in Paradise Lost,’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 213; Maureen Quilligan, ‘On the Renaissance Epic: Spenser and Slavery.’ 47 My thanks to Jeffrey Masten for this observation. 48 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 231, n. to 2.7.41.1. 49 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Marcello Turchi and Eduardo Sanguineti, 2 vols., I Grandi Libri Garzanti (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), 2:1145 (42.64.7–8). Subsequent quotations of the Furioso refer to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text. 50 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 231, n. to 2.7.42.6–9. 51 Spenser’s repetition of this morbid rhyme seems to have inspired Milton’s image of the devils raping the ‘womb’ of hell to build Pandemonium, led by none other than Guyon’s hellish antagonist: ‘Mammon led them on, / Mammon, the least erected Spirit that fell / From Heav’n, for ev’n in Heaven his looks and thoughts / Were always downward bent, admiring more / The riches of Heav’n’s pavement, trodd’n Gold, / Than aught divine or holy else enjoy’d / In vision beatific: by him first / Men also, and by his suggestion taught, / Ransack’d the Center, and with impious hands / Rifl’d the bowels of thir mother Earth / For Treasures better hid.’ John

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Milton, Paradise Lost, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957), 228–9 (book 1, lines 678–88). Campos notes that Bartolome´ de las Casas, who provided a foundation for English elaborations of the Black Legend, offered a particularly biting critique of Spanish mining in the Americas, based on ‘the miserable conditions under which the Indians are forced to work . . . Mining . . . became one of the most powerful tropes of genocide and the site of particularly vehement colonial critique.’ Campos, ‘West of Eden,’ 258. Carla Freccero, ‘Queer Spectrality,’ in Queer/Early/Modern, Series Q (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 69–70. Freccero is citing Jacques Derrida, ‘Marx and Sons,’ in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1998), 254. Freccero, ‘Queer Spectrality,’ 70. Stratford, A Dissuasive from Revenge, 54–5. Hamlet expresses the secular counterpart to Stratford’s admonition when he scorns Polonius’s vow to treat the visiting players ‘according to their desert’: ‘God’s bodkin, man, much better. Use every man after his desert, and who shall scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.’ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), II.ii.524–7. The dating of the Cinque Canti is contentious; see David Quint’s introduction to Ludovico Ariosto, Cinque Canti, trans. Alexander Sheers and David Quint, ed. Louise George Clubb, Biblioteca Italiana (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 3n2. All quotations and translations of the Cinque Canti cite this edition and appear parenthetically in the text. I owe this observation – along with much of this account of the Cinque Canti in general – to David Quint’s introduction to the Biblioteca Italiana edition. See Bean, ‘Cosmic Order,’ 67n1. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, Bampton Lectures in America 16 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 153.

3. Intemperance and ‘Weak Remembrance’ in The Tempest 1 All parenthetical citations of the play refer to William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).

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2 The first use of ‘distempered’ in this political sense, as attested by the OED, was Shakespeare’s, from Macbeth: ‘He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause / Within the belt of Rule’ (V.ii.15–16), The Riverside Shakespeare, 1384. 3 Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: Ecco, 2007), 11. 4 Peter Hulme suggests reading the titular ‘tempest’ quite differently, as a term that implies Providential reassurance rather than threatening disorder. For Hulme, the implicit, unspoken term opposed to ‘tempest’ is not ‘temperance’ but ‘hurricane,’ derived from the Arawak word ‘hurakan’ introduced to the Spanish in the writings of Oviedo and Peter Martyr. ‘It can well be imagined, but perhaps not proved, that [in Renaissance English] ‘tempest’ would tend to be used when the outcome of the narrative could be favourably interpreted, and ‘hurricane’ when otherwise.’ Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 97. What is so interesting to me about temperance and its cognates, of course, is its paradoxical assimilation of contradictory meanings. Deployed in different contexts and for different ideological ends, temperance and the tempest might represent benevolence, Providential order, and English triumph; and/or crisis, disruption, and colonial resistance. 5 Michael Neill, ‘Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest,’ in Jonson and Shakespeare, ed. Ian Donaldson (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), 45. 6 Ronald Takaki, ‘The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,’ Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 893, emphasis original. 7 The case for The True Reportory of the Wrack as a source for The Tempest is reviewed meticulously by David Kathman in ‘Dating The Tempest,’ an article on the Shakespeare Authorship Page: http://shakespeareauthorship.com/ tempest.html#2, accessed 17 October 2010. 8 Barbara Fuchs, ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing The Tempest,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1997): 45–62; Meredith Anne Skura, ‘Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1989): 42–69. Following Fuchs’s and Skura’s lead, both issuing and heeding the call to do ‘justice to the play’s Mediterranean setting without neglecting the obvious references to Atlantic exploration and colonization,’ is Wilson-Okamura, ‘Virgilian Models,’ quotation on p. 709. 9 This passage is F.M. Cornford’s translation of Plato’s transcription of Socrates in the Theaetetus: Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters [Translated by Various Hands], ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961),

Notes to pages 99–103

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897. As Mary Carruthers explains, ‘the image is not original to Plato, who says that he was developing a metaphor already implicit in Homer. In fact, Socrates is at some pains to say that his way of describing the memory as being like seals (se´meia) made by a signet ring is not new, but really very old.’ Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 21. Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, Memory and Forgetting in English Renaissance Drama, ed. Stephen Orgel, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 31 and chapter 1 passim. Sir Thomas Elyot and Thomas Cooper, Bibliotheca Eliotae Eliotes Dictionarie, by Thomas Cooper the Third Tyme Corrected, and with a Great Number of Phrases Enriched, as to Him That Conferreth the Other Aeditions, It May Easely Appeare (London: Tho. Berrheleri, 1559), s.v. ‘letargia, or lethargus.’ Cited in Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 54. James Howell, A German Diet, or, the Ballance of Europe Wherein the Power and Weaknes . . . Of All the Kingdoms and States of Christendom Are Impartially Poiz’d: At a Solemn Convention of Som German Princes in Sundry Elaborat Orations Pro & Con . . . (London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1653), 53–4. The oxymoron is sixteenth-century physician Andrew Boorde’s, cited in Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 55. Dympna Callaghan, ‘Irish Memories in The Tempest,’ in Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 133. Paul Brown, ‘ “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,’ in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 59. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. T.S. Dorsch, The Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1955), I.iii.78. It is worth noting that ‘tempests’ figure prominently in the descriptions of the natural portents of Caesar’s assassination: ‘O, Cicero,’ exclaims Casca, ‘I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds / Have riv’d the knotty oaks; / . . . / But never till to-night, never till now, / Did I go through a tempest dropping fire’ (I.iii.4–10). While there are few women in The Tempest, the play seems to be haunted by their theoretical or imagined infidelities. When Prospero first explains to Miranda that her ‘father was the Duke of Milan,’ and she inquires, ‘Sir, are not you my father?’ he jests, ‘Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter,’ raising the spectre of the unchastity he

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disavows (I.ii.54–7). When Miranda hears of her uncle’s political machinations, she swears, ‘I should sin / To think but nobly of my grandmother: / Good wombs have borne bad sons’ (I.ii.118–20). When Ferdinand and Miranda become mutually besotted, Prospero vows to torment his future sonin-law a bit, concerned that his daughter might prove too sexually permissive (‘this swift business / I must uneasy make, lest too light winning / Make the prize light’ I.ii.453–5, ‘light’ here meaning not only ‘of small value’ but also ‘wanton’; see OED 13a–b and 14b). Even the ‘Kate’ of Stephano’s sea shanty is licentious: ‘She lov’d not the savour of tar nor of pitch; / Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch’ (II.ii.53–4). Callaghan discusses these concerns as evidence of English anxiety about miscegenation with the Irish; Callaghan, ‘Irish Memories in The Tempest,’ 120. Stephen Orgel, ‘Shakespeare and the Cannibals,’ in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1985 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 59–60. The Renaissance iconographic tradition that associates such vessels with chastity goes back to late medieval representations of Mary as a ‘vessel most clean,’ as the fifteenth-century Mirror of Our Lady puts it in explaining the service of Thursday matins. The fifteenth-century Me´rode Altarpiece by Flemish painter Robert Campin, now in the Cloisters, is one of the most famous examples of this iconography in its early manifestations; the iconographic tradition continues throughout Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting. Orgel, ‘Shakespeare and the Cannibals,’ 59–60. For a complementary reading of Mantegna’s portrait, see Margaret Franklin, ‘Mantegna’s “Dido”: Faithful Widow or Abandoned Lover?’ Artibus et Historiae 21, no. 4 (2000): 111–22. Francesco Petrarca, Letters of Old Age (Rerum Senilium), trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), letter to Federigo Aretino, IV.5. Donna Hamilton’s monograph Virgil and ‘The Tempest’ argues that the play is structured as a ‘formal and rigorous rhetorical imitation of the major narrative kernels of Aeneid 1–6.’ Donna B. Hamilton, Virgil and ‘The Tempest’: The Politics of Imitation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990), x. Wilson-Okamura argues compellingly that Renaissance readers found ‘a model for their expansionist activities’ not in The Aeneid’s narrative of the founding of imperial Rome, but rather in ‘Virgil’s description of the colony at Carthage,’ an argument that would vindicate Gonzalo’s claim that ‘This Tunis, sir, was Carthage.’ Wilson-Okamura, ‘Virgilian Models,’ 717–19.

Notes to pages 106–10

231

25 William Strachey, ‘A True Reportory of the Wracke, and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas: His Coming to Virginia and the Estate of that Colony Then and After, under the Government of the Lord La Warr, July 15, 1610, written by William Strachey, Esquire,’ in A Voyage to Virginia in 1609: Two Narratives: Strachey’s ‘True Reportory’ and Jourdain’s ‘Discovery of the Bermudas,’ ed. Louis B. Wright, Jamestown Documents (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, Published for the Assocation for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, 1964), 78–9. 26 Wilson-Okamura, ‘Virgilian Models,’ 718. 27 Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare, I.ii.72. 28 Richard Halpern, ‘ “The Picture of Nobody”: White Cannibalism in The Tempest,’ in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 472. Halpern reads Gonzalo’s solecism in identifying Claribel’s Tunis with Dido’s Carthage in a similar way: ‘[B]y confusing Tunis with Virgil’s fictionalized vision of Carthage, he transforms a real African city into a spot in the literary geography of The Aeneid, thus supplanting the material existence of a non-European society with a founding text of the Western tradition and, not incidentally, the great epic of Roman imperialism’ (274). 29 Skura, ‘Discourse and the Individual,’ 41. 30 Carla Freccero argues that Montaigne engages in ‘exhibitionistic forgetting’ in this essay, where utopia itself functions as a figure for loss or forgetting. Carla Freccero, ‘Cannibalism, Homophobia, Women: Montaigne’s “Des Cannibales’ and “De L’amitie´,’ in Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 78. 31 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals,’ trans. John Florio, in Essays Written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, Knight of the Order of S. Michael, Gentleman of the French Kings Chamber: Done into English, according to the Last French Edition, by Iohn Florio Reader of the Italian Tongue vnto the Soueraigne Maiestie of Anna, Queene of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, &c. And one of the Gentlemen of Hir Royall Priuie Chamber (London: Melch. Bradwood for Edward Blovnt and William Barrett, 1613), 100. 32 Ibid., 101. 33 Ibid. 34 The verb in the French, remarquer, has the same secondary meaning, referring especially to the noting down of dates and times, and of marking one’s name on laundry. The association between prevarication and clothing, especially, has compelling resonances within Shakespeare’s play, as

232

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38 39

Notes to pages 111–14

we will see shortly; this evidence suggests that Shakespeare worked with a French version of Montaigne as well as Florio’s translation. Tracing Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘bourn,’ which appears in both Gonzalo’s utopian speech and Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy, Travis D. Williams has recently offered compelling evidence that Shakespeare read Montaigne in French before he read Florio’s translation. See Travis D. Williams, ‘The Bourn Identity: Hamlet and the French of Montaigne’s Essais,’ Notes and Queries 58, no. 2 (2011): 254–8. Henry More, ‘An Apology for Dr Henry More,’ in A Modest Enquiry into the Mystery of Iniquity: The First Part Containing a Careful and Impartial Delineation of the True Idea of Antichristianism, in the Real and Genuine Members Thereof, Such as Are Indeed Opposite to the Indispensable Purposes of the Gospel of Christ, and to the Interest of his Kingdome (London: J. Flesher for W. Morden, 1664), 544. Ibid., emphasis original. Dover Wilson and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, eds., The Tempest, The Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 90–1, n. to I.ii.100. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 204, 85. In 1965, Eleanor Prosser urged Shakespeareans to look more deeply into Montaigne’s Essays to investigate heretofore unacknowledged sites of possible Shakespearean influence. In 1985, Gail Kern Paster responded by suggesting the influence of ‘Of Diverting and Diversions’ – an essay from book 3 of Montaigne – on The Tempest, and reissued the call for further exploration. Another twenty-five years have elapsed since Paster’s article. In adducing ‘Of Lyers’ as another possible source, I would like not only to take up the cause that Prosser and Paster advanced, but also to suggest that criticism stands to benefit from such studies through both deeper understanding of European debates about colonialism, and through the establishment of a comparatively and philologically grounded methodology for postcolonial scholarship. Eleanor Prosser, ‘Shakespeare, Montaigne, and “the Rarer Action,” ’ Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 261–4; Gail Kern Paster, ‘Montaigne, Dido, and The Tempest: “How Came That Widow In?” ’ Shakespeare Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1984): 91–4. Williams warns against pursuing such connections to the point of implausibility, noting that many of the alleged Montaigne references in Shakespeare are proverbs and commonplaces, which a sixteenth-century playwright might have found in hundreds of places. At the same time, his article both acknowledges and models the ways in which such comparative approaches may enrich our understanding when they are pursued with philological rigour. See Williams, ‘The Bourn Identity.’

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40 Montaigne, ‘Of Lyers,’ trans. Florio, in Essays written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne, 16. 41 Ibid., 15–16. 42 Ibid., 15. 43 Ibid., 17. 44 Ibid., emphasis original. 45 Ibid., 16–17. 46 William Slatyer, The History of Great Britanie from the First Peopling of This Island to This Present Raigne of O[U]R Happy and Peacefull Monarke K. Iames (London: W. Stansby for Rich. Meighen, 1621), ‘To the Reader.’ 47 Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 49. 48 Jonathan Baldo, ‘Exporting Oblivion in The Tempest,’ Modern Language Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1995): 140. 49 Montaigne, ‘Of Canniballes,’ trans. Florio, 105–6. 50 Freccero, ‘Queer Spectrality,’ 87. See also Freccero, ‘Cannibalism, Homophobia, Women.’ 51 Freccero, ‘Queer Spectrality,’ 87–8. 52 Trinculo muses, ‘Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver: there would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man: when they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’ (II.ii.28–34). Trinculo clearly distinguishes here between the man who is ‘made,’ financially, by displaying the beast, and the beast who fails to ‘make up’ or constitute a man. 53 Julia Reinhard Lupton, ‘Creature Caliban,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 1 (2000): 13. 54 The Booke of Common Praier, and Administration of the Sacramentes, and Other Rites and Ceremonies in the Churche of Englande (London: Richard Iugge and John Cawode, 1559), ‘The order for the administration of the Lordes Supper, or holy Communion.’ Subsequent references to the 1559 Book of Common Prayer cite this edition, which does not include page numbers. 55 Neill, ‘Remembrance and Revenge: Hamlet, Macbeth, and The Tempest,’ 49. 4. John Donne, Christopher Brooke, and Temperate Revenge in 1622 Jamestown 1 The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (Preservation Virginia), ‘Historic Jamestowne,’ http://www.historicjamestowne.org/ history, accessed 4 October 2011.

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Notes to pages 127–32

2 Conseil for Virginia, ‘A True and Sincere Declaration of the Purpose and Ends of the Plantation Begun in Virginia [ . . . ]’ (London: [George Eld for] I. Stepneth, 1610), 2–3, emphasis original. 3 Ibid., 23. 4 For more on the competing motives of English New World colonialists, see Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘ “Every Man, that Prints, Adventures”: The Rhetoric of the Virginia Company Sermons,’ in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History, 1600–1799, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough, Politics, Culture, and Society in Early Modern Britain (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000); Tom Cain, ‘John Donne and the Ideology of Colonization,’ English Literary Renaissance 31, no. 3 (2001): 444–5; Peter Harrison, ‘ “Fill the Earth and Subdue It”: Biblical Warrants for Colonization in Seventeenth Century England,’ Journal of Religious History 29, no. 1 (2005). 5 Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia with a Relation of the Barbarous Massacre in the Time of Peace and League, Treacherously Executed by the Natiue Infidels vpon the English, the 22 of March Last [ . . . ] (London: G. Eld for Robert Mylbourne, 1622), title page. I use the word ‘massacre’ advisedly, as a term borrowed from English rather than Powhatan representations of this event. I deploy this term because this chapter limits its purview to England’s rhetorical justifications of its conduct; I do not wish to sanction the English ideology of innocent martyrdom that it represents. 6 Ibid., 22–4. 7 Cain, ‘John Donne and the Ideology of Colonization,’ 455. 8 John Donne, Foure Sermons Vpon Speciall Occasions. (Viz.) 1. A Sermon Preached at Pauls Crosse. 2. To the Honorable, the Virginia Company. 3. At the Consecration of Lincolnes Inne Chappell. 4. The First Sermon Preached to K. Charles at St. Iames, 1625. (London: Printed for Thomas Iones, 1625), A4r. Subsequent citations from the ‘Sermon to the Virginia Company’ refer to this edition and will be appear parenthetically in the text. 9 ‘A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia, with an Introduction by Robert C. Johnson,’ The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 72, no. 3 (1964): 260–1. Subsequent quotations from Brooke’s poem refer to the facsimile published with Johnson’s introduction and will be cited parenthetically in the text. 10 Fitzmaurice, ‘Every Man, that Prints, Adventures.’ Fitzmaurice objects to the traditional characterization of the Virginia Company as purely commercial and profit-driven, and as opposed to the civic-minded settlements of early New England. Challenging historians’ ‘devaluation’ of the

Notes to pages 132–8 235

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13 14 15 16

17

18

19 20

21 22

sermons commissioned by the Virginia Company, Fitzmaurice reads these texts as constitutive of a ‘propaganda campaign’ which deployed classical oratory and rhetoric to drum up public support in England, both financial and ideological, for the struggling Virginia Company (24, 26). Donne thus occupies a prominent but not a unique place in his argument as an advocate of temperate conduct in colonial Virginia. Ibid., 35. Cain, ‘John Donne and the Ideology of Colonization, 469–70. Cain is quoting from Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis (1532), and from Juan Gine´s de Sepu´lveda’s Democrates Alter: De Justis Belli Causis apud Indios (1550). Cain, ‘John Donne and the Ideology of Colonization,’ 462. Thomas Festa, ‘The Metaphysics of Labor in John Donne’s Sermon to the Virginia Company,’ Studies in Philology (2009): 79. Festa, ‘The Metaphysics of Labor,’ 99, 92, 99. The printed sermon cites the King James Version. Acts 1:6 is transcribed in the printed text immediately following the dedicatory epistle (‘To the Honovrable Companie of the Virginian Plantation,’ A3v–A4r), preceding the text of the sermon itself. John Rastell, Donne’s maternal great-grandfather, was married to Elizabeth More, daughter of Sir John More and sister to Sir Thomas More. See David Colcought, ‘Donne, John (1572–1631),’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). T.H. Breen, ‘George Donne’s “Virginia Reviewed”: A 1638 Plan to Reform Colonial Society,’ The William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1973): 450. On the controversy over whether the George Donne who held these offices in Virginia was indeed the same George Donne born to of the famous poet, see Breen, 450n4. Cain, ‘John Donne and the Ideology of Colonization,’ 442. The phrase ‘ever an affectionate servant’ comes from a letter Donne wrote to Sir Henry Goodyer around 1612, in which he comments ironically on the disappointment of the post he sought – that of secretary to the Virginia Company in London – having gone to his friend Richard Martyn in 1609. ‘[S]ince I am ever an affectionate servant to that journey,’ he writes, ‘acquaint Mr. Martin from me how easy it will be to get a good part of this [money] for Virginia.’ Cain, ‘John Donne and the Ideology of Colonization,’ 442–3. John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most Copious, and Exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London: Arnold Hatfield for Edw. Blount, 1598), 363. Stubblefield, ‘I Have Taken a Contrary Way.’

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Notes to pages 139–46

23 Luka`cs defines this transformation of time into space as reification: ‘time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable “things” (the reified, mechanically objectified “performance” of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space.’ Gyo¨rgy Luka´cs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 90. 24 See The Faerie Queene 5.2.35.1–36.4. 25 A ‘bugle’ is a tubular glass bead used to ornament clothing (OED n.3), and so suggests an item of trivial value. Possibly implicit here is the contrast between such a trinket of limited worth and a ‘bead’ as a metonym for the performance of prayer (OED 1), derived from the practice of counting prayer with beads. Although Reformation Protestants would have been likely to associate such beads with the Catholic rosary, the use of prayer beads traces back to early monastic and eremitic Christian practice. See Herbert Thurston and Andrew Shipman, ‘The Rosary,’ in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1912), http://www .newadvent.org/cathen/13184b.htm, accessed 7 July 2011. 26 See The Faerie Queene 2.9.43.9; Paradise Lost 2.648–870. 27 Federica Pirani, ‘Quando agli angeli spuntarono le ali?’ in Aurea Roma: Dalla citta` pagana alla citta` cristiana, ed. Serena Ensoli and Eugenio La Rocca (Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2000). 28 Fitzmaurice, ‘Every Man, that Prints, Adventures,’ 30. 29 Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), Introduction: ‘To Be “A Man in Print.”’ 30 Robert C. Johnson, Introduction to ‘A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia,’ The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 72, no. 3 (1964): 260–1. 31 Ibid., 260. Three of these five poems – Richard the Third; Two elegies consecrated to . . . Henry Prince of Wales; and The Shepheards Pipe – are currently included in the EEBO database, but no edition of Brooke’s poetry, apart from Johnson’s publication of the facsimile, has appeared since Grosart’s 1872 edition of the collected works. Grosart does not include A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia. Alexander B. Grosart, The Complete Poems of Christopher Brooke, for the First Time Collected and Edited, with Memorial-Introduction and Notes, The Fuller Worthies Library (Blackburn, UK: Printed for Private Circulation, 156 Copies Only, 1872). 32 Johnson, Introduction to ‘A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia,’ 260; Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Brooke, Christopher (c. 1570–1628),’ in Oxford

Notes to pages 146–55

33 34

35 36 37

38

39

40

41 42 43

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Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H.C.G. Matthew, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). O’Callaghan, ‘Brooke, Christopher (c. 1570–1628),’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Christopher Eagle, ‘ “Thou Serpent That Name Best”: On Adamic Language and Obscurity in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2007): 185. OED s.v. ‘mean n.3’ 6b. This expression, too, is attested in the OED only in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English. Gualtherus Bruele, Praxis Medicinae, or, the Physicians Practice [. . .], trans. I.A. (London: Iohn Norton for William Sheares, 1632), 96. I discuss this figure in Kasey Evans, ‘Misreading and Misogyny: Ariosto, Spenser, and Shakespeare,’ in Renaissance Drama: Italy in the Drama of Europe, Renaissance Drama New Series 36/37, ed. William N. West and Albert Russell Ascoli (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 271. Morris P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950); Archer Taylor and Bartlett Jere Whiting, A Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820–1880 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958). Margreta de Grazia, ‘Sanctioning Voice: Quotation Marks, the Abolition of Torture, and the Fifth Amendment,’ in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 288–9. See Delio’s opening speech in I.i, and Antonio and Bosola’s maxims in II. iii: John Webster, The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy (London: Nicholas Okes for Iohn Waterson, 1623), B1r, E2r, E3v. My thanks to Jeffrey Masten and Will West for these references and typographical insights. 2 Esdras 14:22 (KJV). See The Faerie Queene 2.12.1.1–5. William Ian Miller explains the pre-modern risks of ‘security’ in this way: ‘ “security” . . . is . . . culpable negligence in the ordering of one’s own system of values. Thomas Nashe, writing in the late sixteenth century, puts it best: Security is “forgetting mortalitie; it is a kind of Alchymical quintessensing of a heaven out of earth.” ’ William Ian Miller, ‘Gluttony,’ Representations 60 (1997): 102. Miller is quoting Thomas Nashe, Christs Tears over Jerusalem (London, 1593), 75v. Johnson, Introduction to ‘A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia,’ 264.

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45 Edmund Valentine Campos, ‘Thomas Gage and the English Colonial Encounter with Chocolate,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 1 (2009): 185. 5. Globalizing Temperance in Seventeenth-Century Economics 1 Edmund Spenser, ‘A Letter of the Authors,’ in The Faerie Queene, ed. Hamilton, 737. 2 John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London and New York: J.M. Dent, 1962), 2:284, emphasis added. 3 For the purposes of comparison (and for those readers not forced to memorize these lines in ‘Introduction to British Literature’), Chaucer’s version reads: ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour; / Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth / Inspired hath in every holt and heeth / The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, / And smale foweles maken melodye, / That slepen al the nyght with open ye / (So Priketh hem Nature in hir corages), / Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, / And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, / To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; / And specially from every shires ende / Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, / The hooly blisful martir for to seke, / That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.’ ‘The General Prologue,’ in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 23, lines 1–18. 4 Gerard Malynes, Saint George for England, Allegorically Described: By Gerrard De Malynes Merchant (London: Richard Field for William Tymme, 1601), 1–3. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. 5 See Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, chapter 2. See also my discussion of the ‘watery’ English temperament in chapter 4. 6 In Henry V the Duke of Orleance and the Constable attribute the English armies’ ability to ‘fight like devils’ to their ‘great meals of beef’ (III.vii.150–1); similarly, in 1 Henry VI, Charles the Dolphin and the Duke of Alenson mock the ‘famish’d English’ who ‘want their porridge and their fat bull-beeves: / Either they must be dieted like mules / And have their provender tied to their mouths, / Or piteous they will look, like drowned mice’ (I.ii.7–12). The Riverside Shakespeare, 1:999, 1:635. 7 I thank Jeff Masten and Susie Phillips for assistance with this passage. Isidore of Seville makes the first explicit written reference to the quill pen in

Notes to pages 162–3 239

8

9

10

11

12

13

the seventh-century Etymologiae – he glosses its split tip as a figure for the Old and New Testaments (VI.xiv.3) – but quill pens were certainly in use centuries earlier. See Stephen A. Barney et al.’s introduction to the recent edition of the Etymologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 21. The OED also suggests that ‘drink’ could refer specifically to a ‘medicinal potion or draught,’ a meaning first attested in the mid-fourteenth century (s.v. ‘drink’ 5b). Gerard Malynes, Consvetvdo, Vel, Lex Mercatoria, or, the Antient LawMerchant, Diuided into Three Parts: According to the Essentiall Parts of Trafficke. Necessarie for All Statesmen, Judges, Magistrates, Temporall and Ciuile, Lawyers, Mint-Men, Merchants, Mariners, and All Others Negociating in All Places of the World. By Gerard Malynes, Merchant (London: Adam Islip, 1629), 2. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text. The body of texts that we now call the ‘mercantile debates’ comprises a pamphlet war started in the 1620s, and prompted by James I’s establishment of an advisory committee to investigate the causes of an economic depression whose effects included inflation, unemployment, and declining textile sales both domestically and abroad. The commission blamed international trade in general, and the East India Company in particular, for depleting the country of bullion and coin. Malynes and his fellow bullionist Thomas Milles concurred; Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun favoured international commerce on the condition that net exports exceed net imports, creating a permanent trade surplus – an insupportable state of affairs according to contemporary economists, but constitutive of a ‘favorable balance of trade’ according to Misselden and Mun. Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3–4. For a careful elaboration of the similarities and differences between usury and profit-making/investment, see Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions, 13–16, esp. n40. See Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598– 1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), chapter 1 passim. Howard argues that Gresham’s Bourse inspired in the English a sense of both pride and socio-political anxiety. Much has been written about the increased appetite for luxury goods, especially foreign groceries, among the English in the seventeenth century: see, e.g., Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon, 1992); Jordan Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence

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16

17

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Notes to pages 166–8

(London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods (London: Macmillan, 1996); Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). Thomas Trapham, A Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica with a Provision Therefore Calculated from the Air, the Place, and the Water, the Customs and Manner of Living &c. (London: R. Boulter, 1679), 50. Henceforth Trapham, The State of Health in the Island of Jamaica. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman Fashioning Him Absolute in the Most Necessary & Commendable Qualities Concerning Minde or Bodie That May Be Required in a Noble Gentleman (London: [John Legat for] Francis Constable, 1622), 192, 194, 202, emphasis added to third passage. Goodman, Tobacco in History, 143. Goodman provides figures representing the growing appetite for tobacco in England over the course of the seventeenth century: in 1620, Britain imported sixty thousand pounds of tobacco from the Chesapeake colonies; by mid-century, that figure had increased to approximately one million pounds; by 1669, fifteen million pounds; and by the turn of the eighteenth century, thirty million pounds. Tobacco thus played a crucial role in sustaining the English economy; in the 1660s, tobacco duties from these colonies accounted for about twenty-five per cent of English customs revenues. Goodman remarks, ‘Tobacco played a key role in the European colonial enterprise. Once the methods of cultivation, and curing, were both appropriated by Europeans, tobacco became rapidly transformed into an essential commodity of the transatlantic economy, and provided the economic foundations of successful settlement’ (152, 150,146). Russell Menard’s statistics convey a similar message: in the 1620s, annual per capita consumption of tobacco in England and Wales is .1 pound; by 1700, 2.3 pounds. Russell R. Menard, ‘British Empire,’ in Tobacco in History and Culture: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jordan Goodman (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 100. I focus on A Counterblaste as exemplary of the entire rhetorical tradition. For a more comprehensive discussion of the tobacco debates, see Jeffrey Knapp, ‘Divine Tobacco,’ in An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from ‘Utopia’ to ‘The Tempest’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 134–74. James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco (London: R. B[arker], 1604), A3r. Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text.

Notes to pages 170–1 241 19 Cf. the ‘Homo Microcosmus,’ depicted in woodcut and accompanying verse in Henry Peacham’s emblem book. Like A Counterblaste, Peacham’s explanatory poem exploits the analogy between the four elements and the four humours: ‘Of heate and cold as is the Aire composed, / So likewise man we see breath’s whot and cold, / His bodie’s earthy: in his lunges inclosed, / Remaines the Aire: his braine doth moisture hold, / His heart and liver, doe the heate infold: / Of Earth, Fire, Water, Man thus framed is, / Of Elements the threefold Qualities.’ Henry Peacham, Minerua Britanna or A garden of heroical deuises furnished, and adorned with emblemes and impresa’s of sundry natures, newly devised, moralized, and published, by Henry Peacham, Mr. of Artes (London: Wa. Dight, 1612), 190. For the micro-/ macrocosmos analogy more generally, see Jerzy Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 54. Andrea Finkelstein points out that writers disagree about the representational range of the body politic metaphor. While William Perkins, Edward Forset, and Richard Baxter see body politics at various levels (the family, the church, the city, etc.), up to and including the national state, Richard Hooker defines the entire world as a body politic, with the commonwealths as its constituent parts: ‘For as civil law, being the act of a whole body politic, doth therefore overrule each several part of the same body; so there is no reason that any one commonwealth of itself should to the prejudice of another annihilate that whereupon the whole world hath agreed.’ Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity I.x.13, cited in Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance, 21. 20 Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity, 7. Floyd-Wilson explains the Renaissance English penchant for melancholy as an overcompensation for the cold, wet temperament attributed to them by classical geohumoral theory. English melancholy thus represents an attempt to cultivate inwardly the very heat and dryness of which the Britons had been climatologically deprived. 21 Historians agree that syphilis was brought to Europe by American Indians enslaved by Spaniards. The American Indians did indeed use tobacco to treat the disease, and Europeans followed suit, as medical literature of the period widely attests. Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 162. In his chapter on ‘Venereal Affects,’ Thomas Trapham (on whom more below) blames the Spaniards for this particular import: ‘The first opening of this Pandoras Box, at least in the European parts, was at the Siege of Naples, where the Spaniards returning from their new found World, brought with them as great a rarity, this new found distemper.’ Trapham, The State of Health in the Island of Jamaica, 111.

242

Notes to pages 171–6

22 See also Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity. 23 In 1604, ‘temperature’ could refer to a humoral temperament as easily as to a climate (OED s.v. ‘temperature’ 5, 6). This is the first time in James’s treatise, though, that he uses ‘temperature’ rather than ‘temper’ to refer to a humoral condition within a body, indicating a distinction in his own idiolect. 24 Gerard Malynes, The Center of the Circle of Commerce. Or, a Refutation of a Treatise, Intituled the Circle of Commerce, or the Ballance of Trade, Lately Published by E.M. (London: William Iones, 1623), 129, emphasis original. 25 Ibid., 128–9. 26 Ibid., 130, 132. 27 Ibid., 129–30. 28 See chapter 1, n80. 29 Cf. 1 Henry IV, where Hal scorns his companion’s cowardice: ‘Falstaff, you carried your guts away as nimbly, with as quick dexterity, and roar’d for mercy, and still run and roar’d, as ever I heard bullcalf’ (1 Henry IV II. iv.258–61 [Riverside Shakespeare, 903]). For ‘belly’ as ‘the body in its capacity for food . . . Also, the appetite for food,’ see OED 5b. 30 Gerard Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of Englands Common Wealth Deuided into Three Parts: Wherein the Author Imitating the Rule of Good Phisitions, First, Declareth the Disease. Secondarily, Sheweth the Efficient Cause Thereof. Lastly, a Remedy for the Same. (London: Richard Field for William Iohnes, 1601), 69–70. 31 B. Ann Tlusty, writing about the introduction of distilled liquors in early modern Germany, notes that many substances introduced to Western society in this period share a pattern of cultural assimilation, often characterized by an initial period of enthusiasm in which they are treated as ‘medical wonder[s].’ B. Ann Tlusty, ‘Water of Life, Water of Death: The Controversy over Brandy and Gin in Early Modern Augsburg,’ Central European History 31, no. 1–2 (1998): 5. For medicinal uses of cinnamon, pepper, and cloves – essential ingredients in the treatments of gonorrhea, migraines, and colic, respectively – see A.T., A Rich Store-House or Treasury for the Diseased: Wherein, Are Many Approued Medicines for Diuers and Sundry Diseases, Which Haue Been Long Hidden, and Not Come to Light before This Time. Now Set Foorth for the Great Benefit and Comfort of the Poorer Sort of People That Are Not of Abilitie to Go to the Physitions (London: Printed for Thomas Purfoot and Raph Blower, 1596). 32 I consider Occasion’s place in medieval and Renaissance iconography at greater length in ‘Misreading and Misogyny: Ariosto, Spenser, and Shakespeare,’ 270–1.

Notes to pages 177–82

243

33 For temperance as a positive representation of the capacity for self-discipline and self-definition via consumption and excretion, see Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, chapter 2. 34 Cf. Circe’s lovers at the end of The Faerie Queene II.xii, who are transformed into animals ‘According to their mindes like monstruous’ (II.xii.85.5). Both Spenser and Malynes identify temperance as integral to the maintenance of not only Englishness, but humanity – an equivalency that glosses with startling clarity the depictions of New World natives as bestial or animalistic: Caliban at his most atavistic, or the natives of Christopher Brooke’s poem. 35 Perhaps, as in James’s discussion of the ‘Microcosme’ of man, there is an implicit astronomical analogy here, according to which the harmonious strings of the ‘common-wealth’ ought to be attuned to the proverbial music of the spheres. For more on the musical senses of temperance, see my discussion of the paintings by Torrentius and Molenaer in chapter 1. 36 Interest rates were legally limited to ten per cent in England; Malynes admits some usury ‘as a necessarie euill,’ but advocates lowering the allowable rate to six per cent ‘to qualifie [the dragon’s] extreame deuouring of the poore’ (Saint George for England, C8r). Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England, 198–201. 37 In such transactions, English merchants would purchase commodities from foreign sellers at deflated prices, and then ‘dump’ their commodities abroad in order to conceal the usurious profits. E.A.J. Johnson, ‘Gerard De Malynes and the Theory of the Foreign Exchanges,’ American Economic Review 23, no. 3 (1933): 451–2. 38 Harris, Sick Economies, 58. 39 Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments, 200. 40 The echo of the printing press is faint here, but might function similarly as a figure of standardization, mechanization, and depersonalization. See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 41 David Hawkes, ‘Sodomy, Usury, and the Narrative of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,’ in Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 97. For insights into earlier representations of barren usury, see D. Vance Smith, ‘Body Doubles: Producing the Masculine Corpus,’ in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed.

244

42

43 44

45

Notes to pages 182–3

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 2000), 3–19. Explaining Dante’s inclusion of both usurers and sodomites in the same circle of his Inferno, Smith writes, ‘userers are faulted in part because they make fertile what should “naturally” be infertile; sodomites are faulted, according to a number of medieval writers, because they make infertile what should be fertile’ (13). Smith also notes that many medieval writers depict usury as bestializing, underscoring its contiguity with intemperance. Lynn White, Jr, ‘The Iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology,’ in Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E.H. Harbison, ed. Theodore K. Rabb and Jerrold E. Seigel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 197–219. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 11. King of England James I and J.H., King James His Counterblast to Tobacco to Which Is Added a Learned Discourse Proving That Tobacco Is a Procuring Cause of the Scurvy, Written by Dr. Everard Maynwaringe. With a Short Collection out of Dr. George Thompson’s Treatise of Bloud, against Smoking Tobacco. Also Serious Cautions against Excess in Drinking, with Many Examples of Gods Severe Judgments Upon Notorious Drunkards Who Have Died Suddenly. Concluding with Witty Poems against Tobacco, by Josh. Sylvester (London: Printed for John Hancock, 1672). Henceforth Sylvester, Witty Poems against Tobacco. Sylvester originally published his Tobacco Battered; & the Pipes Shattered in 1617, one year before his death. One might interpret the anthologization and recirculation of his poems in this late-seventeenth-century text as a material correlative to the continual recontextualization and redeployment of temperance throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ibid., 54–6. The poem quoted here is entitled ‘Tobacco Battered, and the Pipes Shattered (About their Ears, that id’ly Idolize so base and barbarous a Weed: Or, At least-wise over-love so loathsome Vanity.)’ Such accusations of idolatry against New World natives were, by this point in the seventeenth-century, a familiar trope of early colonialist literature – cf., for example, A Briefe and True Report, which includes Hariot’s notorious anecdote about the response of the Algonquian to his Bible, when he ‘made declaration of the contentes . . . that therein was set foorth the true and onelie GOD, and his mightie woorkes, that therein was contayned the true doctrine of salutation through Christ, with manie particularities of Miracles and chiefe poyntes of religion . . . And although I told them the booke materially & of it self was not of anie such vertue, as I thought they did conceiue, but onely the doctrine therein co[n]tained; yet would many be

Notes to pages 183–8 245

46

47 48

49 50

51

glad to touch it, to embrace it, to kisse it, to hold it to their brests and heades, and stroke ouer all their bodie with it . . .’ Hariot, A Briefe and True Report, 27. Coffee consumption probably originated in Ethiopia and Yemen between 800 and 1000 CE. The English owe their first recorded contact with the beverage to Turkey; it was not until 1600, in Aleppo – the city immortalized in Othello’s final speech (a detail whose relevance will soon become clear) – that an Englishman, William Biddulph, first wrote about a beverage called ‘coffa,’ which he identified as the Turks’ favourite drink. Most Europeans first encountered coffee in ‘travel narratives that described the exotic customs of the peoples living in the large “oriental” empires of Asia.’ Brian William Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 5, 17; Jordan Goodman, ‘Excitantia: Or, How Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs,’ in Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology, ed. Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 128. Sylvester, Witty Poems against Tobacco, 59. As my earlier readings suggest, James’s metaphors of the temperate body politic, and its global as well as national signification, belie his professed disdain for this ‘feeble . . . enemy.’ For the argument that tobacco’s insubstantiality is in fact the source of its power – and thus an explanation for the attenuation of this initial optimism in the Counterblaste and in Renaissance ideology generally – see Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from ‘Utopia’ to ‘The Tempest,’ chapter 4 (‘Divine Tobacco’). Romeo and Juliet II.vi.36–7, The Riverside Shakespeare 1120. Hughes and Trapham both specify that they wrote their treatises while in residence in Jamaica, while practising their trade as physicians. The question of first-person experience is vexed in the case of Chamberlayne, as his volume is palimpsestic; the historical and textual origins of the text are mediated by multiple layers of translation and revision. Further details of this textual history appear in the treatment of Chamberlayne’s text below. William Hughes, The American Physitian, or, a Treatise of the Roots, Plants, Trees, Shrubs, Fruit, Herbs, &C. Growing in the English Plantations in America Describing the Place, Time, Names, Kindes, Temperature, Vertues and Uses of Them, Either for Diet, Physick, &C.: Whereunto Is Added a Discourse of the Cacao-Nut-Tree and the Use of Its Fruit, with All the Ways of Making of Chocolate. The Like Never Extant Before (London: J.C. for William Crook, 1672), A8v, emphasis original.

246

Notes to pages 188–92

52 Ibid., B1r, emphasis added. 53 Exemplary of this subfield is Lisa Jardine’s Worldly Goods, which argues ‘that those impulses which today we disparage as “consumerism” might occupy a respectable place in the characterization of the new Renaissance mind . . . [T]he European Renaissance . . . was a celebration of the urge to own, the curiosity to possess the treasures of other cultures, and pride in a new craftsmanship which can make the most humdrum commodities desirable . . . [T]he seeds of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism were planted in the European Renaissance.’ Jardine, Worldly Goods, 12, 33–4. 54 Hughes, The American Physitian, A6v–r. 55 Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights, 85. 56 Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 324. For more on the reins of temperance, see J. Carscallen, ‘Temperance,’ 680–2; A. Bartlett Giamatti, ‘Sfrenatura: Restraint and Release in the Orlando Furioso,’ in Ariosto 1974 in America, ed. Aldo Scaglione, Maristella Lorch, and James V. Mirollo (Ravenna: Longo, 1976), 31–9. 57 Hughes, The American Physitian, A7v. 58 Ibid., 148. 59 Ibid., 139. 60 Ibid., 145. 61 Ibid., 149. 62 Marcy Norton, ‘Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,’ American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 668–9; Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, chapters 2–3; Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), chapter 11. See Norton for a more complete critical history. 63 Campos, ‘Thomas Gage,’ 185. For cannibalism as a perversion of the Eucharist, see Jose´ Juan de Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies Intreating of the Remarkable Things of Heaven, of the Elements, Mettalls, Plants and Beasts Which Are Proper to That Country: Together with the Manners, Ceremonies, Lawes, Governments, and Warres of the Indians, trans. Edward Grimeston (London: Val. Sims for Edward Blount and William Aspley, 1604), 379. 64 Campos, ‘Thomas Gage,’ 186. Campos theorizes chocolate not as Catholic per se, but as religiously amphibious: crossing, rather than substantiating, the Protestant–Catholic divide. 65 Ibid. See also Carole Shammas, ‘Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800,’ Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 177–205.

Notes to pages 193–6 247 Trapham, The State of Health in the Island of Jamaica, 4. Ibid., 50–1. Ibid., 51–2. Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Sherman might not be entirely sympathetic to my reading of Trapham’s text here, since he presents his study of eighteenth-century time and diurnal form as a corrective to the teleological tendency to read early modern experiences of time as all ‘precapitalist.’ That tendency, Sherman points out, obscures the way in which time as it was conceptualized in this period ‘called attention away from endpoints and invested it in middles – of the current hour, of the ongoing life’ (20–1). As I have suggested throughout this study, early modern temperance – which is sometimes coextensive with ‘time’ but never synonymous with it – names a contested ground of sometimes incompatible ideologies and ethics during this period, some of which are anti-teleological and anti-proleptic, and others of which are explicitly focused on time as a teleological means to an end, an end that might well be described as ‘pre-capitalist.’ 70 See Campos, ‘Thomas Gage,’ 184. 71 Hughes and Trapham’s preoccupation with the productivity of New World labour is in some important ways appropriative: such conditions would apply more forcefully to the colonized and/or enslaved subjects than to the colonizers and their intended European audiences. If James I and Joshua Sylvester, in their explicit racism, echo Prospero at his worst, Hughes and Trapham perhaps imitate Gonzalo (see chapter 3). Even European colonizers who idealize the New World colonial landscape, its resources, and its inhabitants are unwittingly complicit in effacing and/or appropriating the material reality of the lives of their colonized subjects. 72 Chamberlayne’s text is not an original composition, but a translation and compilation of Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma’s Curioso tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del chocolate (Madrid, 1631) and Philippe Sylvestre Dufour’s Traite´s curieux du cafe´, du the´, et du chocolat (Lyons, 1684). EEBO identifies Dufour alone as the author of the 1685 English edition that I examine here, specifying Chamberlayne’s contribution only in the notes. Because my focus is on English reception and nationalism, though, I am interested in the volume as Chamberlayne’s rhetorical rendering of the source texts. Certain bibliographic details recommend this interpretation: Chamberlayne’s name is the only one that appears in the prefatory pages introducing the volume – on the dedication page, where he identifies himself as the translator, naming his sources as Colmenero de Ledesma and an

66 67 68 69

248

73

74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

Notes to pages 197–201

anonymous ‘learned Physitian of Germany, who would be nameless.’ Dufour’s identity is uncertain; the name may be a pseudonym of the German physician Jacob Spon, who reportedly died in 1685. See Louis Grivetti and Howard-Yana Shapiro, Chocolate: History, Culture, and Heritage (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), 104. Dufour’s text itself comprised a French translation of Colmenero de Ledesma’s, along with substantial revisions and additions. According to Colmonero de Ledesma’s first English translator, James Wadsworth, the Spaniard ‘sometimes lived in the West Indies.’ Like The American Physitian and A Discourse of the State of Health in the Island of Jamaica, therefore, Chamberlayne’s text does lay claim to the authority of first-person experience, however multiply mediated. James Wadsworth, ‘To the Gentry of the English Nation,’ in Chocolate: Or, an Indian Drinke . . . Written Originally in Spanish, by Antonio Colminero of Ledesma, Doctor in Physicke, and Faithfully Rendred in the English, by Capt. James Wadsworth (London: J.G. for Iohn Dakins, 1652), A3r–A5v. John Chamberlayne, The Manner of Making of Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate as It Is Used in Most Parts of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with Their Vertues, Newly Done out of French and Spanish, ed. John Chamberlayne (London: William Crook, 1685), 95–7, emphasis original. Ibid., 95, emphasis original. In his preface, Chamberlayne explains that the treatise on tea ‘consists of some particular Remarks extracted from the Dutch East-India Companies Embassy to the Emperour of China’ and ‘from the Medicinal Observations of Nicholas Tulpius a Physician of Amsterdam,’ whose texts also relied on East India Company trade (A4r). Tulp(ius)’s Observationes medicae (1641, 1652) analysed commodities brought back to Holland by the East India company, including tobacco and tea. Jordan Goodman adds, ‘The English East India Company started regular shipments of tea from Canton to London in the 1660s, though English acquaintance with tea drinking antedated the Company’s involvement: Holland supplied the English market for the first half of the seventeenth century.’ Goodman, ‘Excitantia,’ 128. Goodman, ‘Excitantia,’ 137. Chamberlayne, The Manner of Making of Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate, 5, 12. Ibid., 49, 40. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 30, emphasis original. Ibid., 46–7, emphasis original. Ibid., 49–50. I borrow these examples from Roger Schmidt, who argues that widespread caffeine consumption in England catalyzed voracious literary production

Notes to pages 201–4 249 and consumption, resulting in a ‘devaluing of sleep as a meaningful activity,’ and its recharacterization as a failure of ‘virtue, industry, and above all, self-discipline.’ Roger Schmidt, ‘Caffeine and the Coming of the Enlightenment,’ Raritan 23, no. 1 (2003): 132, 134; Macbeth II.ii.34–37, Riverside Shakespeare 1368; Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Oxford Authors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 168 (sonnet 39.1–4). 84 A. Roger Ekirch, ‘Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles,’ American Historical Review 106, no. 2 (2001): 351–60. See also Ekirch, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 2005). 85 Schmidt writes, ‘The history of caffeine consumption cannot be extricated from the history of literary consumption, especially of the novel, and both are implicated in the historical devaluation of sleep as a meaningful activity. It is hard to imagine the common reader progressing enjoyably through the nine hundred pages of Tom Jones or the seven volumes of Clarissa without the aid of artificial stimulants.’ Schmidt, ‘Caffeine and the Coming of the Enlightenment,’ 132. Coda 1 Thomas Tryon, A Way to Health, Long Life and Happiness, or, A Discourse of Temperance (London: H.C. for R. Baldwin, 1691; orig. pub. 1683). 2 Health’s Grand Preservative (1682) went through two editions; The Good Housewife Made a Doctor (1685), three editions; The Way to Make All People Rich (1685), two editions; A New Art of Brewing Beer (1691), three editions; A Pocket Companion (1693), two editions. See Nigel Smith, ‘Enthusiasm and Enlightenment: Of Food, Filth, and Slavery,’ in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerard MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 117n23. 3 Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2006), chapter 5. 4 Tryon’s consideration of temperance is thus commensurate with the forms of alimentary regulation analysed so masterfully in Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves. 5 Tryon, A Discourse of Temperance, A4v, emphasis original. 6 Tryon, A Discourse of Temperance, 48–9, emphasis original.

250

Notes to pages 205–6

7 Smith, ‘Enthusiasm and Enlightenment,’ 20, emphasis added. 8 Ibid. 9 See especially Friendly Advcie [sic] to the Gentelman [sic]-Planters of the East and West Indies (London: Andrew Sowle, 1684), published under the pseudonym Philotheos Physiologus. Part 2 of the treatise is entitled: ‘The complaints of the negro-slaves against the hard usages and barbarous cruelties inflicted upon them.’ 10 ‘Brackmanny’ is a variant of ‘Brahman’ in use from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries; see OED s.v. ‘Brahmin, Brahman.’ Friendly Advcie [sic], similarly, concludes with ‘A Discourse in way of Dialogue, between an Ethiopean or Negro-Slave, and a Christian that was his Master in America.’ Like the dialogue between the East-Indian and the Frenchman, this one allows the colonized subject to decry the hypocrisy of his interlocutor, who identifies as the third tenet of good Christian conduct ‘To be Sober and Temperate in Meats, Drinks and Exercises, mortifying the Lusts of the Flesh, and avoiding all kind of Superfluity, that so we may not waste or abuse the good Creatures of God’ (155). The Negro responds, ‘What Heathen People (as you call them) are there in the whole World, that more pamper their Carkasses, and indulge themselves like you, with things that are not needful, nor convenient? Do you not invent an hundred Superfluities and needless Toys, to gratifie your own, and your Childrens Pallates and Sensuality?’ (165). 11 Tryon, A Discourse of Temperance, 13, emphasis original. Pagination begins again at 1 at the beginning of the ‘Dialogue.’ 12 Ibid., 4. 13 Ibid., 2.

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Index

Adelman, Janet, 74 affect, 9, 67, 68 – 77, 79, 83, 86 – 7, 91 – 2, 119, 149 – 51, 155 – 6 Alberti, Leon Battista, 21 – 2, 30 allegory, 52, 80 – 3, 97, 103, 167, 173, 180, 184 – 6 Alpers, Paul, 68 Anderson, Judith, 7 Aquinas, St Thomas, 138, 165, 182 Ariosto, Ludovico, 83, 88 – 92, 220nn77 – 8 Aristotle, 3, 15 – 20, 22, 27, 35, 52 – 4, 67, 73, 79, 123, 165, 182, 196; via media, 16, 131, 144, 149, 168, 193, 195, 199 Armitage, David, 64 – 5, 222n5, 242 – 3n11 Bacon, Francis, 222n5 Baldwin, William, 75 Barbados, 205 Baxter, Richard, 241n19 Berger, Jr, Harry, 68, 210n5 Bermuda, 97 Biddulph, William, 263 Black Legend, 45 – 54, 128, 137, 174, 176, 191, 218n57, 221n90

Blank, Paula, 225n32 Boccaccio, 220n77 body, human: Catholic emphasis on, 192; humoral balance in, 43, 165, 168, 172, 173, 177, 185, 197; as ‘little world,’ 50, 95 – 6, 169 – 70, 180, 188, 241n19, 243n35; as metaphor, 160; as text, 103, 109, 118 – 20, 148, 150 – 1 body politic, 96, 133, 161 – 4, 168 – 78, 186, 205, 245n48 Boethius, 79 Boorde, Andrew, 116, 118 (figure 15), 229n14 Brooke, Christopher, 145 – 6; ‘A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia,’ 5, 10 – 11, 131 – 2, 137, 145 – 59, 171, 243n34 Brown, Christopher, 39 – 40 Brown, Paul, 101 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, 37 – 9, 38 (figure 10), 216n41 bullion, 162, 174, 239n10 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 70 Cabot, John, 48 cacao. See chocolate

270

Index

caffeine, 198 – 9, 248 – 9n83, 249n85 Cain, Tom, 132 – 3 Callaghan, Dympna, 100, 229 – 30n18 Campin, Robert, 230n20 Campos, Edmund Valentine, 77, 152 – 3, 192, 227n52, 246n64 cannibalism, 98, 109, 112, 118 – 23, 192, 231n28, 246n63; Eucharist as, 122 – 3, 192, 246n63 Canny, Nicholas, 221n90 capitalism: early development of, 8, 63 – 7, 75 – 7, 188, 247n69; Invisible Hand of, 65 – 7, 78 – 86 cardinal virtues, 3, 68, 223n14 Carribbean, 165, 188 Carruthers, Mary, 228 – 9n9 Carscallen, James, 217n46 Castiglione, Baldassare, 17, 22, 24, 73 Chamberlayne, John, 11, 187, 195 – 201, 245n50, 247 – 8n72, 248n75 Charles I of England, 135 Charles V of France, 33 chastity, 92 – 3, 104 – 6, 229 – 30n18, 230n20 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 160 – 2, 164, 177, 180, 238n3 chivalry, 66, 77 – 8 chocolate, 11, 142, 157, 187, 190 – 3, 195 – 8 Christine de Pisan, 33 – 5, 34 (figure 8), 215n33 Cicero, 3, 20, 112, 132, 144, 210n4 cinnamon, 175, 197, 242n31 claret, 174, 175 climate: English, 95, 99 – 100, 116; temperate, 103; tempests in, 3 – 4, 92 – 3, 94, 96, 109, 228n4 clocks, mechanical, 21, 30 – 9, 180 – 3, 187 – 8, 191, 197 clothing, 116 – 18, 231 – 2n34

cloves, 175, 197, 242n31 coffee, 142, 184 – 7, 192, 198 – 201, 245n46 coinage, 111 – 13, 121, 157, 239n10 colic, 242n31 Colmenero de Ledesma, Antonio, 247 – 8n72 colonialism, English, 4 – 9, 11 – 12, 44 – 59, 65 – 6, 77 – 8, 97 – 8, 108 – 9, 120, 163 – 5, 188 – 202, 229 – 30n18 commodity culture, 10 – 11, 37 – 41, 75, 121, 131, 137 – 45, 152, 157, 166 – 78, 180 – 3, 185, 233n52, 246n53 commonplaces, 152 consumerism, 188 – 9, 246n53 Cooper, Thomas, 99 – 100, 110 Corte´s, Fernando, 53 – 4 counterfeiting, 111 – 12, 157 – 8 crasis (humoral balance), 43, 165, 168, 172, 173, 177, 185, 197 currency exchange, 163, 174, 179 – 80 Dante Alighieri, 69, 74, 79, 85, 177, 243 – 4n41 de Bry, Theodor, 77, 130, 174 – 5, 220n80, 226n45 Dee, John, 45 Derrida, Jacques, 84 – 5, 140 Descartes, Rene´, 69 – 70 Dido, 104 – 8, 105 (figure 13), 114, 231n28 diet, 5 – 6, 11 – 12, 41, 109, 119 – 20, 121 – 2, 161, 165 – 6, 188 – 201, 203 – 7, 217n48 Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard, 214n21 Donne, George (son of John Donne), 135, 235n18 Donne, John, 5, 10, 130 – 46, 152, 159, 170, 235n20

Index 271 Drake, Sir Francis, 46 Dryden, John, 160, 164 Dufour, Philippe Sylvestre, 247 – 8n72 East India Company, 239n10, 248n75 East Indies, 198 Eburne, Richard, 8, 55 – 6, 176, 221n90 effeminacy, 161 efficiency, 129, 184 – 202 Egerton, Thomas, 146 Elizabeth I, 45, 46, 48, 60, 220n77 Empire: British, 45 – 59, 64 – 5, 222n5; Holy Roman, 45, 89, 104 – 7, 230n24 Enlightenment, 65 Erasmus, 18 – 19 evangelism, 14 – 15, 46 – 8, 55 – 6, 127 – 8, 130 – 2, 135 – 6, 140 – 1, 143, 144, 234n4 Evelyn, John, 205 Festa, Thomas, 133 fetishism, 131 Finkelstein, Andrea, 7, 241n19 Fitzmaurice, Andrew, 132, 144 Florio, John, 9, 109 – 23, 138, 231 – 2n34 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 6, 50, 99 – 100, 241n20 Forman, Valerie, 239n10 Forset, Edward, 241n19 Freccero, Carla, 84 – 5, 119, 231n30 Froissart, Jean, 33 Frye, Northrop, 93 Fuchs, Barbara, 97, 228n8 Gage, Thomas, 195 Galenic medicine. See humoral medicine geohumoralism, 50 – 2, 95 – 6, 161, 169 – 73, 183, 184, 188, 197, 205

George, St, 11, 160, 179 gift, economy of, 21, 75 – 6, 85 – 6, 138 – 9 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 48 Gillies, John, 6 Giotto di Bondone, 23 (figure 1), 24, 27, 30 Gittings, Clare, 224n27 globalization, economic, 162, 166, 185, 197 – 8 gluttony, 37, 41, 49 – 50, 174 – 5, 206, 217n48 gonorrhea, 242n31 Goodyer, Sir Henry, 235n20 grace, as theological concept, 67, 75 – 6, 85 – 6 Greenblatt, Stephen, 4, 224n27 Greer, Margaret R., 64, 209 – 10n3, 218n57 Gresham’s Bourse, 163, 239n10 Grijalva, Juan de, 53 – 4 Hadfield, Andrew, 7 Hakluyt, Richard, 8, 45 – 50, 53 – 4, 58 – 9, 70, 130, 218 – 19n63 Halpern, Richard, 108 – 10, 119, 222n8, 231n28 Hamilton, A.C., 73, 82, 83 Harington, Sir John, 220nn77, 78 Hariot, Thomas, 244 – 5n45 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 7, 180 Henry VII of England, 48 Herna´ndez, Francisco, 157 Herodotus, 50 Hippocrates, 43, 50, 95 Hoby, Sir Thomas, 17, 73 Homer, 228 – 9n9 Hooker, Richard, 241n19 Houlbrooke, Ralph, 224n27 hourglass, 27 – 30

272

Index

Howell, James, 116 Hughes, William, 11, 165 – 6, 187 – 94, 197, 245n50, 247n71 Hulme, Peter, 228n4 humanism, 4, 5, 16 – 22, 104, 117, 189 Hume, Alexander, 75, 80 humoral medicine, 43 – 4, 50 – 1, 57, 95, 99 – 101, 132, 133, 137, 149 – 55, 168 – 9, 176 – 7, 191 – 2, 199 Hutson, Lorna, 6, 70 Huxley, Aldous, 117 Icarus, 153 idolatry, 244 – 5n45 imperialism, 45 – 59, 106 – 8, 123, 201, 205, 231n28 Isidore of Seville, 238 – 9n7 Jamaica, 165 – 6, 187 – 94, 245n50 James I of England (James VI of Scotland), 122, 189, 239n10, 243n35; Counterblaste to Tobacco, 5, 11, 165, 166 – 73, 174, 175, 183, 185 – 7, 191, 194, 197 – 8, 242n23, 245n48, 247n71 Jamestown (English settlement in Virginia), 5, 6, 10, 106 – 7, 127 – 8, 133, 143, 148, 167 Jardine, Lisa, 246n53 justice, 16, 27 – 8, 84, 86, 138 – 9, 204, 223n14 Kaye, Joel, 214n20 Kesler, R.L., 75 Knapp, Jeffrey, 240n17, 245n48 labour, 11, 55 – 6, 96, 108, 158, 190 – 1, 195, 199 – 202, 204 – 5, 247n71; alienated, 139, 201; forced or slave, 9, 77 – 82, 98, 101 – 2

Landreth, David, 77 language: as European prerogative, 147 – 8; prelapsarian, 147 – 8 Las Casas, Bartolome´ de, 49 – 50, 54, 227n52 LeGoff, Jacques, 7, 22, 214n21 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 27, 28 (figure 4), 30 Luka`cs, Gyo¨rgy, 236n23 lust, 41, 104, 229 – 30n18 luxury goods, 11, 128, 166 – 201; English appetite for, 165, 175; importation into England of, 239 – 40n13, 240n16; as medicinal substances, 242n31. See also chocolate; cinnamon; claret; cloves; coffee; pepper; silk; tea; tobacco; velvet lying, 110, 112 – 17, 231 – 2n34 Maˆle, E´mile, 7, 30 Maley, Willy, 7 Maltby, William, 218n57 Malynes, Gerard, 5, 160 – 6, 173 – 83, 187 – 8, 191, 243n34 Mammon, 67, 76, 77 – 86, 111, 119, 154 Mancall, Peter C., 221n92 Mantegna, Andrea, 104 – 6, 105 (figure 13) Marlowe, Christopher, 140 Martyn, Richard, 135, 235n20 Martyr, Peter, 157, 228n4 Marvell, Andrew, 20 – 1 Marx, Karl, 63 – 7, 76, 78, 131, 139; in Renaissance scholarship, 222n5 Massys, Cornelis, 28 – 30, 29 (figure 5) Medea, 87 – 91, 93, 94, 107, 159 melancholy, 119, 164, 171, 241n20 memory, 9, 71 – 2, 77, 96 – 123, 161, 231n30

Index 273 mercantile debates, 239n10 Mignolo, Walter D., 45, 64, 209 – 10n3, 218n57 migraines, 242n31 Milles, Thomas, 239n10 Milton, John, 20, 143, 226 – 7n51 mining, representations of, 64, 67, 77 – 86 miscegenation, 184 – 6 Misselden, Edward, 174, 239n10 Molanaer, Jan Miense, 41 – 4, 42 (figure 12), 217nn48, 50, 243n35 Montaigne, Michel de, 9, 109 – 23, 231 – 2n34, 232n39 Montesquieu, 65 More, Henry, 111 More, Thomas 63, 135, 235n17 Mun, Thomas, 239n10 narrative, 72, 101 – 3, 110 – 17, 152 – 3, 164 nationalism, 165, 183, 186, 203 – 7 Native Americans, 5, 10, 48 – 50, 58 – 9, 122 – 3, 127 – 32, 138, 141 – 2, 146 – 8, 153 – 8, 169 – 73, 190, 192, 197, 221n92, 228n4, 234n5, 243n34, 244 – 5n45 Neill, Michael, 122 Nicholas of St Albans, 99 North, Helen, 7, 18 Oresme, Nicole, 32 (figure 7), 33 Orgel, Stephen, 104 Orientalism, 185 Orwell, George, 13 Oviedo (Gonzalo Ferna´ndez de Oviedo y Valde´s), 228n4 Paster, Gail Kern, 232n39 patience, 20, 93, 96

Peacham, Henry, 166 – 8, 172, 175, 241n19 Penelope, 107, 108 pepper, 175, 242n31 Perkins, William, 241n19 Petrarch, Francis, 104, 107 Physiologus, Philotheos. See Tryon, Thomas Pierre de Celle (Peter de la Celle, Peter Cellensis), 99 Pilate, Pontius, 84 – 6 plantation (as colonial practice), 11, 50, 54 – 5, 59, 108, 120, 127, 130, 205, 221n90 Plato, 3, 24, 98 – 9, 151, 189, 217n46, 228 – 9n9 Powell, Captain Nathaniel, 146, 148, 155 – 8 primitive accumulation, 9, 63 – 7, 81 – 2, 84, 128, 131, 143, 157 – 8, 165, 188 – 9, 191, 194, 206 Prosser, Eleanor, 232n39 protectionism, economic, 162, 165 – 73, 175 – 6, 179, 186 – 7 Protestant Reformation, 20, 46 – 8, 73 – 4, 191, 224n27, 236n25 Purchas, Samuel, 45 – 50, 218 – 19n63 Quilligan, Maureen, 45, 64, 77 – 9, 209 – 10n3, 218n57 Quintilian, 112 quotation marks, 151 – 2 race, 6, 80 racism, 10, 131, 146 – 8, 171 – 3, 183, 184 – 6, 201 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 48 Raman, Shankar, 7 Read, David T., 6, 53

274

Index

reason, human faculty of, 16, 30, 153, 154 revenge, 67, 74 – 6, 81, 97, 130, 131, 148, 155, 158, 225n32 Reverdy, Georges (Gaspar Reverdino), 25 – 7, 26 (figure 3) Royal Exchange, The, 163, 239n10 Scanlan, Thomas, 7 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 5 – 6, 225n38 Scodel, Joshua, 6 Sepu´lveda, Juan Gine´s de, 132 – 3 Sforza, Francesco, 114 – 15 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, 107, 152, 227n55, 231 – 2n34; Henry V, 238n6; 1 Henry VI, 238n6; Julius Caesar, 103, 229n17; Macbeth, 200, 227 – 8n2; The Merchant of Venice, 21; Othello, 184 – 6, 245n46; Romeo and Juliet, 186; Sonnets, 20; The Tempest, 5, 8, 9, 92 – 3, 94 – 123, 159, 229 – 30n18, 233n52, 247n71 Sherman, Stuart, 195, 247n69 Sidney, Sir Philip, 189, 200 – 1 silk, 174 Singer, Julie, 30, 35, 216n36 Skura, Meredith, 97, 109, 228n8 Slatyer, William, 116 slavery, 12, 14, 77 – 82, 98, 101 – 2, 127, 205 – 7, 226n46, 250nn9 – 10 sleep, 21, 99, 161, 199 – 201 sloth, 99, 100, 154, 191 – 2, 237n43 Smith, Adam, 65 – 6, 76, 78, 81, 86 Smith, Captain John, 155 Smith, Nigel, 205 Spaniards: as colonial competitors, 45 – 50, 52 – 4, 128, 130, 137, 171, 191, 221n90, 241n21; as consumers of chocolate, 190, 192

Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, 3 – 5, 8 – 9, 17 – 18, 51 – 2, 66 – 93, 94, 111, 119, 120, 139, 143, 153, 159, 160, 166, 176, 185, 193, 207, 217n46, 243n34; as poet of empire, 80, 222 – 3n11 Spon, Jacob, 247 – 8n72 Stevens, Jane R., 41 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 14 Strachey, William, 97, 106 – 7, 228n7 Stratford, Nicholas, 75 Stubblefield, Jay, 138 Suso, Henry, 33 Sylvester, Joshua, 5, 183 – 7, 198, 244n44, 244 – 5n45, 247n71 syphilis, 170 – 1, 241n21 tea, 11, 192, 198 – 201 technology, 30 – 7, 182 temperance: and abstinence, 174 – 5, 193 – 4; and alcohol consumption, 14 – 15, 19, 24 – 6, 37, 41, 56 – 8, 166 – 7, 206, 217n48, 221n92; and bodily appetites, 41, 49 – 50; and capitalism, 75 – 6, 157; in classical culture, 3 – 4, 15 – 17, 20; and climatology, 3, 44, 50, 55, 92 – 3, 95 – 6, 98 – 9, 132, 149 – 50, 168 – 73, 188, 203, 242n23; and colonialism, 7, 9 – 12, 44 – 59, 66 – 8, 77 – 86, 92, 97 – 8, 101 – 2, 108 – 23, 204 – 7; and commodity culture, 37 – 44, 131, 137 – 45, 157; and continence, 16 – 20, 35; and diet, 5 – 6, 49 – 50, 174 – 8, 182, 203 – 7, 243n33, 250n10; and efficiency, 8, 16 – 22, 187 – 202; etymology of, 3 – 4; and humoral medicine, 43 – 4, 50, 99 – 101, 149 – 57, 165, 168 – 73, 177, 182, 187 – 8, 191, 203, 242n23; iconography of,

Index 275 22 – 44, 57, 71, 182, 189; and metallurgy, 156 – 7; as moderation, 16, 24, 27, 49, 95, 123, 132 – 3, 149; and music, 37 – 44, 132, 178 – 9, 216n41, 217n46, 243n35; and the passions, 17, 19, 23 – 4, 69 – 70, 79, 81, 88, 95, 131, 133, 149, 153, 155 – 6; and revenge, 131, 158; and time, 3 – 4, 7, 8, 11 – 12, 19 – 20, 27 – 44, 52 – 6, 66, 92 – 3, 94 – 7, 100 – 1, 130 – 2, 133 – 9, 149 – 50, 154 – 5, 165, 174 – 7, 180 – 3, 187 – 202, 205 textile production, 239n10 time, 129, 133– 9; as commodity, 21, 137 – 45; occasion, as variety of, 3 – 4, 27, 86 – 7, 96, 100, 119, 131, 136, 141, 176, 210n4; Providential, 134 – 7 Tlusty, B. Ann, 242n31 tobacco, 39, 142, 166 – 73, 174, 175, 185 – 7, 197, 240nn16 – 17, 244n44, 244 – 5n45 Torrentius, Jan, 39 – 41, 40 (figure 11), 243n35 Trapham, Thomas, 5, 11, 165 – 6, 187, 193 – 5, 197, 241n21, 245n50, 247n71 trauma, 71 – 3, 224n23 travel literature, 195 Tryon, Thomas, 5, 12, 203 – 7, 249n4, 250nn9 – 10 Turks, 183 – 6, 199 – 200, 245n46 Tuve, Rosemond, 7, 35 typography, 151 – 2 usury, 11, 165, 179 – 81, 191, 243nn36 – 7, 243 – 4n41 van Haarlem, Cornelis, 217n50 van Thiel, P.J.J., 41, 43, 217nn48, 50 vegetarianism, 203 Vela`zquez, Diego, 54 velvet, 174

Virgil, 74, 79, 104, 106 – 8, 122, 230nn23 – 4, 231n28 Virgin Mary, 24, 230n20; Hours of, 112, 113 (figure 14) Virginia, colony of, 127 – 59 Virginia Company: founding of, 127; John Donne’s sermon to, 130 – 45; mission of, 127 – 30, 134, 135, 158; officers in, 135, 145, 155; rhetoric of, 234 – 5n10 virtues, cardinal. See cardinal virtues Wadsworth, James, 247 – 8n72 Wall, Wendy, 145 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 45 Waterhouse, Edward, 128 – 30, 146, 158 Weatherby, Harold L., 18 – 19 Webster, John: The Duchess of Malfi, 152 West Indies, 46, 165 – 6 White, John, 56 – 9, 176, 221n90 White, Jr, Lynn, 30, 37, 41, 44 Willard, Charity Cannon, 215n33 Willard, Frances E., 14 – 15 Williams, Travis, 231 – 2n34, 232n39 Wilson, Dover, 111 Wilson-Okamura, David Scott, 106 – 7, 228n8, 230n24 witnessing, 71 – 3, 81 wrath, 37, 41 writing: metaphors of, 147, 148, 155 – 6, 164; technologies of, 145, 238 – 9n7, 243n40 xenophobia, 114, 169, 171, 183, 186, 197, 205, 206 Zimmerman, Susan, 224n27 zodiac, 161, 164, 180