On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England 9780804772907

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ON DEMAND

On Demand writing for the market in early modern england

David J. Baker

stanford university press Stanford, California 2010

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved Portions of Chapter 4 were originally published in ELH: English Literary History ©2005, Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baker, David J. On demand : writing for the market in early modern England / David J. Baker. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-3856-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1.  English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism.  2.  Authorship—Economic aspects—England— History.  3.  Authors and readers—England—History.  4.  Books and reading—England—History.  5.  Book industries and trade—England—History.  6.  Economics and literature— England—History.  7.  Consumption (Economics)—England— History.  I.  Title. pr428.a8b35      2010 820.9'003—dc22 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/13.5 Galliard

2009022163

For Joe and Alex

Acknowledgments

On Demand is about how readers help to shape texts, and this book has been helped along at various junctures by several shrewd and generous readers. I’d like to thank Sumner La Croix and S. Charusheela for their patient explanations and robust conversation, and Jan de Vries for his graciousness. He will find here, some sixteen years after the fact, a response to his call for a “real dialogue among the varied parties interested in the history of consumption,” and I hope he finds it as engaging as his own contributions have been for me. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Barbara Fuchs, and Mary Floyd-Wilson provided detailed readings of some of these chapters. I’m grateful to them, as well as the two anonymous readers for Stanford University Press. Each taught me much more about what this book could be than I would have known otherwise. Many of its more cogent insights are really theirs. Stanley Fish, whose name doesn’t show up until Chapter 5, but whose influence will be noticed throughout, first set me to thinking about reading as a species of consumption. Jonathan Goldberg’s energetic mind and steady friendship over many years have meant more to me than an “acknowledgment” can convey. On Demand offers a token. Rick Rambuss and Willy Maley were stalwart at key moments. This book is fortunate to have as its editor Emily-Jane Cohen at Stanford University Press. And I have been fortunate in my colleagues, first at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, and now at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The first offered me their aloha and the second their hospitality; both have been sustaining. These colleagues have heard versions of Chapters 1 and 3, respectively. A portion of Chapter 4 was presented at a panel at the

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Shakespeare association of America in 2007, and I’d like to thank my fellow panelists, Robert Markley and Jonathan Burton. Each audience will hear an echo of our discussion in these pages. Passages from Chapter 4 appeared in English Literary History 72 (2005), and I am grateful for permission to reprint them here.

Contents

Preface: Writing for the Long Run  xi

1. Marvelously Altered  1



2. Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, and the Demon of Consumption  35



3. William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: Credit Risks  62



4. “Allegory of a China Shop”: Ben Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse and Volpone  93



5. “Idleness is an appendix to nobility”: The Preface to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy  121



Coda: Butter Buyers  143

Notes  151 Bibliography  173 Index  197

Preface: Writing for the Long Run DEMA’ND, dė-mănd.’ n.s. [demande, Fr.] 3 . The calling for a thing in order to purchase it. Samuel Johnson, Dictionary (1755)

Recently, some critics have wondered aloud—and disagreed—about the economic motives of Shakespeare and his theatrical company. Andrew Gurr points out in The Shakespearean Playing Companies that when the King’s Men took up the lease to the lucrative Blackfriars playhouse in 1608, they could have abandoned their theater of the moment, the Globe, or rented it out, but they didn’t. And again in 1613, when the Globe burned down, they could have abandoned the site and reverted to Blackfriars, but they didn’t. Instead, they chose to rebuild the more down-market Globe at great personal expense. Both decisions strike Gurr as “quixotic” and, in terms of sheer profit and loss, unreasonable. Perhaps, he speculates, they were animated by “nostalgia.” In their repertory they “clung tightly to the older traditions,” and so too in their allegiance to the more variegated audiences of the Globe. Shakespeare and his fellows lost money, though apparently the affective pay-off was enough: “They could afford the self-indulgent and extravagant luxury of buying themselves a new system based largely on nostalgia for the old times.”1 When Shakespeare and Co. had enough money, the profit motive disappeared; money was what allowed them to buy their way out of the need to make money. Not so fast, says Theodore Leinwand in Theatre, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England. Could the real estate choices of Shakespeare and Co. have been motivated not by nostalgia, but “exhilaration”? Just as today “[r]ock-and-roll bands . . . make considerable fortunes from compact disks and music videos [yet] continue to mount lavish live-performance tours held at huge outdoor venues . . . [m]ight there have been players who were, as we now say, committed to playing for popular audiences?”

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Or might “emulation” or “condescension” or “[f]ear” or “caution” in various ways also be part of the affective mix?2 This critic does not deny that the King’s Men operated according to a hardheaded business logic, but he doubts that was all there was to it. “The early modern English economy, considerably less theorized than our own,” says Leinwand, “must certainly have operated according to a blend of cognition and affect.”3 Between them, Gurr and Leinwand raise questions well worth pursuing: Just how did cognition and affect work together in the financial thinking of, not only the King’s Men, but other literary entrepreneurs in their time? What sort of economic cognition can we attribute to Shakespeare and to others who wrote (and performed and published) “for the market,” as my subtitle has it? Can we think of them as simply “actors . . . rationally pursuing their goals” according to a calculus of profit and loss (the model of “utility maximization” offered us by neo-classical economics)?4 Or should we consider other motives, and, if so, what might those motives be—not just fear, emulation, desire and so on, but fear, emulation, and desire as early modern people would have understood and experienced them? These are the questions that give some point to Gurr and Leinwand’s light sparring over the affective payday that Shakespeare and his partners seem to have expected. Their questions raise, but do not really address, some of the most far-reaching problems an economic criticism of early modern English literature must confront.5 As it happens, Gurr and Leinwand have recently been said to exemplify “two avenues or paths” now diverging within an “emergent mode” of such criticism. In “On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare,” Douglas Bruster borrows terms from Shakespeare to provide a rough typology. Gurr, he says, with his concern over the “frugal husbandry” of the King’s Men and his chagrin as they appear to abandon the profit motive, exemplifies “the reckoned.” This sort of reader values the “calculated and specific.” Leinwand, by contrast, is preoccupied with the company’s “‘affective econom[y]’” and with “‘other emotional factors.’” He typifies “the rash,” critics who emphasize the “intuited and general.” “With apologies for simplification, I represent them here as antinomies.”6 Ironically, though, one effect of setting Gurr beside Leinwand in this way is to make us aware of just how similar the two in fact are. Both, really, number among “the rash.” Neither has much to say about the economic thought at work as the King’s Men choose their venues. For both, the choices of Shakespeare and his partners are mostly emotional. Did



Writing for the Long Run

these decisions proceed from nostalgia? Or was it exhilaration? Or some mix of those and then. . . . We’re left with a vague sense that Shakespeare and Co. were businessmen (except when, for some reason, they chose not to be), little sense of how they might have combined commercial acumen with other imperatives, and almost no sense of the commercial reasoning that informed their choices. Nor is Bruster himself much help. He reminds us that an economy, traditionally defined, is a “system involving money, credit, debt, profit, and loss.”7 But exactly what this “system” would be in the early modern period, and how Shakespeare and his partners would have been invested in it, cognitively, is not clear. If these two early modern critics really do between them represent the major tendencies in today’s economic criticism, then that criticism has reached something of an impasse. It’s not that this criticism has not produced acute readings of the “amalgam of cognition and affect” elicited by England’s changing market economy; it has. Leinwand’s own study is a particularly subtle inquiry along these lines. But his leading concern is with “what the market felt like,” not what it meant to “think” that market.8 Cognition has a place in his amalgam, but it is gestured toward, not described. A more inclusive “reckoning” of early modern economic thought and feeling seems in order. Let’s consider what we know of Shakespeare’s dealings with the theatrical marketplace. What sort of cognition seems to have been at work? Sometimes, certainly, he wrote for the “short run,” and he thought mostly of the moment. His audiences could be fickle, and they often left him guessing. They liked his Hamlet (1603), for instance, and he had good reason to think that they would, since it had appeared before in another avatar. When it was put on, in whatever version, they went. But he also seems to have thought that they would like a roughly contemporaneous play, his Troilus and Cressida (1609), and in the event they did not. Either it was never put on the stage or it was and it bombed. For this commercial artist, the “short run” mattered crucially, and for some of his plays meager returns at the “box office” meant their run would be short indeed. Shakespeare often wrote to meet demand of this capricious sort—or so he must have felt (and, certainly, his friend Ben Jonson complained often enough of his vacillating and injudicious audiences). But Shakespeare, it’s clear, kept the “long run” in mind too, as well as another sort of demand.9 Then as now, the most compelling and consequential way the public made its approval or disapproval known to drama-

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tists like him was through the sales curve. Will people pay for an afternoon at Romeo and Juliet (1597)?, he had to wonder, but also, will they pay for the next play, and then the one after that, and so on? And he was not alone in asking these questions. He was one in an acting company that was also a joint stock company. He and his partners had a longstanding relationship with James Burbage and his sons, who bankrolled the Chamberlain’s and then the King’s Men.10 Together, they leased and bought real estate, built, and then (as Gurr and Leinwand note) rebuilt the Globe theater. Together, they acquired another venue, Blackfriars. Together, they developed a repertoire of company owned play scripts, distributed earnings through profit sharing arrangements, and so on. Their enterprise bore all the marks of long term planning and investment, and their marketing was based, clearly, on a shrewd sense of consumer trends. In keeping their accounts, therefore, acting companies like Shakespeare’s did not just tally up the receipts from their most recent smashes and flops. They extrapolated from past annual returns to future profits. In effect, they anticipated the financial viability of the theater business as a whole in early modern London. To say that Shakespeare wrote for the “long run” is to say that he depended on continuing demand, that he could plausibly believe that he would be in business when present demand had been met and tastes had shifted. Many of the decisions that Gurr wants to attribute to nostalgia or Leinwand to exhilaration look different if we take a longer view, as Shakespeare did, and so too does Shakespeare’s economic cognition. He seems to have had demand, sustained demand, on his mind as he wrote and produced his plays, and he appears to have considered it robust. In On Demand, I argue that, if we are going to make sense of the economic choices of Shakespeare and his fellows, we need to attend to, precisely, demand. That is, we need to make sense of those others in early modern England who were also making choices, including choices to buy this or that book, attend this or that play. Without buying, there can be no selling. The question of exactly what economic thinking we can presume of Shakespeare and his business partners matters because it does not end with them. Whatever that thinking may have been, it has implications for more than the King’s Men and their real estate ventures. This dynamic engagement between early modern writers and audiences, where choice met choice within the available understanding of the market, was what meant to write “for” that market in early modern England. To make my case, I begin by considering the effects of demand in early



Writing for the Long Run

modern England. In the first chapter, I review mounting evidence that suggests that the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a steady rise in demand and consumption in the kingdom. In these years, English people began to buy many more goods—more clothes, food, house ware, and more books—than they once had, and more services as well, including theatrical performances. The benefits of prosperity were distributed unevenly; they were also widespread. The English of this day were active consumers, delighting in novelty and energetically seeking out new opportunities to spend. They bought more, and others found ways to sell them more, bringing about decided changes in English farming, manufactures, trade, transport, merchandizing—and, I argue, in the production and consumption of literature. Next in that chapter, I consider the causes of this demand. For this, I turn to economic historian Jan de Vries for a cogent explanation. He is not the only one to offer this explanation; it reflects trends in economic history of some twenty years, and such analyses have been adopted and applied outside of early modern England, as we will see. De Vries, though, offers the most innovative and methodologically detailed version of such claims. Around this period, he says, many English households reorganized themselves and so increased their productivity. More members worked, and they worked harder and differently, fashioning goods in the home for sale or taking up jobs for pay outside it. Where once they might have made what they needed for themselves, now they were more likely to make what they wanted to sell and to rely on the market to supply them with goods and services in turn. The money they made in “proto-industry” and on the job they spent on what other households had to offer. Often these households were themselves being reorganized along similar lines. As productivity rose, so too did consumption, each driving the other along. De Vries says this “industrious revolution” primed the pump for the “industrial revolution” some centuries later.11 Nor was this “revolution” unknown to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I argue. They grasped its effects, if not always its causes. Certainly, this is an understanding that we can attribute to the literary entrepreneurs of the time. Their incomes, and often their livelihoods, depended on their knack for discerning, reacting to, and manipulating the fluctuating tastes of their audiences. English society had been “commercialized” for some time, possibly since the twelfth century, and the profit motive, I take it, was more or less a constant, and with them late and soon.12 As consump-

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tion burgeoned around them, providing their commercial enterprise with its impetus and its raison d’être, Shakespeare and others in his line of work gave close consideration to the springs and effects of the economic decisions of their fellow Englishmen. These people made up the audience to which they had to appeal. They and their propensities to buy this and not that were what literary marketers made it their business to know. If demand always presented itself unambiguously and ready to be exploited, though, commercial marketing would not be the tricky affair that it often is. I argue that the awareness that the early modern English had of their own demand was far from simple, not for writers, and not for audiences either. This was because demand itself presented them with an intricate and often inconsistent mix of imperatives (some explicit, some tacit, some, as we will see, hardly capable of articulation) and information (some of it self-evident, some opaque, some, as we will see, hardly recognizable as such). Growing demand in England outstripped the discourse—as we now say—that the English had to depict and explain it. The impetus behind consumption was not lacking, but the language in which to represent it coherently and consistently was. Of course, this did not stop the early modern English (among them, writers such as Shakespeare) from talking about demand and consumption. They did, almost compulsively. But, in order to do so, they had to take up whatever terms they had and to reconfigure them. As Laura Caroline Stevenson puts it in her fine study of “commercial self-consciousness” in the period, “social fact changes more quickly than vocabulary and ideology, and so men frequently find themselves describing observations of the present in the rhetoric of the past.” This does not mean that such men are merely repeating what they have said before, that their rhetoric is not meant to “describe what they observe.” It means, rather, that they are “strain[ing] their rhetorical concepts to the snapping point in an attempt” to make sense of what is only partially visible to them. “The tension between what men really see and what they say they think they see expresses itself in paradox.”13 On Demand is given over to such paradoxes and to the rhetorical means that certain early modern authors found to articulate them. In the chapters following the first, I find the paradoxes of demand in Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse (1592), William Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1609), Ben Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse (1609), as well as his Volpone (1606), and the preface to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). My readings are presented as case studies in the cognitive, but also the af-



Writing for the Long Run

fective and rhetorical effects of demand-led economic change in England. I concentrate on works from around the turn of the seventeenth century, mostly because, as we will note, this is a period when the pressures of demand were being felt, but when the obvious indices of it were not yet in place. But my analysis speaks to developments that stretched over the “long sixteenth century,” in the well known phrase, roughly the latter part of the fifteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth. The “industrious revolution” that Shakespeare and his contemporaries experienced had been many years in the making, and its full effects would not emerge for centuries to come. It goes without saying that my readings do not exhaust what early modern English writers had to say on the topic; far from it. These readings are meant to be extrapolated to other authors and other works and to be tested against them. Similarly, in my readings, I test the economic history that I use against the literary works I’ve chosen. For instance, de Vries’ explanation for rising consumption in early modern England, including literary consumption, is helpful. But it does not do all that much to explain the consumables in question, literary works themselves. These require a more nuanced reading of the problems that consumption entailed for authors and audiences in the period. In the first chapter, therefore, I read and then re-read de Vries’ claims, the second time reconfiguring them to yield a better account of what the early modern English thought (and felt) about their economic lives. The arguments of de Vries and other economic historians are both enabling and ancillary in this book. They fill in much that has been left blank in recent economic criticism of the early modern period, and in doing so they give us a more concrete sense of the inclinations of working artists such as the King’s Men, and their customers too. And it is these consumers, finally, who are the subject of this book, since it is their demand that I read into works of Nashe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Burton. My purpose in On Demand is two-fold. I want to explain how demand operated on and in the thinking, as well as the feeling, of the early modern English over the long sixteenth century, and, at the turn of the twenty-first, to make “demand” available as a literary critical term of art. If you take your definition from the lexicon of political economy, you will learn that “demand” is the desire for a good (or a service), along with the ability and inclination to pay for it (or so-called “effective demand”). More technical understandings of “demand” emphasize the cost/benefit analyses that go into such purchases as customers “maximize their utility.”14 For de

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Vries, it is the “behavior that changes, augments, replenishes or diminishes the goods accessible to the individual.”15 “Demand,” as I use the term here, combines all of these emphases. It is the desire for goods, and it implies the full register of emotional responses that wanting, buying, and having calls up. It is also the actual buying of goods, and, beyond that, the purposeful striving that makes buying possible. It is interested economic behavior taken in the aggregate. Early modern “demand” has the weight and consequentiality that it does, for economic and for literary historians both, because it does not consist merely of individual choices made according to whim, of affect unlinked to cognition. The desires of English consumers, and their willingness to act on those desires, yielded a market force to be reckoned with. Demand was their collective “calling for things,” to paraphrase Samuel Johnson. It answered the early modern vendor’s cry, “what do you lack?,” and turned that lack into having.

ON DEMAND

chapter one

Marvelously Altered

i. pillows and logs Things had changed in Radwinter, the old men told their rector. “[L]ately,” a great “multitude of chimneys” had been “erected, whereas in their young days there were not above two or three, if so many, in most uplandish towns of the realm.” They could remember a time when the “goodman of the house” thought himself lucky—“the lord of the town”—to have “within seven years after his marriage purchased a mattress or flock-bed.” They themselves had “lien full oft upon straw pallets, on rough mats covered only with a sheet.” In their day, pillows “were thought meet only for women in childbed,” and servants slept directly on the pallet, the “pricking straws [running] oft through the canvas of the pallet and [rasing] their hardened hides.” “[I]f they had any sheet above them it was well.” For most, a “good round log under their heads” served for a “bolster or pillow.” But now there was a “great (although not general) amendment of lodging.” Most people, they thought, lived better and had more and better things about them. Plates had once been “treen” (wooden), for instance, but now they were “pewter,” and “wooden spoons” had been exchanged for “silver or tin.” These “things” were “marvelously altered in England within their sound remembrance.” “I use their own terms,” the rector would later report, but he himself had seen these changes as well. “The furniture of our houses” in the vicinity “exceedeth and is grown in manner even to passing delicacy.” “[A]nd herein,” he insisted, I do not speak of the nobility and gentry only but likewise of the lowest sort. . . . Certes in noblemen’s houses it is not rare to see abundance of arras, rich



Marvelously Altered hangings of tapestry, silver vessel, and so much other plate as may furnish sundry cupboards. . . . Likewise in the houses of knights, gentlemen, merchantmen, and some other wealthy citizens, it is not geason [uncommon] to behold generally their great provision of tapestry, Turkey work, pewter, brass, fine linen, and thereto costly cupboards of plate.

“[I]n time past the costly furniture stayed” in such houses, however, “whereas now it is descended yet lower, even unto the inferior artificers and many farmers, who . . . have . . . learned also to garnish their cupboards with plate, their joint beds with tapestry and silk hangings, and their tables with carpets and fine napery, whereby the wealth of our country (God be praised therefor and give us grace to employ it well) doth infinitely appear.”1 These well known remarks are taken from William Harrison’s Description of England (1587) and are often cited by economic historians as evidence of consumption trends in the period (somewhat selectively, however, as we will find at the end of On Demand). It is pleasant to think of these shrewd old parties regaling their rector with tales of now and then, of pillows at night where once there had been only logs, though we might wonder if either the hardships of the past or the luxuries of the present are being exaggerated here. Was their manner of life late in the sixteenth century really that different from a generation previous? In fact, it was. Harrison and his elderly informants were right: in their day, England was indeed experiencing a marked rise in consumption. “Things” were “marvelously altered,” and not only in Radwinter and its environs in Essex, but throughout the kingdom. The rise of mass consumption in Great Britain was once pegged to the industrial revolution. In an influential book, The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982), Neil McKendrik argued that it was not until 1800 that the kingdom “achieved . . . the features of modern consumer society,” and even then not all of them.2 He pointed to London as the great driver of economic growth in the period, as well as the emergence of a servant class eager to emulate its betters and newly provided with manufactured goods by which to do so. Retailing and advertising became more effective, he said, fomenting a “revolution” in attitudes toward consumption. But, as Cissie Fairchilds observes, he “never really bothered to prove that the revolution had actually happened.”3 Before the burgeoning consumption of the nineteenth century, supposedly, daily life had been grim. “The pre-industrial home was marked for most men and women by a simplicity, an austerity, a sheer lack of posses-



Marvelously Altered

sions, which can still startle one when one reads the probate inventories,” said McKendrik. “‘one small iron pot,’ ‘a small scillite.’” Harrison and his informants would have been surprised to learn that, in their day, “[f]urniture was sparse and simple,” “[f]eather beds were a mark of wealth,” and “few . . . possessions were new.”4 Later work by economic historians who returned to probate inventories to analyze them in detail, however, found that the pre-industrial English were far less severe in their habits and appetites than McKendrick had made them out to be.5 A “stagnationist” view of European economies had prevailed when McKendrik was finding a dearth of consumption. But such views came under attack from economic historians who placed the antecedents of industrialization (trade networks, urban growth, and so on) much earlier than had once been thought.6 By 1990, Joan Thirsk could say that the “notion of a consumer market of limited scope in . . . sixteenth century [England], patronized only by courtiers and gentry and some middle-class townspeople, has now proved increasingly unsatisfactory.”7 Still, if industrialization (or even “proto-industrialization”8) did not generate consumption in early modern England, what did? The necessary, though probably not sufficient cause, it is generally agreed, was population growth, especially after the sharp declines of the fifteenth century brought on by bouts of the plague.9 In 1500, there were about 2.4 million people in England; by 1601, roughly twice as many. By 1651, there were about one million more. More English people meant more English demand for food, clothes, housing, furnishings, utensils—and literary entertainments. The story of growing demand in early modern England has often been told, and there are many versions of it, each with its own emphasis.10 The story as I’m about to tell it, though, has a distinct advantage over other versions, including some that are more familiar to early modern critics. In this version, the explanatory through line leads from demographic change and on to increased demand and then to what economists call “specialization.” Specialization, in turn, leads to productivity, or, as a critic of the approach puts it, “a long-term trend of moderately increasing output per unit of labor input.”11 If the causal links in this story are tight, they are not ineluctable. If population growth is the ultimate driver of economic change in early modern England, it works slowly and not altogether monocausally. Specialization, by which “people are continually driven to focus on just a few tasks for which they in particular can find a market,” is usually “fueled by high population density,” as Kenneth Pomeranz notes,





Marvelously Altered

since “one cannot generally support oneself doing certain tasks that each person needs done only occasionally unless there are many people within one’s market area.”12 Similarly, a growing population will usually stimulate growing demand, though not under all circumstances. The prime benefit this version offers to early modern critics, though, is that it adds a new set of economic actors to the story. The stories that we know are often of the “who did it?” variety. They cite widespread enclosure of rural holdings by landlords and their enforced “proletarianization” of the rural poor as the first causes of early modern England’s economic transformation. On this Marxian account, increased efficiency is imposed: smallholders are thrown off their land, left exposed to market conditions, and brutal new habits of labor are forced on them. But, while “proletarianization” certainly did take place, it was not solely, or even largely, responsible for the gradual transformation of the early modern English economy.13 Despite what many in the period claimed, it was ultimately “exposure to market opportunities and the availability of new consumables” that changed how most of the English worked and spent their money, not landlords, no matter how rapacious.14 The overall result of these demand-led changes was hardship for some, greater wealth for many, and, as we will see, more consumption at many places on the social ladder. Early modern England was overwhelmingly a rural society, and so the story begins in the countryside. Many of the efficiencies that the English achieved by working harder and working differently were achieved in agriculture. Starting in the first decades of the sixteenth century, more people to feed meant that some English farmers had the incentive to grow more produce and to ship it to places where prices were higher. Production was accordingly up, but distribution was sometimes uneven and supply was not always enough to meet total demand. This pushed up prices, thus triggering the spiraling inflation of the period. A great deal of land was to be had, in part because of the die-offs of the previous century, in part because of the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. Certain farmers, both among the gentry (larger landowners) and the yeomen, were able to consolidate their holdings, often by buying out their neighbors’ lands. (Sometimes, rents were raised as well, judiciously or injudiciously, or land tenures converted to short term, renegotiable leases.) The rationalization of agriculture drove down the numbers of small peasant farmers and drove some of them off their holdings. These displaced laborers were now more dependent on the market for their food, which



Marvelously Altered

increased demand still further, along with the profits of their suppliers. Rising prices enriched those who had agricultural goods to offer; those who bought their wares had only their labor to sell. Some left the more densely populated parishes for the less. Many headed for the cities, especially London (historians debate whether it was the countryside that was more inhospitable or the cities that were more alluring). The capital was also the terminus point for much rural produce, the transshipment point for most foreign imports, and the jump off point for most exports as well. Thus, it both exerted a powerful pull on rural productivity and energized foreign trade. As the better off in the countryside and cities accumulated wealth, they spent it on goods and services. Across the kingdom, employment rose among carpenters and joiners, and lawyers too—all those skilled workers who sold their talents and/or their artifacts on the market. These workers in turn bought the goods and services of others, and so on. The cycle spirals up from population growth, creating reciprocal adjustments in both supply and demand as it goes. Import figures tell some of the story of this upturn. One effect of demand in England was to push open its markets to the larger world; this, as we will see, is crucial. The year 1630 is a useful benchmark. By then, it has been shown, “imports by traders with Italy, by Levant Company merchants, and by the East India Company, taken together, composed perhaps 40–50 percent of England’s total imports.”15 By around that year, the total tonnage of English shipping was more than twice what it was in the early 1570s. Appetites for European and Asian luxuries grew steadily among the English upper crust from the 1540s on. The goods they fancied included wines, textiles, and delicacies. The early seventeenth century saw the value of such imports increase by forty percent. Raw silk imports from the Near East grew ten-fold between 1560 and 1621. Between that year and about 1630, the value of luxury silk fabrics from Italy increased by about fifty percent. But the demand for more widely distributed groceries from abroad had begun even earlier. The quantity of sugar shipped into London tripled between about 1560 and the turn of the century. Between about 1560 and 1620, imports of wine and raisins grew five-fold. And currants from the Levant? (These were from the Greek islands, actually, but were shipped in by the Levant-East India Company, which had a monopoly.) In 1630, English men and women were eating about 37,000 hundredweight of the dried fruits. Just eight years later, that number was up by over half. Imports, though, are not the only part of this story. Although the ship-





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ping tonnage devoted to foreign trade rose markedly by the mid seventeenth century, as much as a third, the tonnage devoted to England’s domestic shipping up and down the coasts rose by a factor of five. Again, what drove the expansion was a growing demand for goods and services. Some of this demand, as we know from Thirsk’s classic study, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England, resulted from “a deliberate government policy to foster the native manufacture of consumer goods.” Notables at the courts of Elizabeth I, and then James VI and I, believed that if the imported items that English subjects were buying—white and brown paper, perfumed gloves, daggers, and so forth—could be made in the kingdom, this would keep work and specie from going abroad. With this in mind, they encouraged “projects.” Such domestic manufactures added a powerful stimulus to England’s economy throughout the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Producers and consumers, says Thirsk, formed a virtuous circle: the laborer who made buttons or pins or nails had a little cash to spend on “a brass pot for the kitchen shelf, a colourful pair of striped stockings, or a knitted Monmouth cap.”16 Those who made these items had some cash as well, which they spent on more consumer goods. The causal relation between production and consumption is a much discussed topic among economists, but useful for our purposes here is that production can serve as an index of consumption. When, in the later sixteenth century, rural villagers took up cottage industries such as lace or glove making, Thirsk notes, the pressure to do so “must have come from somewhere.”17 “It turns out,” as another researcher says, “that those enterprises employing the most [English] workers” in the period “primarily manufactured consumer items—cloth, stockings, hats, and the like. . . . The volume of goods produced clearly indicates that a mass market existed for these commodities.”18 While these industries catered to the basic needs of the public, the service and leisure industries flourished as well. Beer, a staple of English diets, was cheap in this period, and stayed cheap. The many alehouses fostered competition and kept this beverage within reach of the poor. (In Radwinter, Harrison’s congregants had a litany of names for the brew: “huffcap, the mad-dog, father-whoreson, angels’-food, dragons’ milk, go-by-thewall, stride-wide, and lift-leg, etc.”19) And especially germane to our concerns in On Demand: a boom in the entertainment and publishing sectors. The theater was a capital intensive business, and a potentially lucrative one too. Over fifty million visits were made to London playhouses between



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the 1560s and 1642, when the theaters were closed. Just as dynamic was the growth in the publishing industry. The number of books published tripled between the 1530s and the turn of the century (and these are just the ones still extant and now listed in the Short Title Catalogue). Their average price, though, did not rise; you could buy a book in 1635 for about what you would have paid in 1560. Each year, London printers and publishers put into circulation up to a million individual items. Between 1550 and 1600, three to four million ballad sheets were sold in marketplaces, booksellers, and grocery shops for 1–2d. each. City-dwelling English had the most opportunities to consume the world’s goods. This was especially true in London, the prodigious “centre of conspicuous consumption,” as F. J. Fisher called it in his well known essay.20 Not surprisingly, the most vigorous expansion in the print and theater businesses took place there. The city’s population stood at about 50,000 in 1500. It was four times that by 1600 and was growing at a rate faster than in the kingdom at large. (By the end of the seventeenth century, one in ten among the English would be a Londoner.) On the whole, the urban “pseudo-gentry”—greater and lesser tradesmen, merchants, lawyers and other “professionals”—did well for themselves from the mid sixteenth century onward (though not all of these groups at the same pace and time), and their growing wealth provided London with a steady income stream. Joining them were many of the country gentry, drawn by the royal court and the courts of law—and sometimes, Fisher noted, pushed too by the need “to save the charges of housekeeping in the country.”21 City folk, generally speaking, had money to spend on goods, a fact that was not lost on the country folk who supplied them. Wages were higher in London than elsewhere, as much as fifty percent higher, and this attracted a constant influx from the lesser towns and the countryside. The metropolis absorbed about 3,750 immigrants a year in the late sixteenth century, a number great enough to offset the high rate of mortality (caused mostly by overcrowding and disease) and to grow the population. It is estimated that a third of these newcomers, or perhaps more, were apprentices. If you wanted to better your fortunes, London was your destination of choice. By 1700, one adult in six was or at one time had been a Londoner. And then there were the shops. The most conspicuous of these were the new retail shops offering luxury goods, often imported, “all sorts of silkes, fine linnen, oyles, wines, & spices, perfection of arts, and all costly ornaments and curious workmanship.”22 For the greater ease of their elite





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clientele, and to set themselves apart from the common run of emporia, some luxury shops (booths, really) were housed together in “malls,” notably Thomas Gresham’s “Old Exchange,” opening in the 1570s, and Robert Cecil’s “New Exchange,” opening in 1609. They made “a very gay Shew, by the various foreign Commodities they were furnished with,” said John Stow in 1619; “and, by the Purchasing of them, the People of London, and of other parts of England, began to spend extravagantly; whereof great Complaints were made among the graver Sort.”23 Such establishments were innovations in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries, the most obvious signs of sweeping changes in English marketing. This, indeed, was one reason that they drew complaint. But Londoners who wanted to go marketing were not limited to high end shops, and, in fact, most of the English were not patronizing such places. Characteristically, they preferred “good-quality but relatively inexpensive goods” to “low-volume-but-high-value-added luxury.”24 This was what set them apart from many consumers on the Continent, for instance. London retailing was transformed to meet their wants and needs. This occurred quickly, in about two generations. The children of Harrison’s elderly informants saw it happen. On the scene came merchants who specialized in selling manufactured goods directly to the public. Middlemen entered, and eventually took over, all of the victualling trades in these years, interposing themselves between the consumer in London and the farmer in the countryside, but also providing an expanding “market basket” of foodstuffs. To fill that basket, Londoners went to large, open air markets, of which there were twelve in their city. If they couldn’t find what they were looking for, they probably weren’t looking very hard. In 1601, the Earl of Rutland’s steward went shopping for a dinner party. On his list: “2 Caponnes, 5s.; 6 hens, 10s.; 6 mallard, 6s.; 2 heron, 8s.; 6 rabits, 6s.; 4 woodcock, 4s. 8d.; 10 tame pigeons, 10s.; 4 partridge, 8s.; a pheasant 20s.; 12 snipe, 11s.; 6 knot, 3s.; 12 blackbirds, 2s. 6d.; a turkey, 3s. 6d.; 2 doz. larks, 3s.; . . . bacon, 1s. 5d.; . . . 4 joints veal, 8s.; 6 joints mutton, 13s.; half a lamb, 5s.”25 Eggs, lard, anchovies, chestnuts, butter, oranges, lemons, capers, marrowbones, oysters, onions, oil, apples, vinegar, and mustard rounded out his list, and, of course, wine (white, Rhenish, Canary). The expensive fruit alone tells us that this was upscale shopping. The poorer consumer made do with bread, cheese, beer, and sometimes the cheaper types of meat. But everyone wanted meat. The appetite of Londoners for it was notorious, and the amount a household could spend on it was a good gauge of its wealth.



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Those who did not stay in London brought their consumption habits back home with them, and the places they returned to were becoming more and more like the city they had left behind. There was a growing cadre of wage earners in England’s towns, and, again, these people depended on markets, not their own farms, for their food. When they got to market, they were not as much inclined to barter for their commodities as their parents had been. For many items, they might not go to market at all. They preferred industrial goods—cheap and durable textiles, shoes, and pots and pans—and they were now more likely to go to shops and to pay in cash. Mercers (textile dealers), grocers, haberdashers, and other retail outfits began gradually to displace markets in the larger towns, and pedlars and chapmen took this merchandizing revolution to the countryside. This was also the era of the “Great Rebuilding” in rural England, in W. G. Hoskins’ notable phrase.26 Old houses were modernized and improved in and out. The “multitude of chimneys” that Harrison’s interlocutors had noticed sprang up, fireplaces were added, ceilings plastered, and glass windows installed—all of which created work for wage earning carpenters, glaziers, roofers, and so on. At the turn of the seventeenth century, then, England’s market economy was both integrated and expanding. Its shops, fairs, markets, and sales routes made up a ramifying network of inland trade, transport, and communication. To some degree, it was London and the bigger towns that catalyzed this expansion, but the consumption it encouraged was spreading widely, even as the gaps between economic actors narrowed. “London fashions were not confined to foolish, light-headed Londoners,” as Thirsk observes. The “country bumpkin was no longer satisfied with the goods he could buy in the nearest market town; he wanted a Spanish girdle or a Spanish knife. The gentleman insisted on buying his cap, his hose, his shirt, ‘his gear’” from London as well.27 By 1650, there were only two “degrees of separation,” as we now say, between the English even in the remote countryside and their counterparts in the capital city. William Harrison, we saw, believed that all types of people, up and down the hierarchy, were spending when and where they could. Were they? Historians do not speak with one voice here, but some generalities can be hazarded. Spending throughout the English kingdom was on the rise, and some, though by no means all, of this spending can be attributed to increased borrowing. Certainly, those at the top were, if not the most inclined to borrow and spend, the most able to do so. Extravagance was



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expected from the nobility and came with its own justifications. According to some pundits, what sustained the economy was the consumption of the rich, and the poor benefited from their consumption. Many peers were lured (quite easily, no doubt) into debt and bankruptcy by their spending habits. Indeed, much of the nobility was chronically in debt. Their less well off contemporaries, we know, could be unsparing in their denunciation of elite indulgence. And those among the aristocracy with the money to invest in, say, the East India Company, could expect to do very well for themselves. A stake of £1,000 in a venture could be leveraged against future profits for a pay out of £1,300 or even more—liquid capital that then might go into consumption. Just down the hierarchy, among the gentry, there were those who commanded—or hoped to command—as many resources as their titled betters. The wealth of this cohort was growing too, thanks largely to an increase in the value of its real estate holdings. As we might expect, spending among the gentry also spiked, and this too was helped along by emerging capital markets and more readily available credit. And, since some of this new wealth was put into emulating the high-living habits of the nobility, debt among the gentry spiked as well. And what of the “middling sort,” or those whom Harrison termed the “lowest sort,” small peasant farmers and landless laborers? As Theodor Leinwand has said, “From laborers to the Duke of Norfolk, from widows to Queen Elizabeth, English people were lending and borrowing.”28 Here too, though, there were distinctions to be made. Not surprisingly, probate records show that “the amount people borrowed was a clear function of the value of their material goods.” The more you had, the more you could be loaned; “the rich could borrow proportionally more.”29 But credit was loosening for the lesser “sorts” too, as for their betters, and this may have fueled spending. Still, although these expenditures were helped along by mass borrowing, they were not finally enabled by it. Then as now, mass borrowing is at best an insecure foundation for general prosperity. For that, you need a thriving mass market, undergirded by rising productivity. Thirsk, for one, argues strongly that the period saw the development of a “consumer society that embraced not only the nobility and gentry and the substantial English yeoman, but included humble peasants, labourers, and servants as well.”30 This is why it’s possible that, in England, as Carole Shammas says, “[b]eing



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poor and being a consumer . . . were not mutually exclusive conditions.”31 And, as for those on the very bottom, the rural cottagers who had so little to spend on manufactured or imported goods, Craig Muldrew (to whose work we will return) holds that this was not a time of absolute immiseration.32 The increasingly competitive English economy was devastating for many, he says, and especially those who sold little more than their labor and bought little more than their food. Still, he “emphasizes the degree to which poverty must be interpreted as . . . relational.”33 Probate rec­ords seem to show that, by the latter sixteenth century, poorer households were doing better than their fifteenth-century counterparts. The benefits of English prosperity became much harder to come by somewhere down the social scale, it’s clear, but, as a recent survey of household wealth in five English counties puts it, the “general trend . . . is unmistakeably upward. People appear to be getting richer, living standards were improving, and by implication the economy was growing steadily (if not spectacularly) for most of the two hundred years from 1550.”34 All in all, then, McKendrick got it mostly wrong. Homes in this period were not austere, not if their owners could do much about it. Many houses would have seemed meagerly furnished to us, but they were slowly filling with the chests, bedsteads, pots and pans, chairs, linens, and so on that the English were enthusiastically acquiring. London did not emerge as a commercial dynamo in the nineteenth century. It was powering up as early as the sixteenth, if not well before. The early modern arts of marketing and merchandizing were not rudimentary. On the contrary, the retail trade was growing in both size and sophistication. Emulation of the social elite and subservience to the dictates of fashion helped propel the economy long before the nineteenth century (as a closer look at early modern sumptuary laws might have suggested). Pace Thirsk, England in this day was not a true “consumer society,” for reasons that we are about to discuss, but it was slowly becoming a consuming society. Many of the English saw real improvements in their material lives, now “marvelously altered” by the consumer marketplace that was emerging among them. The thirty years after 1550, says Muldrew, the thirty years during which Harrison’s informants had grown old, “were the most intensely concentrated period of economic growth before the late eighteenth century, and the means by which this new demand was met had much more immediate and far reaching social effects than any change before industrialization.”35

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ii. the paradox of demand As we noticed in the preface, debates among critics can sometimes glance at, without quite explicating, issues of deep economic consequence for the early modern English. Here is another example: critics have noticed an “apparent anomaly” in the behavior of theater patrons in early modern London.36 The less their money bought, it seems, the more they went to the theater. The years from 1581 through 1602, observes Douglas Bruster in Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, saw a “high rate of economic inflation. . . . Historians have pointed to this period, in fact, as a time of telling discrepancy between wages and buying power.”37 He cites the figures of Henry Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, who fix the lowest ebb in buying power in 1597, “the year of the Midsummer Night’s Dream.”38 “Literary scholars today would be more likely to locate 1 Henry IV or The Merry Wives of Windsor in that year,” Bruster says, “but Brown and Hopkins’ point still holds: during Shakespeare’s lifetime—during the period he was producing English literature’s most acclaimed work—the real incomes of many of his countrymen and women were the lowest they would be in seven centuries.”39 With a nod to Bruster, Andrew Gurr takes up the point in his recent The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642. The 1590s, the “period when the Shakespeare company launched their first and greatest period of invention and innovation, was a dreadfully bad time for London’s citizens,” he observes. Besides the plunge in wage values, there was an outbreak of the plague and “seven successive crop failures.” Foreign trade brought in “huge amounts of new money,” but a few merchants held on to most of it. “For the pastime of playgoing to flourish so strongly under these conditions,” Gurr considers, “is a paradox.”40 And so it is. As it happens, the “paradox” that Bruster and Gurr have noticed goes into the very mainsprings of consumer behavior in early modern England. It has its analogue in an “apparent paradox” that has often troubled economic historians.41 In the decades leading up to and then following the turn of the seventeenth century, the English, as we have seen, had unprecedented opportunities for consumption, and not only of theatrical performances, but of books, food, clothing, bedding, furniture, kitchenware—a cornucopia of goods that their own buying habits and the matching strategies of entrepreneurs were calling forth. “[E]vidence from probate inventories suggests . . . major increases in economic wealth,”



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as one historian puts it, and with it, increased consumption. And yet, he notes, “[c]onventional real-wage indictors” for the period “show a marked decline.”42 Across Europe, in fact, there was a “massive erosion of purchasing power for wage earners in the ‘long sixteenth century.’”43 Making this drop even more onerous was the steep rise in prices in the period. In real wages, a day’s labor at the start of the seventeenth century bought half of what it had in the fifteenth. Thus, if there was an upturn in consumption in early modern England, as we have so many reasons to believe, it must have happened “in the face of contrary real wage trends.”44 Even historians who disagree over whether supply or demand provides the impetus for growth agree that real income must usually rise for demand to increase, but in this period it fell. Wages were yielding payments of lower and lower value. How then did wage earners (as more and more of the English were) buy more and more products, especially on the scale that they did? What enabled these consumers to be consumers, and not only for, say, linens, but books and plays too? “In the face of soaring prices, stagnant wages, and recurrent famine, owing to which sixty-five to eighty percent of people worried chronically about the annual grain crop and the price of bread next winter,” as Lauro Martines asks of Europe generally, “how can we make luxury or even other surplus goods the ghost in the economic machine of the sixteenth century?”45 One way to address this “paradox” is to make it a little less stark. Not all of the buying English public would have been constrained by this “paradox” in the same way. Take, for instance, a building craftsman, one who decided to hear a performance of Hamlet or Henry V at the Globe around the turn of the seventeenth century. (This is a useful choice of occupation because wage indexes for those in this line of work are readily available. The figures that Bruster cites from Phelps Brown and Hopkins are derived from these indexes.) Taking in a play would not have meant much of a sacrifice for this man. As with books, the cost of admission to a London theater remained the same from the rise of commercial theaters in the 1570s to their close in 1642, and this despite inflationary pressures. One penny bought admission to the yard throughout this period.46 Our builder’s pay had been going up recently, since it was loosely tied to inflation, although, again, in real terms his wages had gone down considerably in recent years (how much depends on what data set one consults).47 A decade earlier he might have been making 16 d. a day; now he was perhaps making 18 d.48 Ten years ago, he could get into the Globe’s yard on a sixteenth of a day’s

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take home pay, that is; now it was an eighteenth. (Maybe he would splurge on entry to one of the twopenny galleries.) And, since other prices (for food, clothing, and so forth) were going up as theater prices stayed the same, the relative price of an afternoon at the theater had dropped. Admission to venues such as the Globe was cheaper, in real terms, than it once had been. Many Londoners in this period, it has been argued, were able to adapt to the hardships of these years by means of various expedients, and probably this man found it easier to do so than most.49 For him, a chance to witness the heroics of Henry V or the tortured ruminations of Hamlet would have entailed a cost/benefit analysis, and it would have come out favorably, often enough, for the Chamberlain’s Men. Nonetheless, the “paradox” persists. Even for our hypothetical builder, a trip to the theater was not an inconsequential investment. And keep in mind also that this craftsman was not representative, either as a wage earner (which is why some historians have questioned the use of builders’ wages in calculating real and nominal wage rates for the period) or as a playgoer. Fewer than one man in ten in London, or possibly about one in twenty, worked in the building trades. Earnings for common laborers were consistently lower. While in 1600 our builder was making 18 d. a day, another man in the audience was more likely to be making about 12 d. Then there were the many women in the crowd: if they worked for pay, they would have made forty-five percent of what this craftsman did.50 And apprentices? They took in no pay at all, but had to depend on what cash they could scrounge or on what their (increasingly strapped) masters could spare. (Their “presence as pennypayers” is thus, as Gurr notes, “a chronic anomaly.”51) Moreover, this was so in London, where wages were well in excess of those in the rest of the kingdom. For visitors to the city, and for its most penurious inhabitants, the plunge in real wages and rise in prices would have been more onerous still. The “paradox” Bruster and Gurr have located, then, is a very real one. It was just such people, distressed as they were, who found a way to afford the luxury that admission to the theater had become for them, who thronged to such venues in numbers large enough to drive the theater industry’s burgeoning growth. Every year from 1567 to 1642, it has been calculated, saw an average of more than 65,000 visits to the theater, and this at a time when the population of London was about 200,000. Many of these would have been repeat visits.52 Relatively well off builders, at most about eight percent



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of the male workforce, cannot account for all, or even much, of this attendance. So this is what we have to ask: why did so many people, with little enough money in their pockets, and with that money buying less and less all the time, choose to spend both time and money hearing plays, offered six days a week and every holiday (except Lent)? It was just these choices that Shakespeare, his colleagues, and his competitors depended upon to make the theater business profitable. An answer to such questions has been put forward recently by Jan de Vries­ in The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. The claims he develops there were first advanced some sixteen years ago in a series of essays, and most notably in “Between purchasing power and the world of goods.”53 Many historians have noticed the “paradox” of rising consumption / falling wages, but only de Vries, to his great credit, has given it systematic consideration. Some have noted the “theoretical elegance” of his claims while wondering whether more “direct evidence can be marshaled in its support.”54 In the event, such evidence is now emerging.55 Briefly, de Vries proposes that consumer demand grew in the early modern period “even in the face of contrary real wage trends . . . because of reallocations of the productive resources of households.” A range of these households “made decisions that increased both the supply of marketed commodities and labor and the demand for goods offered in the marketplace.”56 The word “households” is key here. De Vries follows economist Gary Becker in taking the household, not the individual, as his unit of study. De Vries shifts the focus away from the individual wage earner (who, as we saw, was making less in real terms than she once had) to the household (which was earning more). In the early modern period, says de Vries, the household (usually a family and often servants) was “simultaneously . . . both a producing and consuming unit.”57 It was a site of production where “items of utility” were transformed into consumables, or what Becker calls “Z commodities” and de Vries specifies as “non-traded, mainly nonagricultural”58 goods. (De Vries offers tea as an example of an “item” that would take little effort to convert to household use, a sheep as an “item” that would take a lot.) It was a site of auto-consumption as well, making use of its own food, cloth, and so forth. And it was in this nexus of decision-making, he says, that new priorities came to the fore. “M goods,” as he calls them in the earlier versions

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of his argument—“manufactures, or non-agricultural goods and services produced outside the household”—came to be valued more than Z commodities.59 Households, both rural or urban, wanted the new commodities that were becoming available. To make the money to buy such goods, they adopted various expedients. They might grow specific crops intending to sell them on the produce market. They might specialize in “proto-industry,” producing marketable goods in the home, say, knitted woolen stockings. Or they might turn to wage labor and put more of their members, women and children especially, into the work force. In the late seventeenth century, for example, wives of London construction workers hired themselves out as “domestic servants, took in washing, nursed children and the sick, sold fruit, did needlework, sold pictures, kept drinking establishments, or made pots.”60 Household members also worked harder and for more days per year, and they cut down on their leisure time. More of the income so derived was spent on marketed goods (marketed, often enough, by other similarly striving households). This gave rise to a “simultaneous rise in the percentage of household production sold to others and a rise in the percentage of household consumption purchased from others.”61 By such strategies, de Vries contends, many early modern households counteracted the drop in real wages that plagued them and made the money that afforded them the pewter, the coverlets, the wine, and the many other things that they wanted. As he puts it: “[h]ouseholds desiring to consume more market-distributed goods and services redeployed their productive assets, offering to the market more goods, more labour and more intensive labour. As a result, annual household money earnings could grow relative to individual wage rates.”62 Taken together, these shifts amounted to a “new strategy for the maximization of household utility.”63 De Vries, however, does not simply insert a late model economic actor (the so-called “homo economicus” of some of today’s analysts) into England’s early modern economy to see how he might fare. The changes in the early modern household went “beyond . . . adjustments to prices and wages.”64 Early modern households were maximizing their utility, true enough. But they were also collectively (though of course not concertedly) re-engineering the market so that it was more answerable to their needs and desires. In doing this, they were jointly engaged in solving what is called a “coordination problem”: all parties involved can benefit, but only if they pursue consistent and parallel strategies. In this case, says de Vries, “a multitude of [early modern] households must choose a level of special-



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ization in production the outcome of which will help determine the speed with which the transaction costs of market consumption will decline.”65 That is to say, enough people in enough households must decide to make enough of some and not other marketable goods and work long enough hours that, when it comes to their own buying, those decisions will be profitable. The benefits of buying are not outweighed by the costs (in time, money, inconvenience, and so on). A relatively frictionless market now exists, thanks to their collective efforts. And the “visible signals [that] enable[d] the requisite coordination to take place,” says de Vries, were provided, not by a rise in wage values (on the contrary, these dropped, remember), but by “consumption . . . via the creation of a common experience shared by ever-larger circles of the population.”66 It was the getting and owning and enjoying of goods and services that convinced many people to work harder and differently in order to get, own, and enjoy more, and it was these same “experiences” that communicated to them that others were doing the same. Consumption, that is, figures in de Vries’ thinking not just as an effect of increased productivity, but also as a cause. The early modern economic actor, as de Vries conceives her, scrutinized her neighbors, how they dressed, ate, and housed themselves. From these signs, she inferred their investments of time, work, and money, and then calculated the likely outcome of her own investments. Thus, what de Vries calls the “industrious revolution” is urged along by what in one place he calls “the industrious disposition,” and that disposition is urged along by consumption, which tells others that this disposition is shared.67 That early modern consumption signals (and so promotes) structural changes in the economy is for our purposes one of de Vries’ most important claims, although in The Industrious Revolution he does not make much of it. If an “industrious revolution” was indeed taking place in England, and if, as seems likely, that “revolution” was operating in a recursive fashion with the consumption that it made possible, then through consumption we have a certain, albeit mediated access to the economic inclinations of a good number of early modern English people—and, presumably, so too did a good many English writers and their business partners. De Vries posits an “active searching consumer whose acts of discovery interact with an array of goods supplied by producers to form tastes, and whose selection of goods, in a trial-and-error process” creates “new ways of signaling meaning to others.”68 This active searching consumer implies an active searching producer as well: a literary entrepreneur bent on discovering through

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trial-and-error the tastes of this demanding consumer, the better to supply her with the goods and services she wants. As the producer attends to such demands, market signals and literary signage chase each other around a positive feedback loop, each indicator boosting the other as it goes. The producer’s efforts thus answer to something, and that something is a signifying apparatus—a developing consumer market—that communicates who’s spending, on what, and why. If we are trying to get at the cognition that the early modern English writer applied to his market dealings, this is helpful.

iii. the industrious revolution: when, where, and who? The usefulness of de Vries’ work for our discipline and for other, related disciplines is not a coincidence: this is what he originally intended. In his early essays, de Vries tried to bring cultural and economic historians together in what he called a “‘common house’, furnished with discussions of theory, evidence and methodology . . . and equipped with a new conceptual framework . . . that may someday allow the lion and the lamb to lie together, speaking amicably of demand curves and desire, of tastes and budget constraints.”69 In The Industrious Revolution, this ecumenism is mostly gone, to be replaced by pointed comments directed at purely “cultural interpretation[s] of consumption” and those who “celebrate the triumph of the will of the self-fashioning individual.”70 In any case, few (or no) critics of early modern literature, to my knowledge, have ventured into this “house,” nor have economic historians ventured much into any of theirs. Lion and lamb seem mostly to have found other things to do. That’s too bad, because, as we’ve seen, de Vries’ arguments on demand are ingenious and, if true, widely consequential for our understanding of the Renaissance marketplace and those who had to make their way in it, including the writers that we study. Note, for example, that de Vries’ historiography not only provides a general account of how consumption was jumpstarted in the early modern period and why; it also explains the specific theatergoing behavior that puzzles Bruster and Gurr. The early modern English were heading to the theater even as their wage values were dropping for some of the same reasons that they were buying a wide assortment of other consumables: because they could, thanks to their own



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market oriented efforts. And theatrical performances, surely, were “M goods” par excellence, offering “manufactured” and attractively packaged entertainment to consumers who, more and more, were looking outside the home for their pleasures. This behavior, we can now see, was probably not so puzzling to early modern theatrical entrepreneurs as it is to critics today. Valuable as de Vries’ theses are, however, they cannot be imported just as they are into early modern criticism. They can be taken up only with considerable tinkering and repurposing. By yet another “paradox,” one familiar enough in interdisciplinary work, it is in the problems of the “industrious revolution” thesis, the questions it raises in passing and doesn’t really address, the claims that are not as definite as we might like, or even just wrong, that we can find the greatest critical opportunities. If what interests us is the cognition that a Shakespeare, say, might have brought to his business dealings, then it’s the questions that de Vries hasn’t thought of or thought through that lead us deeper into this cognition. These questions, I want to suggest, have to do with the type and range of the signals that demand was sending. De Vries, recall, holds that it was “consumption—via the creation of a common experience shared by ever-larger circles of the population”—that offered the “visible signals” that alerted early modern people to the workings of demand.71 If the English were telling one another by their buying and consuming that structural changes were taking place in their market, then what other information could be conveyed? Taking de Vries’ arguments seriously leads to just such questions. Do such arguments apply to turn-of-the-seventeenth-century England, though? That’s the first question: when was the “industrious revolution”? This chronology is left somewhat uncertain. De Vries puts its onset in 1650, as in the subtitle of his book, and locates this “revolution” during the “long eighteenth century.”72 However, in both his early and later work he offers as an enabling “background factor” the “reduction” in the “large number of religious and semi-religious feast days” that began early in the sixteenth century—with the Reformation, in fact.73 And he often cites the work of Thirsk, who, as we have seen, finds a “consumer society” in place by the end of that century. Other historians, moreover, have located an “industrious revolution” much earlier than de Vries does, as early as 1550.74 C. G. A. Clay, for one, suggests a similar wage / work correlation: the drop in real wages during the sixteenth century forced people to work longer hours to keep up. Whereas once they might have stopped when they had enough

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to “maintain a very modest way of life,” he says, now they worked because they wanted more of what money could buy. “The result was an increase in both the productivity of labour and the purchasing power of those sections of the population affected, over and above the improvement in the value of their wage rates.”75 This is the “industrious revolution” without the name.76 Taking de Vries at his word, though, and adhering to the timeline he lays down (but doesn’t always adhere to) is not the best way to think about the history of the “industrious revolution.” On the contrary, it’s much more useful to stress its internal inconsistencies and to put those to work. The shifting temporality of this “revolution” is one of the most suggestive things we can notice about it. Much of the consumption history we now have operates in one direction only: forward. Consequently, it has difficulties in dealing with England’s consumer marketplace “before” certain easily identified changes took place. Joyce Appleby, for example, says that in the early seventeenth century the “possibility that at all levels of [English] society consumers might acquire new wants and find new means to enhance their purchasing power which could generate new spending and produce habits . . . was unthought of, if not unthinkable.”77 She assumes that, as McKendrik put it, for the English of the period “[d]omestic consumption, or home demand, was at best a necessary evil,” and at worst a vice of the grasping rich, and that it could be only that.78 And because these were the dominant views on demand, or, at any rate, the most often articulated views (as in fact they were), she assumes that they represent the totality of what was thought on the subject in late sixteenth-century England. For her, what most people of the day said (in print) about consumption sums up what they could think about it (although there is the tantalizing suggestion in Appleby’s sentence that a residuum of thinkable but nonetheless unthought opinion somehow lingered just beyond the dreaming of this philosophy). The more pliable (though less definite) historiography implied by de Vries offers us English consumers who are not rigidly encased by the economic pieties of their time, who can indeed conceive of “new wants” and who are “finding new means” to “generate new spending” and the habits that go with it. And such consumers might even be thinking about consumption in terms that are not entirely dictated by the conventions of the “prevailing economic idioms” of the period.79 In fact, if de Vries is right about the signaling effects of consumption, they were. De Vries begins to



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suggest that there was a species of “industrious consumerism” at work in the English kingdom long before many historians claim to detect it, and this, usefully for us, obviates a certain determinism that mars many of their accounts. But it also follows, then, that we should treat turn-of-the-seventeenthcentury England not just as a precursor stage to the “long eighteenth century,” but also as a continuation of the “long sixteenth century,” and as a partaker of both. We should expect the trends that are going to become distinctly visible in England around 1650 to be adumbrated many decades earlier, but only that. The English at this juncture were moving toward an “industrious revolution,” but it had not yet arrived. Their acting, thinking, and feeling tended toward the “industrious disposition,” perhaps, but could not yet be entirely subsumed under that rubric. Nor were the uncertainties of this timeline unknown to the English of Shakespeare’s time (or to Shakespeare, for that matter). They too were trying to figure out if an “industrious revolution” was taking place around them and were wondering about its genesis. And they were trying to find the terms in which they could most plausibly ask such questions, and, most likely, not always succeeding. Take, for instance, their views on consumption in their kingdom, which stand in marked contrast to their own practices. There is a distinct contradiction between what some early modern people said about going shopping and what many of them did when they went shopping, and since this contradiction is a crucial one in this study, I’d like to canvass briefly what we know of it. Almost without exception, commentators on consumption in early modern England were resolutely against it. Writers on economic affairs tended to regard it as mere indulgence, siphoning off England’s lucre into foreign pockets. It arose from the basest of motives and had the most pernicious results. “Pouerty alas, and Prodigality” declared Edward Misselden in 1623, are “the two extremities of the Kingdome at this day.” “In the one, ther’s Too much: in the other, ther’s Too little.” And “What’s the fruit of these things?” Who’s responsible? “I want words to giue them titles! I know not to whom to liken them, vnles to him whose they are! It make’s me afraid of Idlenes and Excesse: that These and Those, are all of one breed! He that’s Idle, is fit for any Euill: He that’s Prodigall, is a prey to the Diuell.”80 Such moral charges were commonplace, and Misselden wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t being said in countless other treatises and from any

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number of pulpits. Harrison, the clergyman with whom we began, believed that “for desire of novelty we oft exchange our finest cloth, corn, tin, and wools for halfpenny cockhorses for children, dogs of wax or of cheese, twopenny tabors, leaden swords, painted feathers, gewgaws for fools, dogtricks for dizzards, hawkshoods, and suchlike trumpery, whereby we reap just mockage and reproach in other countries.” This “peevish contempt of our own commodities, and delectations to enrich other countries” was symptomatic of the Englishman’s tragically mutable character, his tendency toward “fickleness and folly.” “Oh, how much cost is bestowed nowadays upon our bodies and how little upon our souls!”81 The English woman came in for even more opprobrium (if possible), since she was thought to personify all the triviality, avarice, and self-indulgence that had emptied England’s coffers. She was Consumption itself.82 And this despite the probability that, with the coming of the “industrious revolution” more women were working harder than before to buy the goods they and their households desired. (Indeed, in large part, such women may have enabled this “revolution.”83) “Who will not admire our nice Dames of Londo,” asked Thomas Wright in 1598, “who must haue Cherries at twenty shillings a pound, and Pescods at 5. shillings a peck, husks without pease; yong Rabbets of a span, and Chickens of an inch: from whence proceedeth this gulling ambition? this spoiling of the crop? this deuoring and gormandizing of the common weale”? Where can it be, he answers himself, “but from a gluttonous curiositie?”84 Rebukes of this sort were ubiquitous and persistent, and not surprisingly, since they proceeded from some of the most profoundly held and fiercely protected economic truisms of the era. The antipathy toward popular consumption went hand in hand with attitudes toward popular labor that denigrated both alike. It was an item of faith among the propertied classes that the lower classes were extremely chary of work, that they would bolt at the first opportunity, and that any money they made in wages was likely to be spent in dissipation (that is to say, in consumption).85 There was a certain truth to this. Early in the sixteenth century, for example, wage earners were usually smallholders working to supplement a meager income. They had little incentive or inclination to give up their own leisure for someone else’s gain. When their income had risen till it met their perceived needs, they worked less. (This is the so-called “backward-bending labor supply curve.”86) But even though productivity rose in the early modern period, and particularly in agriculture, as historians have shown,



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the ruling cohort held fast to its belief that workers were lazy and self-indulgent, and that only penury could motivate them. (“[E]veryone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious,” Arthur Young would opine in the eighteenth century.87) This conviction helped to justify the low wages that employers paid workers and the authority their betters had over them. Their labor was nothing but sloth disciplined into productivity. Productivity created exports, so it was valued. But consumption was thought to increase England’s reliance on imports, so it was ignored or vilified. The wants of the great mass of English people, then, were nothing but debauchery and vice. The land was plagued with roving bands of “able men,” Edward Hext reported to Lord Burghley in 1596. “[T]hey labor not. . . . yf they light vppon an Alehowse that hath stronge ale they will not departe vntill they have druncke him drye.”88 By the same token, popular desires were easy to dismiss, especially if domestic jobs or profits were jeopardized. In the 1680s and 90s, when the East India Company began importing muslin, chintz, and calico, much of it specifically designed to appeal to English tastes, the obvious superiority of these materials soon led to a sharp rise in demand. Predictably, though, silkweavers, wool weavers, and cloth merchants failed to see any benefit to an influx of cheap goods from the subcontinent. More pertinent were the disadvantages posed to their own industries. This trade should be diverted elsewhere, they reasoned, outside the kingdom altogether, where, far from English shoppers, cut-rate textiles would undercut England’s trade rivals. The result? In 1700, Parliament banned the import of printed textiles into England, and, in 1721, not only the sale, but even the use of cottons, wherever they originated. These fabrics might feel better on the skin than coarse woolens, but, for a time, this was a pleasure the English consumer was denied. Such home grown animus toward the needs and wants of one’s fellow subjects lingered long in England. As late as 1697, Charles Davenant could say that “[i]t is the Interest of all Trading Nations, whatsoever, that their Home Consumption should be little . . . and that their own Manufactures should be Sold at the highest Markets, and spent Abroad; Since by what is Consumed at Home, one loseth only what another gets, and the Nation in General is not at all the Richer; but all Foreign Consumption is a Clear and Certain Profit.”89 Indeed, most scholars consider that the “development . . . and subsequent elaboration, of new . . . discourses” favorable to

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consumption begins only in the late seventeenth century, and then as a decidedly minority discourse.90 For writers such as Dudley North, the origins of economic prosperity in human fallibility were obvious. “The main spur to Trade,” declared North, “or rather to Industry and Ingenuity, is the exorbitant Appetites of Men, which they will take pains to gratifie, and so be disposed to work, when nothing else will incline them to it.” 91 Even such thinkers, however, conceded that these “Appetites” were morally reprehensible, and they had little influence, it has been argued, on mainstream economic thinking.92 By the early eighteenth century, the idea that consumption might be a stimulus to the well being of the kingdom was no longer unthinkable. But it was still almost entirely unacceptable. Bernard Mandeville scandalized readers of his Fable of the Bees (1705) with the claim that vices such as vanity and greed encouraged industry and thus promoted the overall good of English society.93 Here, then, we have arrived at another “paradox.” On the one hand, most (if perhaps not all) of the authoritative opinion in Elizabethan and Jacobean England denigrates consumption, often vehemently. Critics of every stripe equate it with waste, idleness, and debauchery in the kingdom. Some feel that it puts England at a disadvantage in its overseas trade too. They urge anyone who will listen to them “soberly [to] refrain from excessive consumption of forraign wares in our diet and rayment . . . which vices at this present are more notorious amongst us than in former ages.”94 But, on the other hand, the English populace has gone on a buying spree that is both a cause and an effect of the most intense economic growth before the industrial revolution. How helpful is de Vries on this “paradox”? In places, he comes to a hard and fast conclusion, one that is almost certainly wrong, even on his own terms: there simply was no way to think, at least coherently, about consumption in early modern Europe. “[T]heory” on consumption “followed practice with long and curious delays,” he says; “a modern form of consumer culture emerged before a means to describe and defend it existed.”95 According to de Vries, that is, those who put their goods up for sale in the early modern marketplace and those who patronized them would have had no way to justify what they were doing, no way even to conceptualize what they were doing, without resorting to the language of denunciation. But again, suppose we take up, not de Vries’ more overt claims, but the historiography that can be inferred from those claims. Suppose we think instead along these lines. A justifying “theory” of consumption was not



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to be had, admittedly, but information about consumption was plentiful. Early modern consumers were being told not to shop, at least not too much, that’s true, but they were also receiving powerful signals from demand itself. According to de Vries, remember, this demand communicates itself through the observable behavior and “common experience” of other consumers in the marketplace. This would have been so whether or not consumption’s critics were taking a stand against it, but in fact they were. In consequence, the early modern consumer was getting a very powerful but very mixed message. Those in moral, political, and cultural authority were unanimous in condemning consumption, but their disapproval was consistently matched by the imperatives of demand. You listened, of course, to what the preacher and the magistrate and the local squire said on the subject, but you listened to your neighbors too, and you saw what you saw on the roads, in the tavern, at the marketplace. We cannot know this, but we can speculate that the emotions bound up in this shared experience were often mixed as well. It’s fairly easy to guess at the mélange of desire, guilt, enjoyment, and loathing that would have accompanied consumption in almost all its forms. The crucial point, though, is that the signals regarding consumption were both strong and contradictory. Despite what de Vries says, the people who were doing the consuming in the early modern period were not consuming in a conceptual vacuum. Among them, consumption was a topic of recurring fascination and controversy. But, just as important, what they knew about consumption was constantly updated and enhanced by the economic behavior of other consumers. Consequently, the “mind” that the early modern English brought to consumption was organized around verities that were contradicted everywhere just by the experience of everyday life. What we should expect to find as we investigate that “mind” is an assortment of claims, shadowing counterclaims, buried implications, ironic acknowledgments—in short, the intellectual paraphernalia that comes into use when a certain explanatory rhetoric has begun to be outstripped by an awareness that, as yet, cannot quite be articulated. De Vries can help us to avoid reducing the early modern English to prisoners of what they could say on consumption (if we push his argument a little); he can also help us to avoid reducing them to prisoners of what they could not say (if we push it further). In a strict sense, of course, de Vries is right. There is no coherent, articulated “theory” of benign consumption in early modern England. Where he goes wrong is in holding that, since there was no “theory” of consumption,

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there was no meaningful thinking and talking about it at all, or no signaling regarding consumption that could not be reduced to denunciations of it. But I believe—and actually, he believes—that there was. And for an index of that semantically overdetermined, signal-rich discourse, we should look to the literature of England at the turn of the seventeenth century. Yes, these works often include denunciations of consumption. Early modern literature returns to this topic again and again, often to urge the corrupting effects of what’s for sale on those who buy. There is tobacco, and then there is, as Ben Jonson puts it in Bartholomew Fair, the “tobacconist,” the lungs “rotted, the liver spotted . . . the whole body within, black as [a] pan.”96 There is sex, and then there are those whom, as William Shakespeare says in Troilus and Cressida, “the devil Luxury, with his fat rump and potato finger, tickles . . . together. Fry, lechery, fry.”97 There is food, but “whereto tends all this gurmandise,” as Thomas Nashe asks in Pierce Penilesse, “but to giue sleepe grosse humors to feede on, to corrupt the braine, and make it vnapt and vnweldie for any thing?”98 Without a doubt, such works send out strong anti-consumption signals. But that is not all they do. Besides the tobacco hating Overdo, Bartholomew Fair features the fatuous Cokes, who, when he goes to the “Fair, . . . will buy of everything to a baby there; and household-stuff too.” And it includes the pragmatic Quarlous, who notes that, when people go to the Fair, they should expect to be hailed as customers. “Why, [the vendors] know no better ware than they have, not better customers than come. And our very being here makes us fit to be demanded, as well as others.”99 It would be too much to say that the play is an anti-consumption screed, although it does share a language with such screeds, and many of the same premises as well. But the attitudes toward indulgence that Jonson takes, and clearly expects his audience to take, are much more nuanced and various. (And, as I will show in the first and second chapters of this book, so too are those implied in Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida.) We can develop this “paradox” a bit more. Anti-consumption critique may have been a selling point. Literary works that excoriate indulgence are themselves, of course, consumables. They may have a lot to say against indulgence, but the very fact that they are for sale means that the presumed buyer has already committed herself to indulgence of a certain sort: the indulgence entailed by reading the book or attending the play. Presumably, this does not mean that critiques of indulgence are not heartfelt on the part of the author or ignored on the part of the customer. It seems unlikely that



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such diatribes were simply forgotten while the consumer kept his eye on a fine pair of boots, her eye on a fetching pair of gloves. Shopping, like any other cultural activity, has a contextual code of its own. Much of what people think and feel as they perform such an activity is informed by such a code, and what early modern anti-market polemicists had to say about consumption must have entered, somehow, into the coding of the early modern shopping experience. But if what a consumer was looking for was a text (or performance) that could speak to all of the cognitive and affective problems she was likely to be having with consumption, then the text (or performance) that didn’t include the received opinions against indulgence or acknowledge the conflicted feelings it elicited would have been hard to market. Consumption, then, was sometimes promoted by means of the critiques “against” it. Denunciations of consumption were packaged and sold as consumer items. Their consumer value depended on the stringency of their denunciations of . . . consumers. Paradoxical indeed. We can push de Vries’ work in other “paradoxical” directions as well. Take his views on the geography of the “industrious revolution.” His is a compelling thesis, and some historians have taken it up for their own uses. Kenneth Pomeranz, from whom we heard earlier, lauds his “particularly powerful . . . account”: “households in northwestern Europe worked more hours and allocated more of their labor to production for the market, while saving time for that labor by purchasing some things that they once made for themselves.” Indeed, de Vries’ “industrious revolution” stands as a key premise in an innovative argument of his own: until roughly 1750, the more developed parts of Europe and the more developed parts of Asia were, economically speaking, not much different from one another. De Vries’­ historiography of growing demand, he points out, “describes the more commercialized parts of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century China (and probably Japan too).”100 In these places and in the same period, he says, “even ordinary people” were buying many of the same consumables—the clothes, the utensils, the sugar—as their counterparts in northwestern Europe, and apparently for much the same reasons. In China, for example, the real value of wages fell, as it did in England, but in both kingdoms households adjusted and put more of their earnings into marketable goods and services. Rice was becoming more “expensive” in the one kingdom, and grain in the other, but in both the poor were spending about as much of their income on basic foodstuffs, were about as well nourished, and were living about as

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long. And, at the elite level, the similarities between the dynamic sectors of the European and Asian economies were even more pronounced. In both, the well-to-do flocked to the cities, and sumptuary laws ineffectually tried to restrain their over-the-top consumption. Early modern China and early modern England were worlds apart in many ways, but Pomeranz argues that the “industrious revolution” occurred in both. It was China, as Robert Markley summarizes the argument, “not England or the Netherlands, [that] was closer to Adam Smith’s conception of a neoclassical economy than any nation in Europe.”101 Now, this trans-global parallel is controversial, and Pomeranz has been criticized for it.102 But, whatever the merits of a point-for-point comparison of Europe to Asia, Pomeranz extends the reach of de Vries’ thought in exciting and consequential ways. “Industriousness” drives economic growth in several sectors of the early modern world economy, not just Europe. As we will see later, Pomeranz figures prominently among an emerging school of historians, perhaps the most innovative working today, who want to rethink longstanding bromides about ineluctable Western expansion and cultural dynamism. But de Vries merely side steps such comparisons. While acknowledging that the “geographical limits of the industrious revolution cannot be drawn with precision,” he limits his “revolution” mostly to northwestern Europe. There, agricultural productivity was higher, he says, and markets figured more in the decisions that households made about allocating their time and labor. Families, that is, were “weaker” in Europe. The family typically had a “public as well as a private aspect; its members participated as individuals in the public sphere, and it had the autonomy to respond to altered market conditions and act on the consumer aspirations of its members.” This “weakness” allowed households to shift over such resources as they had to meet new “market opportunities” and markets in turn to develop to meet their new priorities.103 Households and markets, semi-permeable to one another, established a by now familiar virtuous circle. Again, however, de Vries seems to duck the questions that his own arguments raise. Notably, he once more leaves out the signaling that went with rising consumption, even in Europe itself. In England, for instance, the East India Company was a highly visible indicator of Asian markets and their effects on the domestic economy. As K. N Chaudhuri tells us, by 1620 it not only had more than twelve trading stations in the Far East, but it “had set up two shipyards on the Thames, built a total of 76 ships, and



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become one of the largest employers of labour in the London area.”104 In 1621, Thomas Mun, a director of the East India Company and a defender of its marketing schemes, claimed that in furthering its trade it “set to work fiue hundred men, Carpenters, Caulkers, Caruers, Ioyners, Smiths, and other labourers” in the city, besides the cash and charitable donations it put out, “whole Hogshead of good beefe and Porke, Biskit, and doales of ready money.”105 Trade with Asia was vigorously (though controversially) promoted by spokesmen such as Mun, but the effects of which he was speaking were putting out signs of their own. How, then, did the “industrious” in England register the signs thrown off by Chinese and Japanese economies? Asian production certainly stimulated the desire to consume in England, and its exotic commodities gave that desire an object. Asian kingdoms were on the other side of the globe, true, but no English consumer with her eyes open was likely to make the mistake of thinking that the economies of those kingdoms were of no consequence in her own. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, most northwestern Europeans who set off for the local marketplace would not have come back with many Asian goods in hand, but the very presence of those goods in their marketplace would have announced to them the existence of a global economy and reminded them that this economy was impinging on their own at many points. The European customer who finds tea on the shelves of her store, or who goes to a play and hears of silks, spices, and fortunes all at sea knows something of the Asian producers and consumers on the other side of the world who are implied by that tea, those silks and spices. But what? What did such goods, such news from abroad, portend? These are questions that de Vries seems determined not to ask, mostly, I gather, because he believes that the signage that drove up consumption was a local affair. You scrutinized your neighbors; they let you know what they were doing, or not doing, to solve your shared coordination problem. But if early modern Europeans could infer changes in their own economy from the behavior of those around them, and especially the goods they saw on display, then surely there were other messages conveyed by the “exotic” commodities produced by those of an “industrious disposition” in far off places. It’s hard to see how we can regard the “industrious revolution” as a round of signaling, an information exchange, and then not ask how wide the circuits of communication were. The circuits of economic information were wide enough, certainly, to include many of the English writers of this period. They convey, and very

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vividly, the opening up of world trade, thus enhancing the message that corporations such as the East India Company were already pumping into the marketplace. As we will see when we turn to Ben Jonson’s recently discovered masque, Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, and to his Volpone, it was possible to learn a great deal about early modern England’s place in the global economy from a theatrical performance, and even to learn something about China’s place in that economy too. Some early modern English writers found ways to imply spiraling demand in their own kingdom and also to intimate its operations in the world beyond England’s coasts. At the same time, we will note, their work conveys more than a little uncertainty and dubiousness about that world. Historians debate whether the term “globalization” can be applied to the early modern period, but most would concede that the developments that knit the globe into a unified trading sphere came only much later.106 Information about global markets might be bleeding into early modern England, and writers themselves might be repackaging it for literary effect, but, clearly, they expect their audiences to receive this information with more than a little trepidation and dismay. This sort of understanding, ambiguous in referent and charged with contradictory affect, is what we would expect of writers, readers, and auditors linked, but very tenuously and circuitously, to Asian markets they can only begin to imagine. These works model the global marketplace and its opportunities for profit, but they also insist on its many dangers and perplexities. Finally, there is the matter of de Vries’ “industrious revolution” and its effects on early modern English class. Here too, I think, he underplays the range and variety of signals that demand put out in the kingdom. In the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Keith Wrightson has demonstrated, the English were rethinking their social categories. They faced a discrepancy between two sets of such categories, the one more coherent and precise, the other more flexible and accurate. The first was a formal language of ordered ranks. This was the typology set out, for instance, in Harrison’s Description and in many other notable works: noblemen preceded gentlemen, who preceded yeomen, who preceded citizens, and so on down to artisans and laborers. This hierarchy, Wrightson remarks, must have been as familiar to the early modern English as the multiplication tables are today. There was another language as well, however, one of “sorts,” and this was perhaps more effective in the “hurly burly of everyday affairs.” It was meant to separate and to group, but loosely. People of somewhat similar incomes, or who shared a similar standing in the community, or



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who had attained a similar degree of education were recognized as constituting a “sort.” However, since this language was “varied, resonant, flexible, and wonderfully adaptable to particular contexts,” “sorts” could overlap.107 Belonging in one “sort” or another was a matter of ongoing ascription and negotiation. Class categories in the period were changing and imprecise, thus, because people often needed to “sort” themselves out in ways that the formal language of differentiation did not permit. De Vries has a few cogent things to say on this subject. He points out that it’s difficult to tell from probate records alone whether the very poor were taking part in an “industrious revolution.” These inventories were “drawn up only for decedents leaving sufficient moveable assets to make the exercise worthwhile.”108 Among the “middling sort,” it is these records that suggest more comforts in the home and, significantly, also more “breakability,” more goods likely to be worn out by use or rendered obsolete by fashion, and soon to be replaced. Still, even when “this new consumption regime” emerges fully, it is not “uniform across social classes.”109 Those who had servants, for instance, could afford more of the rewards of industry than those who were servants. This seems plausible enough, but beyond this he does not go. Suppose, though, that we again ask the questions that de Vries does not, but that he enables, finding the fractures in his analysis and prying them open to make room for further inquiries. Not what “is” class during the “industrious revolution”?, as if such categories were a given. But how does the “industrious revolution” shape the language of “sorts” in early modern England? That the “industrious revolution” had some influence on this language appears certain. Wrightson specifically locates its elaboration in the “second quarter of the sixteenth century” and links it closely to several developments—“the expansion of the lesser gentry; the emergence of the urban ‘pseudo-gentry’; the diversification of the prosperous ‘middling sort’; the whittling away of the husbandmen of fielden England; the massive growth of the labouring poor”—that, as we have noted, were both cause and effect of surging demand in many (though not all) sectors of the English economy.110 It was just these changes that the developing lexicon of “sorts” was trying to capture, albeit provisionally and without much precision. The language of “sorts,” it could be argued, was one way in which the English of the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries tried to accommodate the felt effects of a demand-led economy and the dislocations in social typology that came with it.

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Here too, we can look to the literature of the period for the complexities that de Vries elides. Some among the English (and particularly, perhaps, commercial writers attuned to market feedback) seem able to grasp, albeit provisionally and without much precision, the effects of demand on social sorting, and even to discern some of the causes at work. (We will see an example of this in the fifth chapter, when we turn to the preface to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.) But, again, these writers can gesture toward the “sorts” that are emerging only indirectly. Nor is this indirection surprising. At a time when demand is intensifying because some are adopting an “industrious disposition,” it is possible (thanks to demand signals) to recognize this “disposition” for what it is and even to understand how it is remaking social categories. The English had a great deal of information about each other’s work habits, spending, and income. But then how to frame this recognition? Imagine the complexity of the enterprise. If rising demand is altering the vocabulary of “sorts,” then the emerging social categories are not only under construction; there is no obvious and unvarying rhetoric in which they can be spoken. These emerging “sorts” may be easy enough to spot in retrospect, but they were not at the time. In the literature of the day, we catch both author and audience in the act of negotiating a new vocabulary of class among them. It’s when we move beyond de Vries’ compelling but narrow claims on the causality of the “industrious revolution,” then, that problems emerge. These are not problems that vitiate his claims, and they are not problems with which literary readers are unacquainted. Lion and lamb have not run into one another much in his “common house,” but that does not mean that they have no premises in common. Nor are these the problems that arise when we try to historicize de Vries’ claims. These claims are already historical. Rather, these are the problems that arise when we try to historicize his arguments further, to take his generalities and translate them into the specifics of a given moment within the larger narrative that he traces and into the specifics of given literary texts.111 Still in all, de Vries’ account of the “industrious revolution” is powerfully explanatory. Properly adjusted, it makes sense of questions he does not address, directly or otherwise. For instance, it explains not only why people kept going to the theater even though the value of their wages dropped, but why they went even though moralists told them not to, even though they had no obviously plausible way of justifying what they were doing. And it explains why literary marketers such as Shakespeare and Co. kept



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on providing “product” despite the many condemnations of their literary enterprise. All of them—early modern producers, consumers, and consumer critics—were responding in their own ways to the developing “industrious revolution.” This is what I think was happening: the rising demand that propelled this “revolution” (and was propelled by it) was opening up markets for literary consumables: goods (books) and services (performances). Entrepreneurs were at work to meet this demand, though without much collusion and usually in open competition. Their profit margins attracted attention, and not least from competitors in other, related industries, who liked the quickening of trade, but wished more of this income was coming their way. (As Nashe put it in Pierce Penilesse, the “hindrance of Trades” often claimed against the London playhouses by “Traders of the Citie . . . is an Article foysted in by the Vinters, Alewiues, and Victuallers, who surmise, if there were no Playes, they should haue all the companie that resort to them, lye bowzing and beere-bathing in their houses euery after-noone.”112) Growing literary markets attracted the attention of moralists and social critics too. They saw money accruing to disreputable theater companies and to scribbling poets, and to them all this getting and spending looked like a carnival of deception and corruption. They objected, condemning playgoing and other such indulgences as consumer fraud perpetrated on a grand scale. But, of course, railing against indulgence had scant effect on sales figures for books or “box office” receipts for plays. Critics of consumption, including literary consumption, could mostly regulate what could be said about such matters, or at least, they could regulate what could be said about such matters in print. (Universes of discourse, there must have been, made up of what the early modern English said off the record about their own consumption). But they could do little to convince people who were adjusting their work habits and household arrangements precisely in order to buy more consumer goods and services that they should stop doing so. It’s not that the moralists’ charges were not heard; it’s just that there was another signaling apparatus at work, that of consumption itself, which was communicating new strategies for “maximizing utility,” and so had its own message to send to consumers. Perhaps the best index we have of the strength of these counter-signals is the overwrought tone we hear in critiques of early modern literary consumption. Anti-theatrical critics, for example, cannot just lambast plays

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as worthless. They must also abuse those who put them on and, above all, those who go to them. As these critics grasp, their rhetoric is working against other, often more powerful persuasions, and these persuasions can be effective in ways that mere sermonizing cannot. The early modern English simply know more about consumption than it is currently possible to say (a least coherently) on the subject. (Their cognition extends that far.) If a “consumer society” is one in which people are not only consuming but have an available ideology—“consumerism”—to justify their activities (as we do), then the early modern English do not live in such a society. Instead, they inhabit something else, something more interesting: a “consuming society” that, ostensibly at least, does not believe in consumption, but practices it on a mass scale. In England during this period, there were some who said as much (Nashe was one, as we will see next), and they were right.

chapter two

Thomas Nashe, ‘Pierce Penilesse,’ and the Demon of Consumption A stranger that should come to one of our Magnificoes houses, when dinner were set on the boord, and he not yet set, would thinke the goodman of the house were a Haberdasher of Wilde-fowle, or a Merchant venturer of daintie meate, that sels commodities of good cheere by the great, and hath Factors in Arabia, Turkey, Egipt, and Barbarie, to prouide him of straunge Birdes, China Mustard, and odde patterns to make Custards by.1 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse (1592)

i. “coniectures of plentie” According to some, there is a “Nashe problem.” Thomas Nashe, critics have been convinced, has nothing very meaningful to say. In the place of matter, he substitutes an extravaganza of empty prose effects. The “problem,” as Richard Lanham posed it in 1967, is an “inexplicable themelessness” that troubles “inquires into [the] form, . . . structure, . . . nature and direction of . . . topical allusion” in Nashe’s works.2 Many such claims hark back to the classic statement of the “problem” offered some sixty years ago by C. S. Lewis. “In a certain sense of the verb ‘say,’” he said, if asked what Nashe ‘says’, we should have to reply, Nothing. He tells no story, expresses no thought, maintains no attitude. Even his angers seem to be part of his technique rather than real passions. In his exhilarating whirlwind of words we find not thought nor passion but simply images: images of ludicrous and sometimes frightful incoherence boiling up from a dark void.

Despite this dismissal, Lewis’ opinion of Nashe was benign. His cheerful “phrasing has the vividness of a clown’s red nose.”3 His habit of directly

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addressing the reader, as in the first words of Pierce Penilesse, “Faith I am verie sorrie (Sir)” (153), or those of The Vnfortvnate Traveller (1594), “Gallant Squires, haue amongst you,”4 “establish[es] at once an intimacy between the performer and the audience.” Although it was easy enough, thought Lewis, to discern the “faults” in Pierce Penilesse, the “garrulity, the reckless inconsistency of its attitudes, and the author’s nasty pleasure in describing cruelty,” he also noted its “happy extravagance in language and triumphant impudence of tone.” Pierce Penilesse was the most popular of Nashe’s works, Lewis pointed out, his “best seller.” It “offered the Elizabethan reader a new sort of pleasure.”5 This judgment sums up the reactions of many generations of Nashe’s readers, and few will mistake the elegance with which Lewis makes it. Other critics too have noted, sometimes to praise, sometimes to deplore, the “exaggeratedly physical nature of Nashe’s writing, its habit of caricaturing and embodying its own rhetorical excesses,” as well as its “disquieting shifts of tone and attitude.” As Lorna Hutson has said, though, “[n]eat as it is, [Lewis’] argument cannot be closely examined. Any writer so sensitive to the possibilities for producing disquieting, ambiguous effects by minute­ rhetorical alterations is unlikely to have a purely abstract and technical interest in doing so.”6 Nashe’s “stories” are often inchoate, it is true, but even the briefest exposure to his prose will convince most readers that this writer, at the very least, “maintain[s] attitudes,” a plethora of them, some incompatible but linked in a relation that phrases like “exhilarating whirlwind of words” do not capture. Most interesting to me is that Lewis’ claims start off from a plausible premise, but then do not carry it to any developed conclusion. Nashe’s pamphlets, says Lewis, “are commercial literature.”7 It has long been one of the organizing insights of Nashe criticism that the “whole point” of his work “lies in its exploitation of, and bondage to, the emergent technology of printing” and to the marketing apparatus that arose with it.8 The blunt way to put this has been that Nashe is a “hack.” And so he was, perhaps. But, even—or especially?—for hacks, author / reader relations can be complicated. Between Nashe and his public, presumably, there was an involved give and take. He offered “new pleasures” in print. His textual innovations were bought up by his readers; they then accepted or rejected them, enhancing or modifying them, mostly, but not only, through the mechanism of sales. This was an ongoing dialectic in which, finally, it was readerly demand that was the main engine.9 All this is implied in Lewis’ claim that Nashe was writing a “commercial literature.”



Nashe, ‘Pierce Penilesse,’ and the Demon of Consumption

But here we can raise questions that Lewis did not ask. If, for instance, author and reader are joined in a circuit of demand-driven influence, then what relation was there between the “new pleasure” that Pierce Penilesse gave to its readers and the more outré pleasure that Lewis attributed to its author? Is it really probable that the book’s “nastiness” can be located solely in Nashe himself? Lewis remarked on an “intimacy between performer and the audience,” but he did not speak to the marketing implications of this “intimacy.” He posited demand as an influence on Nashe’s works, but then neglected to say specifically how it shaped them (and was shaped by them). For this reason, his influential claims fail as a response to Nashe’s prose, but even on their own terms. Indeed, despite his attempt to separate the jovial clown from the leering sadist in Nashe’s authorial persona, the book’s supposed defects are really its virtues, at least, commercially speaking. The “faults” that Lewis finds in Pierce Penilesse are almost certainly what made it worth both buying and reading. This is a work whose “extravagance” of “language” calls for a reader who will not just tolerate but actually rejoice in its ramifying prose and in the variety of “attitudes” struck by its narrator. And it calls especially for a reader who will be thrilled by the many spectacles of the “grotesque” on display. It is hard to imagine how Pierce Penilesse could have become Nashe’s “most popular work” if the cheerful “cruelty” of some of the text had not found an answering response among its audience. Pace Lewis, it was probably because of its “garrulity,” its “inconsistency,” and its “nastiness” that this book appealed to early modern readers, and we would do the complexity of their liking for it a disservice if we pretended otherwise. We seem to have raised a problem for ourselves, though, as the passage of blunt condemnation that stands at the head of this chapter will suggest. Nashe may well have been a shrewd literary entrepreneur and adept at manipulating his readers, and clearly they were willing to buy his books. But, often, Nashe appears to have little more than contempt for his audience and their desires—in fact, for demand as such. He is, it seems, staunchly against the very buying habits that we are to suppose he is exploiting. How was Nashe able to pull this off? And why did he need to? Here, I think, we should keep in mind the tensions between what early modern consumers knew about their own consumption, and what they were also likely to be feeling about it. Pierce Penilesse was published at a time when demand-led consumption among them was growing, as we have seen, but when they as yet had no widely accepted economic or moral rationale for that consumption. Indulgence was furiously denounced, and

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Nashe, we should note, often frames his own fulminations in just such terms. The English are such meat eating gourmands, he says in Pierce Peni­lesse, that “chast fish may not content vs. . . . It is horrible and detestable, no godly Fishmonger that can digest it” (201). Those who worship “belly-gods” should “distribute all their goods amongst the poore” lest they become “stal-fed cormorants to damnation” (204). Nashe seems to be invested—and, as much to the point, seems to expect his reader to be invested—in a scathing critique of indulgence in early modern England. Given the hostility to consumption in the period, it would be surprising if he were not invested in attitudes with such currency, and clearly he is, so much so that any reading of his work that does not take this antagonism into account must remain partial at best. It’s odd, then, that the contrary case can be made as well. Nashe is clearly not blind to facts of rising consumption, and just as clearly he is willing to do his part to encourage this trend. And, here too, he expects his reader to be invested in this literary consumption, consumption that runs counter to the very critique that he so often espouses. Not only is Pierce Penilesse itself a consumable meant to be bought and read, but its very topic, the occasion for its hodgepodge of narrative, theology, denunciation, and social commentary, is a writer’s poverty and the measures he must take to remedy it: “Hauing spent many yeeres in studying how to liue,” says Nashe’s thinly disguised protagonist, “and liu’de a long time without mony: hauing tired my youth with follie, and surfetted my minde with vanitie, I began at length to looke backe to repentaunce, & addresse my endeuors to prosperitie” (157). “I tost my imaginations a thousand waies, to see if I could finde any meanes to relieue my estate” (158). The pamphlet itself is that “meanes.” The fortunes of its narrator are uncertain by the end, but its author, as we know, fared better. It would be surprising indeed if the writer of a “best seller” were not preoccupied with the reception of his texts, with appraising and then accommodating the responses they would receive from his public, and so any reading of Nashe that does not take into account his tacit endorsement of consumption must also remain partial at best. This contradiction among the attitudes that Pierce Penilesse presupposes, I would argue, is one of the most significant things we can notice about it. It opens out the predicament of the popular writer in England at the turn of the seventeenth century, propelled, on the one hand, by surging demand for his product, but compelled, on the other, to engage a consuming public



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primed to denounce and obfuscate its own consumption. Nashe’s signal achievement, I think, was to take the tropes of anti-consumption thought and to commodify them, to turn them into marketable prose that elicited and matched his readers’ own complicated desires and hostilities. It is this tension between the consumerist desires it so deftly satisfies and the anticonsumerist ideology it so insistently declares that makes Nashe’s prose both so problematical and so marketable. In Thomas Nashe in Context, Lorna Hutson illustrates what can go wrong when we reduce Nashe to just one or the other of the opinions he seems to hold. Drawing on Joan Thirsk’s classic study, Economic Policy and Projects, she declares that “it was in the sixteenth century that England first began to develop in the direction of a consumer society, perceiving itself as a market for its own skills.”10 Nashe, she holds, was a severe critic of those who in his day would have retarded that development. Moralists, who could not conceive of self-indulgence except as “waste,” and monopolists, who were loathe to surrender their patents to potential competitors, joined to assail “licentious” habits among the English. In most writers of the period, therefore, “[c]onsumerism typically figures as ostentation” and is often castigated “as though it were directly responsible for a withdrawal from charitable habits associated with traditional pre-consumer society.” Although the making of, say, pins or starch was praised for preventing idleness and forestalling debt among the poor, those who wore the fine clothes, the very clothes that needed to be pinned or starched, were excoriated. Clergymen inveighed against their “prodigality” and “intemperance” and found the root of their evil in “vanity.” Satires such as Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1579) assured the consuming English that they were headed, as Hutson puts it, “to the devil, by the downward path of debt, Newgate and finally ‘losse of their lyues at Tiburne in a rope.’”11 But Nashe, she thinks, recognizes that this is “absurd.” In Pierce Penilesse, he reveals the “hopeless inadequacy of . . . moralized formulations of contemporary economic relations.” By doing so, he makes himself an advocate for habits of indulgence that would eventually take on the force of ideology. “[O]ne might argue,” she suggests, that in his work Nashe “anticipated the intellectual respectability of the consumer economy by a hundred years.” However, if we consider the intellectual claims in which Nashe traffics, it soon becomes clear that he does not in truth anticipate the rise of a respectable consumer economy. Rather, the views he expresses are just those that will have to be rethought at the root in order for such an economy to

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emerge into respectability. “Wise was that sin-washing Poet,” he declares in one place in Pierce Penilesse, “that made the Ballet of Blue starch and poaking stickes, for indeed the lawne of licentiousnesse hath consumed all the wheat of hospitalitie” (181). That is to say, the wheat which once was given away in the name of charity is now given over to the making of starch and used to stiffen the ornate ruffs that some consumers have come to fancy. Hutson identifies this as a parody exposing the “inadequacy of the sin-washing approach to the complexities of economic change.” “After all,” she takes Nashe to be implying, “it was the fact of producing and starching lawn ruffs, licentious or not, that defined the economic basis of moral reform and that would, ultimately, determine England’s survival and prosperity.”12 Perhaps, and certainly Nashe would have to be entertaining something like this vision of the kingdom’s future if the line were to bear the meaning that Hutson suggests. But, in point of fact, Nashe more often offers himself as an uncompromising critic of the debauchery that he sees around him, and not of the moralists who criticize it. In the same passage from which Hutson quotes, he rails against the “vglie visage of Pride” in terms that could have been taken from any number of contemporary diatribes against self-indulgence. “What drugs,” he asks, “what sorceries, what oils, what waters, what oyntments, doe our curious Dames vse to inlarge their withered beauties. Their lips are as lauishly red, as if they vsed to kisse an okerman euery morning, and their cheeks sugar-candied and cherry blusht so sweetly . . . as if the pageant of their wedlocke holiday were harde at the doore” (180–81).13 Like so many others of his day, Nashe claims to view unchecked consumption as profoundly damaging to the English character. Nashe’s prose, then, is at best an ambiguous vehicle for the promotion of early modern “consumerism.” It may instead make more sense to think of the passages in Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse as so many “consumption junctions”14 (to borrow a phrase from Ruth Schwartz Cowan), places where author and readers meet to negotiate a vexed array of economic questions, including, inevitably, the propriety of consumption itself. If we concern ourselves only with Nashe’s stated claims on indulgence, with what it seems he intended to say about what his readers knew on the subject, then we might decide that this is something he is either unambiguously for or against, when it is instead his knack for being both for and against that allows him to accommodate his readers’ ambivalence about their own habits. We have not really read Nashe if we have not gauged how informed his



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prose is by the constituent anxieties of late sixteenth-century “consumerism,” or if we think that he could present—or his readers would accept— anything like a clear case for enjoying this world’s goods. In Pierce Penilesse, but also throughout his oeuvre, Nashe’s writing is simply too caught up in the rhetoric by which consumption was denounced in the period to be considered in this way. Nor should this surprise us. “Moralized formulations of contemporary economic relations” may seem “hopelessly inadequate” to us now. They may even have seemed so to some in the early modern period. But they were often Nashe’s formulations. An especially disturbing—and thus all the more diverting—example of this occurs as Pierce wraps up a diatribe on England’s social ills. Is hell, he wants to know, turning to his interlocutor, a place of horror, stench, and darknesse, where men see meat, but can get none, or are euer thirstie and readie to swelt for drinke, yet haue not the power to taste the coole streames that runne hard at their feet: where (permutata vicissitudine) one ghost torments another by turnes, and he that all his life time was a great fornicator, hath all the diseases of lust continually hanging vppon him, and is constrained (the more to augment his misery) to haue congresse euery houre with hagges and old witches: and he that was a great drunkard here on earth, hath his penance assigned to him, to carouse himselfe drunke with dishwash and Vineger, and surfet foure times a day with sower Ale and small Beere: as so of the rest, as the vsurer to swallow moulten gold, the glutton to eate nothing but toades, and the Murtherer to bee still stabd with daggers, but neuer die [?]

“[O]r whether,” he asks, suddenly switching registers, “(as some phantasticall refyners of philosophie will needes perswade vs) hell is nothing but error, and that none but fooles and Idiotes and Machanicall men, that haue no learning, shall be damned” (218)? These questions are addressed to a demon, a “knight of the Post . . . a spirite in nature and essence, that take vpon me this humaine shape, onely to set men together by the eares, and send soules by millions to hell” (164). Pierce, complaining that he has despaired of his patrons, is determined to importune a “certaine blind Retayler” he has heard of “called the Diuell,” who will “lend money vpon pawnes, or any thing” (161). The “knight” is to serve as his emissary, and the “thing” Nashe means to offer Satan is a text, the same jovial screed we have been reading (thus the subtitle to the work: his Supplication to the Diuell). The knight of the post, however, can make no sense of his diatribe. “A Supplication calst thou this? . . . it is the maddest Supplication that euer I sawe; me thinks thou hast handled all the seuen deadly sinnes in it, and

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spared none that exceedes his limits in any of them” (217). No less hostile (though less fictional) is the reader whom Nashe pictures with the volume in his hand, perhaps standing at the bookseller’s stall “in Paules Churchyard” (153). “Whilst I am thus talking,” he breaks off at one point, “me thinks I heare one say, What a fop is this, he entitles his booke A Supplication to the Diuell, and doth nothing but raile at ideots, and tels a storie of the nature of Spirits.” As ever, Nashe is quick to account to a customer for his choices of subject and style. “Haue patience, good sir, and weele come to you by and by” (240). The title represents only a section of the book, admittedly, but a prominent one, and so forth. Nashe’s sensitivity to his readers’ reactions, though, might seem justified. It would hardly be surprising, after all, if many of them were put off by this pamphlet, since they themselves could easily be considered among the objects of his satire. How the “ideots” whom Nashe denigrates on almost every page of Pierce Penilesse are to be distinguished from those who are actually perusing it is not always obvious. When, for instance, Nashe addresses his comments to “all you that will not haue your braines twise sodden, your flesh rotten with the Dropsie, that loue not to goe in greasie dublets, stockings out at the heeles, and weare alehouse daggers at your backes” and enjoins them to “forsweare this slauering brauery, that will make you haue stinking breathes, and your bodies smell like Brewers aprons” (208), it would be a self-satisfied reader indeed who decided that the description in no way fit him. Since Nashe’s critique extends to the English at large, who as a “nation” worship their “belly-gods” (204), it probably does fit him. There would be little point to reading the book if it did not. “Much good doe it you, Maister Diues, heere in London,” says Nashe, “for you are he my pen meanes to dine withall” (199, my emphasis). In truth, it can often seem that Nashe writes not so much for as at his “Gentleman Readers” (150). When he is not vilifying them, he is titillating them, and usually both at once. The moral burden of this passage, then, is clear enough. But that is only part of what is going on. One lesson that Pierce Penilesse offers its readers is that a moral stand must be taken against the pleasures of the flesh. But another is that the enjoyment they take from the work depends on just those moralizing attitudes that would forbid that enjoyment. These attitudes themselves, they must realize, have been co-opted by the imperatives of their nascent consumer society, and especially its entertainment sector. In this pamphlet, morality is a species of amusement and amusement a species



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of morality. Nashe, accordingly, displays both a shrewd sense of his readers’ cravings and a rhetorical investment in strict prohibitions against satisfying them. Even today, the passage I quote can force us into a double bind. On the one hand, we are solicited to delight in the ornate prose, which celebrates an extreme physicality. On the other, we are implicitly assailed for being the sort of people who would take such pleasures. Hell, as Nashe renders it, is at once a place of perpetual consumption and eternally frustrated desire. These lines achieve their frisson by calling up almost every sort of impulse toward bodily pleasure that we might have, our desires for meat, drink, “congress,” the feel of gold, and then luridly punishing it before our eyes. We are asked, in effect, to imagine ourselves as the damned, the same drunken, slothful, vainglorious Englishmen whom Nashe has been abusing throughout Pierce Penilesse. We witness as the condemned are aroused and enticed, and then as they are deprived of their satisfactions. This bait-and-switch is not taking place just in the scene itself, however, nor are these unfortunates its only victims. We are also offered a certain pleasure and then deprived of it. As we are engaged by these imaginings, we are licensed to enjoy ourselves. These lines on the denial of satisfaction are themselves deeply satisfying, as one inventive scenario of deprivation gives way to another in a virtuoso display of rhetorical copia, an excess that, for us, begins to take the place of and to be enhanced by all the cheer that is being withheld from the damned. This surplus of delight in the misfortunes of others is the “pay off ” that is being held out to us (and, of course, that Nashe’s first readers were being asked to pay for). The artificially stretched prose, the constantly stimulating imagery makes us conscious of our own powerful but self-thwarted desires, which are tacitly acknowledged and gratified (though derided) here. Nashe’s precisely crafted word pictures enable fantasies of carnage and sex, but in such a way that they can be disavowed—the wicked punished!—even as they are being entertained, and enjoyed all the more for that. And then, just as in hell itself, even this double pleasure is yanked away, as the passage takes up a tone of intellectual superiority, dismissing all of the vivid corporeality it has just described as, perhaps, nothing but the conceits of “fooles and Idiotes and Machanicall men.” The questions that arise from such “disquieting shifts of tone and attitude”15 cannot be easily resolved. Are we now meant to disparage the “phantasticall refyners of philosophie” who think that hell is mere “error” or the more literal dolts to whom they

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condescend? Has our reading of these lines been derived from an “error” that we should repudiate, and with it the slightly guilty pleasure that we have had? The more seriously we take such questions, the more we see what is at stake. We have been offered premises of two sorts, and then, tacitly, we have been invited to apply them to the passage itself—and to ourselves. Either, Nashe implies, it is the physical world that is real and consequential, encompassing even the afterlife, and his prose, with its relentless carnality, is an appropriate, even a privileged instrument of its investigation, one in which moral questions can be rehearsed to edifying effect. Or it is instead the abstract realm of the “refyners of philosophie” that should draw our attention, and the graphic prose we have been reading and enjoying has betrayed us into an “error”: substituting the base simulacrum of a corporeal hell for the ideal reality. We are revealed as “fooles and Idiotes.” Perhaps we are “damned.” But then, to which hell would we be damned? To the horrific torture pit imagined by “Machanical men”? Or to the more “phantasticall” hell posited by the wiser sort? That depends, of course, on the interpretation that we choose, of these lines and of ourselves. Nashe slyly suggests that if we opt for the more abstract nether regions, we can allow ourselves to believe that only dullards will be going to the more literal Hell and spending an eternity there.16 But this may be another trap. Hell may be a place of all too real torment after all, and then even the wisest might find themselves there. Nashe has suggested that the afterlife in which we find ourselves may depend on whether we read his text as a “philosophical” investigation of the morality of consumption or as a mere farrago of “images” to be consumed—and has left the choice up to us. The prose itself makes us ask the question that troubled Lewis: “something” or “nothing”? And it makes the answer to that question eternally consequential—or not, of course, depending on how far the reader chooses to push Nashe’s implications. Hell? It’s what you make of it. The moralism that excoriated profligacy in the period, therefore, was absent neither from the writing of Pierce Penilesse nor its reading. Its prose effects would be hardly comprehensible if it were. Nashe, moreover, does not claim to be much different from the critics of mass consumption, even the most fervent. Instead, he claims that even those critics themselves participate in the economy of pleasure that they condemn—but not as well as he.



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At one point in Pierce Penilesse, Nashe seems to morph before our eyes into a clergyman. He admits that although he strives to promote a literature worthy of his native England, he does not have the backing of its religious establishment. Nashe notes that “I my selfe haue beene . . . censured among some dul-headed Diuines: who deeme it no more cunning to wryte­ an exquisite Poem, than to preach pure Caluin, or distill the iuice of a Commentary in a quarter Sermon.” While we might expect such “Diuines” to be hostile to “Babling Ballatmakers” like Nashe, what’s notable about their critique (as Nashe phrases it) is not that they set aside “Poetrie” as a distinct “Arte” (192) to be denigrated. They do not, that is, rehearse once again the well known Renaissance quarrel between literary practitioners and their moralizing foes. Rather (according to Nashe), they assert that what he does in texts such as the one we’re reading is no different in kind from what they do in their own oratories. Nor does Nashe deny such allegations. How can he, given the high moral tone in which much of Pierce Penilesse is couched (only somewhat ameliorated by its relentless jocularity) and his uncompromising assault on consumption and its pernicious effects? “Good thrifty me,” he exclaims, other “nations” “draw out a dinner with sallets . . . and make Madona Nature their best Caterer.” But “[w]e must haue our Tables furnisht like Poulters stalls, or as though we were to victual Noahs Arke again . . . or els the good-wife wil not open her mouth to bid one welcome.” And “Lord, what a coyle haue we, with this Course and that course, remoouing this dish higher, setting another lower, and taking awaye the third. A Generall might in lesse space remooue his Campe, than they stand disposing of their gluttonie” (200). These carping “Diuines,” then, have a point: sentiments like these, if not language like this, could have been heard from their own pulpits, and in fact would have been heard with some regularity by many of Nashe’s readers. Nashe’s defense of himself does not consist in saying that he operates independently of moral imperatives, but that the imperatives of all such morality are now indistinguishable from those of the consumer marketplace. Once, he seems to suggest, another defense of literature was possible. The “immortal Sir Philip Sidney” (193), whose shade he summons at the beginning of Pierce Penilesse, “wel couldst . . . giue euery Vertue his encouragement, euery Arte his due, euery writer his desert: cause none more vertuous, witty, or learned than thy selfe” (159). Poetry then could cleanse and elevate the English tongue. It encouraged the soldier to emulate noble

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deeds, and so on. (As we will see later, Nashe has a way of invoking an ideal past that his reader knows full well is a fiction—but a pleasant one.) But now, declares Nashe, Sidney is “dead” (159). Whatever nostalgia the reader might feel for him (dead a mere six years) must be set aside. In 1592, scribblers such as he must make their own way and answer to commercial considerations that the aristocratic Sidney never shared. Thus, while he casts his ecclesiastical opponents as drudges, wearily ransacking their libraries to fashion one more tedious sermon, he does not disparage them for their moralism, but for their lack of market savvy. “[N]o eloquence but Tautologies,” he sneers, and nothing to say but “I stoale this note out of Beza or Marlorat.” His own writings also retail the moral “Tautologies” that he shares with the “Diuines,” but they are informed by the demands of those who can choose either to buy or not—consumers. “Should we” writers, he says, “as you [divines] . . . borrowe all out of others, and gather nothing of our selues, our names should be baffuld on euerie Booke-sellers Stall, and not a Chandlers Mustardpot but would wipe his mouthe with our wast paper. Newe Herrings, new, wee must crye, euery time wee make our selues publique, or else we shall bee christened with a hundred new tytles of Idiotisme.” The “Diuines” can cobble together a “dunsticall Sermon” and “tie the eares of your Auditorye vnto you.” They need “no wit to mooue, no passion to vrge, but onelye an ordinarie forme of preaching” (192). But Nashe’s writing is better. It engages both the intellect and the affect, and not only for the usual reason that persuasive rhetoric must do so, but for the explicitly economic reason that if it does not do so it will not sell.

ii. “all these corrupt excrements” Something of the same knowing duality can be seen in Nashe’s views (if we can call them that) on the politics of foreign trade and domestic consumption. Again, Nashe does not so much set right thinking over against consumer pleasure; he organizes them into a contradictory but linked dyad of cognition and affect. And again, Nashe does not so much anticipate a future in which these contradictions will be less pressing; he exploits them in the present. It’s true that one day, centuries later, England would be the world’s dominant trading nation. And this rise would indeed be accompanied by the rise of a consumerist mentality among its people. But, in the sixteenth century, Nashe did little to promote that outcome. Instead, he



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milked the fears that nascent globalization aroused and asked his readers to imagine a (literally) reactionary alternative to it. In Pierce Penilesse, Nashe has already begun to glimpse the effects of world commerce on his native kingdom, and he does not like them. The foreign infiltration of his native kingdom by consumer goods is a fait accompli, he implies, and England will be unable to do much about it. The scene in the “Magnificoes house” that I quote at the head of this chapter, for instance, transpires almost inevitably in the presence of a “stranger” who arrives from abroad to witness and condemn the foolish superfluity of English lives. Despite England’s relative poverty and isolation at the turn of the seventeenth century, the wants and needs of its subjects were already integrating it into a global economy and would do so more and more. The English urge to consume, Nashe implies, will leave little that was English unmarked by and unimplicated in foreign markets. But the appearance of imported commodities such as custard molds or exotic spices on English tables does not deter Nashe’s critique of the appetites that put them there. Global traffic has allowed English gluttony to corrupt English natures. And his proposal for rectifying this dependency on foreign trade is unequivocal: less domestic consumption. “Let but our English belly-gods punish their pursie bodies with . . . strict penaunce, and professe Capuchinisme but one month, and Ile be their pledge they shall not grow so like dry-fats as they doo” (204). The English, who now “carrie their flesh budgets from place to place” (201), should be put on a strict diet. Nashe can be disparaging toward foreigners, then, but some of his severest words are reserved for his fellow countrymen. He thought that they ate, drank, and decked themselves out too much, and though it was often foreigners who supplied these wants, the English had no one but themselves to blame. In Pierce Penilesse, he first starts in on the Dane (“[t]he most grosse and sencelesse proud dolt” [177]), the Italian (“a . . . cunning proud fellowe” [176]), and the Frenchman (“wholly compact of deceiuable Courtship” [177]). Soon, however, he shifts to the English themselves: “I need not fetch [Pride’s] colours from other countries . . . since her picture is set forth in many painted faces here at home” (180). Within pages of this, he is telling the English what other “nations” think of them: they “call vs bursten-bellied Gluttons: for wee make our greedie paunches powdring tubs of beefe, and eat more meat at one meale, than the Spaniard or Italian in a moneth” (200). “Nay,” he insists, the English lose their Englishness under the weight of their gluttonous consumption and become their own

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heathenish “others”: “we are such flesh-eating Saracens, that . . . we delight in the murder of innocent mutton, in the vnpluming of pullerie, and quartering of Calues and Oxen” (201). And if his readers do not change their ways, he warns, they will be brought, “in [their] olde age, to be companions with none but Porters and Car-men, to talke out of a Cage, railing as drunken men are wont, a hundred boies wondering about them; and to die sodainly . . . drinking Aqua vitae. From which (as all the rest) good Lord deliuer Pierce Penilesse” (208). The ill effects of this influx can be countered, Nashe implies, however, but only if what we now call the “entertainment industry” gets into the act. Nashe knows very well—and he expects his reader to know—that England cannot be an island unto itself. But the English should feel what islanders often feel when they think of the larger world: fear. “That State or Kingdome,” he alleges, “that is in league with all the world, and hath no forraine sword to vexe it, is not halfe so strong or confirmed to endure, as that which liues euery hour in feare of inuasion” (211). England exists in a “vexe[d]” (tense or dialectical relation) with “all the world” and is the better for it. Not only is Nashe willing to promote this anxiety; he seeks to turn it into profits for the literary trades. In the next lines, he calls for a national theater offering up patriotic exemplars such as “Talbot (the terror of the French)” (212) and “Henrie the fifth” (213) to hearten and edify English playgoers. While “surfetting, gluttony, drunkennes, pride, [and] whoredom” (203) have collapsed the borders of the English kingdom, he claims, bringing the enemy within and overstuffing the realm with luxuries from abroad, the theater might offer a form of consumption less harmful to its interests. “There is a certaine waste of the people,” he opines, for whome there is no vse, but warre: and these men must haue some employment still to cut them off. . . . If they haue no seruice abroad, they will make mutinies at home. Or if the affayres of the State be such, as cannot exhale all these corrupt excrements, it is very expedient they haue some light toyes to busie their heads withall, cast before them as bones to gnaw vpon, which may keepe them from hauing leisure to intermeddle with higher matters.  (211)

These ex-soldiers are bored, but this is because the domestic marketplace has not yet been configured to accommodate and shape their impulses. Like most of their countrymen, they are devoted to their pleasures and need diversions to keep them amused. The afternoon is the “idlest time of the day,” and they will either indulge themselves in dissipation or go to



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the theater. “[I]s it not then better . . . that they should betake them to . . . Playes?” (212) A well organized theater industry can help to regulate the all too fluid body politic. While the outline of the kingdom is semi-permeable, sometimes expelling the “waste” of some men to serve in foreign wars, sometimes keeping them close at home, the theater holds up for them a spectacle around which they can consolidate their identities as Englishmen (and English consumers). The “subiect” of plays, Nashe observes, is “(for the most part) . . . borrowed out of our English Chronicles” (212), and it is a “glorious thing” to see English victories “represented on the Stage” (213). Moreover, Nashe is quick to claim similar aspirations for his own prose. He is trying to write into being, he lets us know, an English literary consumer whose demand for spectacular effects can be channeled toward the affirmation of a self-subsistent English kingdom. As he presents himself, he is in his literary ambitions akin to the “projectors” of the Elizabethan reign, some of whom were animated by the “exhilarating conviction that England could be solvent and self-sufficient.”17 He displays a testy impatience with all those in his trade who do not join him in raising up an English audience made fit by the emulation of English heroes. He is critical of the suppliers. “I must accuse our Poets of sloth and partialitie,” he says, because they will not uphold “domestical examples” (215) of England’s literary arts as they should. And he is critical of the marketers. As an emblem of “Sloth,” Nashe chooses “a Stationer that I knowe, with his thumb vnder his girdle, who if a man come to his stall and aske him for a booke, neuer stirs his head, or looks vpon him, but stands stone still, and speakes not a word: onely with his little finger points backwards to his boy, who must be his interpreter, and so all day, gaping like a dumbe image, he sits without motion, except at such times as he goes to dinner or supper: for then he is as quicke as other three, eating sixe times euery day” (209). This lazy bookseller appears to be a parodic counterpart to Eumnestes, who presides over the chamber of memory in Book II of The Faerie Queene (not surprisingly, given Nashe’s interest in Spenser).18 That worthy sat in a “chamber all . . . hangd about with rolles, / And old records from auncient times deriu’d” (9.57.6–7), relying on a “litle boy,” Anamnestes, “To reach, when euer he for ought did send.” But this more inert custodian does little to ensure that the texts in his care are preserved or remain in circulation. His establishment is not energized by the “Tossing and turning” (58.2.4–5)

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of books that signals an active trade and keeps deserving “Authors” such as Nashe in the public view. On the contrary, the vender is quite given over to consumption, and of the swinish kind that Nashe assails elsewhere in the pamphlet. He dines repeatedly, perhaps on the same “dainte meate[s]” that can be found at the “Magnificoes house” (200), or on other provender shipped in from abroad. And while he stuffs himself, the trade that should be pursued—English texts for English readers—falls into abeyance, since the acquisitive urges that drive the traffic in luxury goods are not accommodated, or even recognized, in the book trade. The doltish bookseller occupies a blocked nexus in the literary marketplace, neither merchandizing, nor advertising, nor attending to customer relations, but shifting all of these functions onto an overworked boy. He is one of the many literary middlemen in Pierce Penilesse who fails to live up to Nashe’s expectations. Nashe’s glancing reference to Spenser’s Eumnestes (if that is what it is) allows him to remind his readers briefly of another establishment, one in which the infirmity of the “proprietor” does not impede the distribution of texts (“all decrepit in his feeble corse/Yet liuely vigour rested in his mind” [55.6–7]) and in which the “boy” is occupied in delivering forth “things . . . lost, or laid amis” (58.6), not providing discourse for a “dumbe image.” Significantly, what Eumnestes and Anamnestes shuttle between them are the (mostly) intact records of the nation’s glorious past. In one of them, Briton moniments, Arthur will learn of his ancestry and be moved to cry out his devotion to his “Deare countrey” (10.69.3). The market for truly English literary wares is moribund, Nashe implies, but his dig at a gaping stationer of his acquaintance enables him to gesture toward another, far better sort of book “retailing.” To say this, however, is immediately to acknowledge, as Nashe tacitly must, that this sort of “retailing” is mostly an appealing fantasy. The national autonomy that Nashe holds out is almost impossible in practice. It remains largely true that Englishness is now a composite of foreign traits and that the consumption he derides (and capitalizes on) is the vector for this infiltration. “[S]ince we haue mixt our selues with the Low-countries,” he says, “superfluitie in drinke . . . is counted honourable . . . now, he is no body that cannot drinke super naglum . . . quaffe vpsey freze crosse, with healthes, gloues, mumpes, frolickes, and a thousand such dominiering inuentions.” (A marginal note identifies super naglum as “a deuise of drinking new come out of Fraunce (204–5). Vpsey freze means “in the Frisian manner.”19) Indeed, whether there is now an undiluted Englishness in which Nashe



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and his readers can find themselves is an open question. Explaining his “Method,” Nashe reveals that he has not been “tying my selfe to mine own Countrie.” “[I]f I euer write any thing in Latine,” he says, “as I hope one day I shall,” the English actors “Tarlton, Ned Allen, Knell, Bentlie, shall be made knowne to France, Spaine, and Italie” (215). At a time when the English experience touches, directly or indirectly, on “Arabia, Turkey, Egipt, and Barbarie” (200), as well as the European kingdoms to which Nashe hopes someday to announce the virtues of English manhood, a sense of pristine English being will be hard to come by. The implicit tension between Nashe’s hankering to write in Latin, the language of the trans-national elite, on the one hand, and his desire to “boast in large impressions what worthy men (aboue all Nations) England affoords” (215), on the other, suggests how unsettled is the sense of national belonging that his tract implies. Englishness is a compensatory state, hard won in the face of alien degeneration, but implicitly a fiction. The English indulge themselves in imported commodities too much for their identity to be a given. Entertaining and patriotic displays might restore them to a degree of Englishness, but only that. And Nashe expects his readers to know this, even as they thrill to the prospect that it might be otherwise. His “selfe” is untied from his “owne Countrie,” true. But in saying this, he says, he is “insisting in the experience of our time” (215). As we can see, then, though there is a good deal of what Lewis called “gigantic hyperbole . . . [and] Rabelaisian monstrosity” in Nashe’s prose, and much parody of intellectual pretension, there is a kind of thought in it too, subtle and pervasively ironic.20 Hutson is right to insist that Nashe’s “texts were saying something,” though his saying cannot be reduced to a set of claims.21 His texts demand the active, knowing participation of his reader, relentlessly exposed to the contradictions of his own desires, her own interpretations. Hutson is acute on this: “[i]f we get away from the obligation to account for Nashe’s writing in personal, biographical terms . . . it becomes possible to argue that [his] versatile prose, with its exceptional sensitivity to the materiality of words, the plasticity of discourse, the hazards of interpretation, is, far from being the vehicle of one histrionic personal voice, a parodic medium of dozens of public voices.”22 What those voices were talking about in Pierce Penilesse, I have suggested, were the preoccupying questions called up by early modern demand. These “public voices” play off one another, insinuating and responding, in a textual exchange that may itself have been

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powerfully enjoyable. It may also have allowed for the mutual exploration of demand in all of its complications—the world it was bringing into being, the desires that drove it, the prohibitions that constrained it, its tacit compromises, its intellectual blind spots, its unspoken assumptions. And it may have allowed for a certain meaningful inexplictness about matters that would not be discussed with any real clarity for a century, and perhaps not even then. That Nashe had “something” to say about consumption in Pierce Penilesse is indubitable, but it was not just one “thing.” Listen closely, and we can hear almost every voice in the early modern debate speaking here.

iii. bear markets Among the “things” that Nashe discusses in his multiple registers is the consumption history of his native kingdom. Again, it would be unreasonable to expect this flamboyant chronicler of life in late Elizabethan England to give clear voice to notions that would not emerge for another century, but in his Pierce Penilesse he does display a certain labile historicism, a fascination with the possibilities offered by the past. Nashe looks backwards, not forwards, to imagine a “consumerism,” albeit an antiquated one. To see how this happens, let’s consider a fable that Nashe tells toward the end of the tract. He puts this in the mouth of a devil conversing with his alter ego. Critics have often found it puzzling. A bear, “chiefe Burgomaster of all the Beasts vnder the Lyon,” is determined to “surfet” himself “in pleasure.” He begins to “prye and to smell through euery corner of the Forrest for praye, to haue a thousande imagynations with himselfe what daintie morsell he was master of, and yet had not tasted.” He consumes relentlessly and omnivorously: “whole Heards of sheepe . . . fat Oxen, Hayfers, Swine, Calues, and yoong Kiddes.” When he conceives a taste for “Horse-flesh,” he lures such a beast (referred to, oddly, as a “Cammell” [221]) into a trap with the help of a subtle and malevolent ape and then “feedes on his captiue, and is gorged with bloud” (222). Next, he proceeds through a menu of exotic creatures—unicorns, crocodiles, basilisks—until he arrives at a particular delicacy: honey. There is, he knows, a “great store of it . . . in that Countrey.” But here he is in a quandary. How to alienate as much of this honey as possible to himself? Should he promote a market in honey by convincing the “Husbandmen” who now produce just enough for their own needs that “they might buie honey cheaper than beeing at such charges in keep-



Nashe, ‘Pierce Penilesse,’ and the Demon of Consumption

ing of Bees”? Should he, that is, turn these apiarists into consumers whose habits support the distribution and sale of honey? Or should he turn them into employers who demand more labor from their workers than subsistence-level bee-keeping presently requires? As now organized, their industry is profit-less. The bees they raise, he might point out, are “most of them Drones.” They consume without producing. “[A]nd what should such idle Drones doe . . . [but] lye sucking at such pretios Honnycombes”? If these hives were to be taken away from the bees and “distributed equally abroade,” he could advert, they would “releeue . . . a great many” throughout the country “that had neede” of such assets. The husbandmen could then “commaund” the service of these beneficiaries without supporting them otherwise. They might even eliminate bees from production altogether by substituting wasps, since they “humme and buzze a thousand times lowder,” and meanwhile “dispose of the honie as they thinke good.” And the bear, we can assume, will be on hand to receive the (now) surplus yield. Here, the fable takes what may seem an unexpected turn. In fact, it isn’t at all clear whether the same fable continues, or another one begins.23 The bear does not implement these plans himself, but delegates them to subordinates, a fox “addrest like a shepheards dogge” and a chameleon “that could put on all shapes.” Both are directed to “broach this deuice” (224). Oddly enough, the two then go about seeking to persuade the husbandmen that their domestically produced honey is “poysonous and corrupt,” whereas that of “Scotland, Denmarke, and some more pure partes of the seauenteene Prouinces” is not. Despite the bear’s stratagems, that is, they neither encourage a trade in honey, nor do they advise the apiarists on how they might better manage their labor force (however exploitatively). Rather, the two assail the quality of the homegrown product. Baffled and frightened by this appraisal, the “good honest Husbandmen” nonetheless resist it. Relying only on “antiquitie and custom” (225), they refuse to abandon their charges, whom, unfortunately, they have begun to suspect as “dangerous Animals” (killer bees!). Eventually, the “two Deuisers” are overheard by a passing fly as they plot to “driue all the Bees from their Honny combs, by putting wormwood in their Hyues, and strewing Henbane and Rue in euerie place where they resort.” Both are arrested and jailed. The bear, by now concerned with other food, crawls into the forest and dies, outraged that he has not had “his will of a fat Hind that outran him” (226).

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Recently, most critics have agreed that the fable is a political allegory of some kind, and it should be said immediately that in this they have the support of Nashe’s contemporaries, who read it that way themselves.24 Gabriel Harvey thought he could make “a shrewd gesse at a courtly allegory” and described the fable—or, as he saw it, fables—as “parlous Tales.”25 He was right. So assiduously did the first readers of Pierce Penilesse pursue its allegory that, seven years later in Lenten Stuff (1599), Nashe was moved to protest: Talke I of a beare, O, it is such a man that emblazons him in his armes, or of a woolfe, a fox, or a camelion, any lording whom they do not affect it is meant by. The great potentate, stirred vppe with those peruerse applications, not looking into the text it selfe, but the ridiculous comment, . . . straite thunders out his displeasure, & showres downe the whole tempest of his indignation vpon me, and, to amend the matter, and fully absolue himselfe of this rash error of misconstruing, he commits it ouer to be prosecuted by a worse misconstruer then himselfe, videlicet his learned counsaile. . . .

In short, Nashe was sued. An English “potentate” either saw himself, or perhaps some member of his family, shadowed in the fable and brought the author to court, petitioning for a legal judgment on the text. (We don’t know who this “potentate” was, nor the outcome of his case). Objecting to those who “fisht out such a deepe politique state meaning, as if I had al the secrets of court or commonwealth at my fingers endes,” Nashe insisted that the tale of the Beare and the Foxe, how euer it may set fooles heads a worke a farre off, yet I had no concealed ende in it but, in the one, to describe the right nature of a bloudthirsty tyrant, whose indefinite appetite all the pleasures in the earth haue no powre to bound in goodness, but he must seeke a new felicitie in varietie of cruelty, and destroying all other mens prosperitie.26

His aspersions against the bear, thus, should be taken generally.27 Nashe’s admonition that potential litigants should “look . . . into the text it selfe” seems disingenuous (they were, after all, doing exactly that) and was probably meant to deflect the sort of exegesis that had already brought him before the bench. “There is nothing that if a man list he may not wrest or peruert,” he admitted in an opening “Epistle” to Pierce Penilesse, but “[l]et the interpreter beware; for none euer hard me make [political] Allegories of an idle text” (154–55). However, his protestation that the “ende” of his tale was not at all “con-



Nashe, ‘Pierce Penilesse,’ and the Demon of Consumption

cealed,” but was openly declared and lay in the condemnation of the avarice of an archetypal “tyrant” and his offenses against “all other mens prosperitie” should perhaps be taken more seriously. If Nashe is to be believed, the larger import of this tale of honey is to be found in, precisely, its ostensible topic: “appetite” and its consequences. This is a fable, he says, about early modern consumption, who is or should be permitted to consume, how much, of what, at whose expense, and under what political arrangements all of this is to take place, and it’s worth considering it that way. Most notably, I think, the fable develops its implications for consumption through an intricate historiography, one that Nashe clearly expected that his readers could negotiate—and enjoy. It suggests that among them there was an awareness of the dynamic, even overwhelming change that had been brought about by growing demand in England, mixed with a powerful desire for stasis, even an imagined stasis. The fable reflects and plays into each of these. Here’s how: Nashe offers his readers a bi-fold version of their own economic history, divided into not always discrete realms. In one of these, events move forward rapidly, social conflict is ongoing, and the overall relevance of the fable to contemporary affairs is obvious—so obvious, in fact, that Nashe was forced to deny implications that (as he knew) were patent to his readers. They are well aware that their kingdom is becoming a consuming society, and that this is having a wrenching effect on traditional social relations. Nashe’s fable is only one among many works in the period that frames the market economy of the time as a scene of unrelieved and brutal—or brutish, in this case—competition. Consumption (in the sense of predatory engrossment) is the norm here, a fact of life and death. The horse kicks the bear, the bear eats the horse. Thus are figured the struggles for market share that preoccupy those enriched by rising demand. Nashe, moreover, is clearly hostile to those noble entrepreneurs who were cashing in on England’s growing prosperity and amalgamating patents to themselves. The fox, whose mandate is to prey on the husbandmen, is “promist to haue his Pattent seald, to be the Kings Poulterer for euer, if he could bring it to passe” (224). The incentives by which the royal government has been promoting domestic prosperity have become corrupt monopolies benefiting the few.28 From the start, we recall, the pamphlet has been couched in terms of resentment against those who have wealth but do not dispense it liberally, to industrious scrivners, for instance. “Men of great calling,” Nashe complains, “take it of merite, to haue their names eter-

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nizde by Poets; & whatsoeuer pamphlet or dedication encounters them, they put it vp their sleeues, and scarce giue him thankes that presents it.” The new patrons, says Nashe, “not onely giue . . . nothing themselues, but impouerish liberality in others” (159). In this fable, he makes greed the inevitable vice of the elite. In the first historical realm, the effects of ruling class covetousness are immediate, obvious, and ubiquitous. No one escapes the bear’s overweening appetite. There is a second realm in the fable, though, and in this realm the outlines of the history of late sixteenth-century demand are not so easy to recognize. Indeed, it’s not clear that it was meant to be plausible even in 1592. Here, innovations like those the bear devises to satisfy his hunger are not really innovations, but only new forms of longstanding and well understood proclivities. The shift to this realm is signaled by a change in the bear’s “vyands” (221) from indiscriminate prey to a specific object of desire. “Yet newfangled lust, that in time is wearie of welfare, and will bee as soone cloyed with too much ease and delicacie, as Pouertie with labor and scarcitie, at length brought him out of loue with this greedy, bestiall humour; and nowe he affected a milder varietie in his dydet: hee had bethought him what a pleasant thing it was to eate nothing but honie another while, and what great store of it there was in that Countrey.” For honey, he must go to the “Husbandmen of the soyle” (223–24). As he changes his diet, he leaves behind the fierce and bloody competition that prevails among the citified elite and turns toward the extra-urban populace, among whom, Nashe suggests, habits of “ease and delicacie” are less prevalent and a respectable poverty is more accepted. With this turn, we sense a different ethos, and also a different temporality. Nashe (and his reader) move back into a past “before” the advent of demand-led change, when the ordinary run of rural Englishmen was not as caught up in the predatory hostilities of a market economy as the bear and his cohort, and “newfangled lust” could not be so easily sustained among them. Nashe’s readers delight in nostalgia for a time “before” the ravages of a market economy, and so he does too. The almost prelapsarian community of rural beekeepers that he conjures up is not simply or obviously an implausible “imagynation.” In fact, so strongly is this “imagynation” lodged in the fable that it can make better sense of the motives and actions of the fable’s dramatis personae than the more up-to-date “consumerist” thinking it also implies. One reason that this fable is puzzling, at least for us, is that no one in it behaves as we now expect economic actors to do. The bear seems to toy



Nashe, ‘Pierce Penilesse,’ and the Demon of Consumption

with the idea of dispossessing the husbandmen by forcing them into the marketplace, turning them either into voracious honey consumers or energetic honey producers, or perhaps both. He seeks to rationalize the beekeeping industry and to bring its practices up to date, or so it might appear. But really he is not much more than an omnivorous consumer himself, and one who conforms to a much older (literally prehistoric) model. He can neither impose nor accept market discipline. He simply and always wants more. His appetites precede the organization of desire into demand that a consumer marketplace entails; they are just appetites. His scheme for manipulating the honey trade not only fails in practice, it doesn’t hold together as a commercial venture. He does not want the husbandmen to recognize the value of retaining hard working employees, but to fire en masse the ones they have. And then to hire unproductive “humm[ing] and buzz[ing]” laborers, toward whom they will conduct themselves not like managers, but as feudal lords, “commaund[ing]” their services. And then he wants them to distribute the honey that they still have—but gratis! In short, this bear is no business strategist at all. He simply wants the beekeepers to behave as he does, gorging himself at will, on the assumption, apparently, that he will best be able to have his way if the demands of marketplace reciprocity do not apply. His minions are, if possible, even more counter-productive. They first weaken consumer confidence by disparaging the value and quality of honey and eventually go about to render it unfit for consumption altogether. What is specifically figured here, we can assume, is an English magnate who wanted to corner a market in some commodity and who tried to disrupt the industry using tactics such as these, as Nashe’s readers understood. But they also want to believe, it appears, that the economy emerging among them is not the only market conceivable. The bear is first of all a gluttonous thug, and only then a businessman, and a bad one at that. The rural husbandmen are no businessmen at all. They apparently can make no sense of the profit motive and respond not at all to the bear’s schemes. What commands their allegiance, and what enables them to resist his nefarious plots, at least at first, is a simple attachment to an England unsullied by trade and commerce, its “Traditions and Customes” (225) undergirded by popular respect for “antiquite.” These are not the people, obviously, to be overawed by comparisons to “Scotland, Denmarke, and some more pure parts of the seauenteene Prouinces.” Like the ideal consumers conjured up by Nashe elsewhere in Pierce Penilesse, they want English goods for English

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people. Thus, they constitute a self-sufficient kingdom untainted by trade with odious foreigners, while their intense feelings of belonging and pride embed them in certainties that are impervious both to the unreconstructed appetites of the bear and the fluctuations of a demand-led economy. The predatory engrossment that is so much a feature of the markets of his day could be halted, Nashe seems to imply, if only England would return to an agrarian order that, by a final temporal twist, has never really vanished. No “bear markets” for these consumers. Give Nashe’s historical kaleidoscope another turn, though, and yet another view of England’s rural folk comes into view. Now, instead of prelapsarian innocents, they are, at least momentarily, hardworking laborers carrying England’s economy on their backs. With his talk of bees and their keepers, Nashe is engaging another well known popular genre that took the countryside as its locus. As Andrew McRae has shown, the later years of the sixteenth century and the early years of the seventeenth saw the proliferation of books “designed to encourage the diffusion of . . . information” on agricultural best practices not only among gentleman farmers, but “through to the middle and the lower orders.” One of these books, Thomas Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1557), “led the market for over half a century.”29 This genre honored the aspirations of the “‘honest plaine English Husbandman,’” as one contributor put it—his diligence, his slow, steady accumulation of profits, and his desire to own and cultivate his land without overmuch interference from his neighbors.30 (Such treatises were the theory, we might say, and what Jan de Vries call the “new industriousness” was the practice.) The point of these manuals was to reach exactly the audience that Nashe is gesturing toward here—“good honest Husbandmen.” As it happens, moreover, the “Animals” he has chosen for their charges—bees—were said to represent stalwart agrarian virtues as well. “From the sixteenth century, bees had been accepted as a cheap and simple means toward improvement” for the farmer, and, as the next century progressed, bees and their keepers continued to be taken together as honest, industrious, and sober.31 We might expect, after what we have seen of Nashe’s cynicism in Pierce Penilesse, that he would dismiss the sturdy, bee-keeping country swain of these manuals as a well worn trope, and that he would soon turn it on its head. And eventually, as we will see, Nashe does turn this trope on its head, and the sturdy, bee-keeping country swain is revealed as just one more among the “hedlong vulgar” whose “nouell folly . . . mak[es] their eyes



Nashe, ‘Pierce Penilesse,’ and the Demon of Consumption

and eares vassailes to the legerdemaine of . . . iugling Mountebanks” (225). Here again, though, Nashe proves to be not so much a critic of other writers as a deft appropriator. Agricultural how-to manuals were immensely popular. As McRae points out, in “the reign that fostered the genius of Sidney and Spenser, Tusser’s Five Hundred Points was the biggest selling book of poetry.” And they were popular for a reason. While Nashe’s readers might be contributing to the ramping up of consumption through their re-tooled habits of work and spending, this is not how they chose to think of their newly adopted behavior. As they saw it, they were instead like the “industrious smallholder[s]” Tusser championed, “whose pursuit of ‘thrift’ link[ed] the national interest to individual advancement.”32 Manuals such as Tusser’s, which gave specific advice in the day-to-day management of household resources, allowed these readers to meld virtue with industry, and what might look to us like entrepreneurial initiative was figured as moral betterment. Nashe’s fable of the bees recognizes this linkage. When he identifies the rural dupes of the fox and chameleon as bee keepers, he is conjuring up two realms simultaneously: an English past in which labor is valued and respected because it cements an unchanging social order and an English present in which labor is valued and respected because it contributes to a rapidly changing social order. In both, he implies—at least for a time—his readers are the true worker bees in a hive with many drones. Nashe’s fable thus slides between histories of demand. One is very timely; this is the England that his readers know, and it is easy enough to recognize in 1592. The other is almost timeless, and deliberately so. It portrays an ahistorical England that is recognizable mostly as an alternative to the “now” of the early modern consumer marketplace. We are never quite sure which of these two “histories” pertains at any moment in the tale. No doubt most of Nashe’s readers moved readily enough between them, applying the one to the other, just as an “allegory” demands. The pressing exigencies of the first history, we may be certain, were felt by those readers at every moment as they went about the literal business of their daily lives. The second, as they knew, existed mostly as an “imagynation” meant to help them escape those exigencies for a spell. And so finally, since all concerned do know this, Nashe has to admit that the realm of the sturdy beekeepers is not to be found in contemporary England, or, if it is, his readers do not occupy it. Before long, the apiarists’ solid English assurance gives way before the machinations of the fox and chameleon, and they are transformed into the far more familiar English-

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men that Pierce Penilesse typically assails. Now, they hold “nothing . . . Canonical . . . so senceles, so wauering is the light vnconstant multitude, that will daunce after euerie mans pipe” (225). They turn away from domestic provender. Perhaps they make their way to the magnifico’s house, there to dine on the commodities provided by the factors of “Arabia, Turkey, Egipt, and Barbarie.” But these bee-keeping husbandmen do nevertheless serve a purpose in the text, both for Nashe and his readers. At least for awhile, they anchor Nashe’s critique of the market-driven behavior that he sees all around him. And, to his readers, they offer an affect-laden memory of consumption that is not subject to the imperatives of the very economy that their own (equally affect-laden) consumption is bringing into being. In this temporary “imagynation,” honey can just be honey. You can have it without worrying over much about its market value, either as a producer or consumer, because, strictly speaking, you are neither. It’s the bees who make the honey, as they should. (Some, of course, are idle “drones,” but then labor is no more commodified than anything else). You eat the honey. You do have to worry about that ravenous bear, but his impulses are much the same as yours, just given wider scope. Nashe’s primitive apiarists make up an idealized, market-free society, menaced only when the aristocracy deviates from age old “Traditions and Customs” of hospitality and largesse. Contemplating this antique realm, Nashe’s readers off load their anxieties over their own indulgence onto those who traditionally have borne its burden and assumed its prerogatives, the ursine nobility. All this, of course, comes at the cost of some inconsistency. It is, after all, his own demanding readers who are ultimately driving England’s consumer economy. It is, as he has demonstrated often enough in Pierce Penilesse, their “thousande imagynations,” just as much as the cogitations of any aristocrat, that are concerned “with . . . what daintie morsel” they might be the “master[s] of, and yet [have] not tasted” (221). Nevertheless, Nashe’s contradictions are his readers’ own. “In almost all its early English uses,” Raymond Williams reminds us, “consume had an unfavorable sense; it meant to destroy, to use up, to waste, to exhaust.”33 True, but between them Nashe and his readers do sometimes manage to achieve an understanding of consumption that cannot be entirely reduced to this one sense. In Pierce Penilesse, as in other early modern works, what is said against getting and spending needs to be considered together with, if not a clearly articulated counter-position, then the meld of



Nashe, ‘Pierce Penilesse,’ and the Demon of Consumption

half-expressed views, unexpressed but acted upon beliefs, seething disgust and sheer desire that went into the early modern consumer mentality. “But I would not haue you thinke that all this that is set downe heere is in good earnest, for then you goe by S. Gyles, the wrong way to Westminster,” Nashe tells his readers at one point. “Come on, let vs turne ouer a new leafe, and heare what Gluttonie can say for her selfe, for . . . full platters doe well after extreame purging” (199). He affirms. He denies. He offers to glut you on his prose, but only after he has purged you well.

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chapter three

William Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’: Credit Risks ’Tis ordinary for a Citizen to trust, and hee commonly loseth much by it. I thinke there is no Citizen can say hee hath had no losses.1 William Scott, An Essay of Drapery (1635)

i. a culture of credit Historians have long recognized that early modern England’s expanding economy placed a cognitive burden on its beneficiaries. Joyce Appleby, for instance, argued that, in the “sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” “[c]ommercialism, with its free-floating price and profit system,” amounted to a kind of kingdom-wide solvent. A new network of communications superimposed itself . . . breaking down the barriers of local markets. Incentives for increased production went hand in hand with the cost advantages of specialization and economies of size. Production for an expandable market presented Englishmen with more choices, more options, more decisions. An economy contained within the limits of supply slowly became attuned to the peculiarities of demand.

“No longer visible and tangible, the economy,” she claimed, “became generally incomprehensible.”2 More recently, Craig Muldrew has provided a more nuanced account of how and why prosperity led to “conflict and instability” among the English, and, in doing so, he provides an exemplary account of the interplay between cognition and demand in the economic life of the period. As we recall, Muldrew argues that the latter sixteenth century saw the “most intensely concentrated period of economic growth before the late eighteenth century.” Many, if not all, in the kingdom saw a marked rise in their stan-



Credit Risks

dard of living. But along with this boom, he says, came a debilitating sense of confusion; rapid economic change brought the basis for commercial trust into question. The buying and selling, the having and enjoying of things had enriched the lives of many, but had also given rise to what today we might call an “hermeneutics of suspicion.” This was the byproduct of the growth and size of the English economy and came to pervade the “economic epistemology” by which they made sense of their obligations one to another.3 It wasn’t so much that the overall “economy” that became “incomprehensible,” he explains. This was an abstraction for which most of the early modern English had little time. Rather, it was your neighbors who became opaque. Their creditworthiness, their trustworthiness, their very plausibility as economic actors became conundrums that were difficult (though, in practice, not impossible) to resolve. Here’s how this counter-intuitive result came about. Muldrew starts with the assumption, startling enough in itself, that most transactions in the English kingdom were conducted without the exchange of money. Instead, anchoring the economy was credit, a “highly mobile and circulating language of judgement” that governed most market dealings. Hard currency was usually reserved for dealings between people who did not know one another, who had not established trust between them. It was for “very small transactions between strangers, or when people were travelling . . . or in market sales between sellers and purchasers who might see each other only irregularly.” You paid your rent or your taxes in cash, but if you began to use it in your day-to-day affairs, it was probably because your “reputation was in decline” and your word was no longer good.4 As we might expect, the English of this time were intensely concerned with the reliability of their fellows. They had to be. The householder who sold produce to the neighbors on credit, the wholesaler who offered goods on consignment, the merchant whose account books listed columns of outstanding debts, all of these had to base their investments on personal judgments that may have been financial in the end (will I be repaid?), but that started from an intimate and knowing acquaintance with the character of their customers. Of necessity, then, the usual medium of exchange was what Muldrew calls the “currency of reputation.” To have good credit was paramount. It meant that “you could be trusted to pay back your debts.”5 However, as demand-led buying and selling grew apace within and without the English kingdom, Muldrew argues, “marketing structures” became more “complex.” Increasingly, as we have seen, locally produced goods were

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destined for distant markets such as London. As intra-island trade routes lengthened, the number of middlemen grew as well, and many of them also relied on credit offered and accepted. As trade ramified, extending credit also meant extending it along chains of buyers and sellers that grew ever longer and ever more complicated. And, not infrequently, somewhere along the chain the strictures of trust were broken: someone defaulted on a loan, or someone calculated a debt one way, someone else another way. Nor was this surprising, given bookkeeping that was, by our standards, inordinately sloppy. “[B]ecause of the rudimentary nature of accounting, there were . . . many bargains which were remembered differently by the parties involved and payments to third parties could also be communicated badly. Notes were also lost and payments were forgotten. Arguments over the nature of contracts took place, as did disputes over damaged or poor quality goods, or concerning changed circumstances.”6 When a credited payment came due, one party was likely to have a tale of woe that involved a host of other parties, many of them equally unhappy and confounded. As both buyers and sellers, therefore, many of the English found themselves in a bind: on the one hand, trust had to be extended if business was to be done. Not to do so was to break with the conventions that underwrote commerce as such. On the other, that trust could always be violated, and often it was. Market transactions required social calculations that were both delicate and involved: how much credit to extend (or ask for), to whom (or from whom), all the while knowing that every judgment might be wrong, that, some of the time, mistakes could be disastrous—and that everyone else involved was making similar guesses and choices. That these others were in much the same bind did not, of course, make your own bind any less constricting, or your fears any less pressing. Would the mutual reliance that was supposed to guarantee your dealings fail you, perhaps yet again? “[A]s credit expanded,” Muldrew says, “the English practice of basing most credit on oral agreements and reckonings meant that structural problems with trust became endemic.”7 Such complexity, Muldrew argues, was often more than the culture of credit could handle. Turn-of-the seventeenth-century England saw an “explosion of disputes” over unpaid debts, and many among the populace turned to the “coercive presence of the authority of the civil law”; they sued. “Litigation reached its peak in the period from roughly 1580 to 1640, and then declined throughout the seventeenth century” when “the structures of credit networks adapted to higher levels of economic activity,



Credit Risks

making litigation less necessary.” Concurrently with the “culture of credit” there developed a “contractual society” (represented, for Muldrew, in Ben Jonson’s dickering with his audience in the induction to Bartholomew Fair [1614]). Both “political authority and social relations” were redefined in “extremely legalistic terms”; the vagaries of an economy of obligation required the compensatory precision of the sealed bargain.8 When critics of the early modern period call upon Muldrew’s work, though, it is not these problems that they stress, but the communitarian aspect of Muldrew’s claims.9 They say or imply that, because the English economy of this time was grounded on a culture of credit in principle, the English had a more or less secure basis for their transactions in practice. One reader, for example, states flatly that early modern “[c]redit created complex relations based on trust, without which . . . there could be ‘no correspondence maintained either between societies or particular persons.’” In this period, the “moral emphasis shifted from [medieval] fealty to financially based principles of credit, honesty, and conscience.”10 Another quotes Muldrew’s talk of “households attempting both to cooperate and compete within communities increasingly permeated by market relations.” “[C]reditworthiness,” as he sees it, works to ameliorate the “‘structural problems with trust’” that “Muldrew carefully documents.”11 For her part, Nina Levine has no wish to “diminish . . . the harsh realities of credit’s role in early forms of capitalism,” but credit, she thinks, should be considered in “its potential for liberation as well as exploitation.” Credit provides “a structure for negotiating equality in political as well as economic exchanges.” It encourages “the developing notion of contract” and “foster[s] alliances within communities.” “To engage in credit relations may be to risk loss and betrayal,” she concedes. “But when credit is grounded in mutual consent and mutual gain, it is also to participate in opportunities for economic and political change.”12 These critics are on to something. It has been pointed out that Muldrew himself at times puts “a positive spin on evidence that might have been interpreted differently.” He seems to “want it both ways; credit established an equality among those who employed it,” he says, and yet much of what he has to tell us implies a “breakdown” in credit relations.13 Here, I propose to set aside the more anodyne version of Muldrew’s historiography, not because it is altogether wrong, but because it emphasizes one moment in a multi-step argument that ends (despite Muldrew’s occasional impulse to diminish this) not with a pervading and enabling “mutual consent,” but

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with rampant mutual distrust and dissent.14 We have to read both with and against the grain of this historian. The reason that Muldrew finds himself caught wanting it both ways, I think, is his laudable desire to historicize early modern economic transactions. He reminds us that the “economy” as we understand it, both intuitively and analytically, was not the “economy” as early modern people usually understood it. We live in a “utilitarian world in which a massive body of economic knowledge is used to operate systems which seek to reduce economic agency into predictable patterns of behavior in order to preserve stability and permit the trajectory of utilitarian economic growth.” Because of these “expert systems of knowledge,” we no longer feel the need to rely on a “web of tangled interpersonal obligation” to certify our trust in our daily affairs. But the early modern English lived, he notes, before “government regulated central and private banks, insurance companies and a myriad of other financial investment agencies which maintain the value of our credit as it exits in the form of paper money and financial capital.”15 They had no recourse to the apparatus onto which we (however mistakenly) displace the problems of trust. And it is to accentuate this “pastness,” I suspect, that Muldrew highlights the reciprocity that a credit economy required (this is especially true in his earlier work, including an often quoted essay, “Interpreting the Market”). He wants to distance himself from the “very reductionist, instrumental account of ‘rational’ self-interested behavior” that would emerge in the late eighteenth century with Adam Smith and that has become so prominent since. And he wants to make it clear that the “language” in which early modern transactions were understood was that of trust and reciprocity, and not “self-interest.” But it’s one thing to claim that the workings of self-interest in the early modern English economy were obfuscated by a “language” that was mostly incapable of accommodating it as anything but greed. It’s another to claim, as Muldrew sometimes does, that self-interest was not operating very much at all. The English of this day, he says in one place, not only did “not interpret their behaviour in such terms,” but “they were not simply or even primarily concerned with self-interest in the Smithian sense.”16 But, in fact, we have good reason to think that self-interest was indeed operating in the English kingdom on scales both large and small. This seems likely even on Muldrew’s account. After all, what was it that disrupted the early modern “language” of trust, making it harder to use this “language” plausibly, if not self-interest in its most quotidian forms? The seller who



Credit Risks

chose to “forget” the terms of a contract that had since become disadvantageous, the buyer who refused to honor the agreed upon price, the middleman who saw an opportunity for profit in the discrepancies between one set of account books and another—all of these were doing their part to advance their own interests at the expense of others in an economy that ran on trust. This is precisely what the litigants thronging English courts were telling the bench: I trusted him and he cheated. The disruptions in trust that Muldrew documents are almost impossible to explain without invoking self-interest. And this is only self-interest in its most obvious form. Beyond this day-to-day mendacity and greed, what are we to make of the sharply increased consumption in which many of the English indulged themselves? Was all this bought and paid for by a populace for whom self-interest was not a “primary concern”? Muldrew’s account of English market behavior seems curiously unmotivated, as if these people could go on a decades-long spending binge and yet somehow avoid the calculations of profit and loss that add up to “self-interest.” That seems unlikely, to put it mildly. What seems far more likely is that these same English were, as Jan de Vries argues, engaged in an “industrious revolution” that came about precisely because they were calculating profit and loss (with what degree of clarity we cannot know) in their work and their spending. This demandled “revolution” is what powers the economic expansion Muldrew so ably documents. But, if this driver appears to be missing in his work, its effects are well demonstrated. Muldrew may not be able to find a place for selfinterest in his historiography, but the very changes in the early modern economy that he describes strongly imply it. When we fill in some of the blanks, then, Muldrew’s work can suggest not only how conflicted much of the early modern economic thought and behavior was, but why. If the “language” of trust that he delineates was indeed as pervasive as he says, but it could not account for (as he does not account for) the stirrings of self-interest as an economic driver, then we can see how the early modern English may have had a problem: committed to believing that trust provided the template for their actions in the market, but bedeviled on every side by the evidence of their own and others’ less trustworthy impulses, what must have been their predicament? As we have seen before, it’s the problems that economic history raises but does not resolve that, it turns out, do the most to reveal early modern dilemmas. What Muldrew’s work affords us, as critics, is the opportunity to see

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how very fraught with difficulty England’s early modern economy really was, how deeply the problems of trust entered into what Theodore Leinwand calls the early modern “interpretive inventory of responses to socioeconomically induced stress,” “the amalgam of cognition and affect that enables coping mechanisms and coping strategies.”17 My point here is not that credit problems were widespread—something many critics are quick to emphasize—but that they were far less tractable than many critics seem to think. Nor is my point that the “coping mechanisms” that the early modern English deployed as their economy grew did not help them, in truth, to cope. Most, no doubt, found ways to muddle through (and some to prosper). Nor is my point that the early modern English could find no way at all to cooperate. As we have seen, a demand-led economy required more than a little tacit cooperation. But, if Muldrew is right, structural problems remained in the trust economy. He implies that much of the social disharmony of which the early modern English complained so often came about because their economy was founded on the “principle of mutuality.”18 Ultimately, it was rising demand among the early modern English that was “complexifying” their marketplace, but once a certain state of “complexity” had been reached, there was only so much that they could do to extricate themselves from their predicament. Their reliance on the good will and honesty of their fellow subjects to underpin market relations created problems in just those relations. What Muldrew locates for me, then, is a nexus between economic expansion, cognitive disruption, and affective turmoil. At one point, Muldrew says that the predicament in which the early modern English found themselves is so “fundamental” to market relations that it can properly be termed “existential.” Trust “is always required in some form, whether weak or strong, in any social relation where exchange takes place,” and yet it “can be broken by one or other of the participants for a variety of personal reasons.”19 That may be, but what his work goes to show, most cogently, is how difficult and painful this dilemma was for the English at a particular time in their economic history.

ii. “if i be false . . .” Where, though, in the culture of early modern England might we find a “formal analogue” for this dilemma? “Where else,” in the words of Jean-



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Christophe Agnew, “but the theater?”20 And more specifically, where but in a drama that even now has a reputation as “Shakespeare’s most problematic ‘problem play’”: Troilus and Cressida?21 Today, this drama is often read as an economic morality play. It reflects, we are told, a struggle between an embattled aristocracy and an emerging commercial class in early seventeenth-century England. Troilus, an editor summarizes, is “couched in the mordantly pragmatic terms of economic transition.”22 It is “about” a “fall” into a “growing commercialism,” says Douglas Bruster.23 “[W]e are all traders in our relationships,” C. C. Barfoot learns from it, “and, as victims and perpetrators, susceptible to the inevitable treachery that trade brings in its wake.”24 For Gayle Greene, the “society” depicted in Troilus is one “that reduces people to terms of appetite and trade.” “Proper relationship is destroyed, and the ethics of the marketplace—what Marx calls the cash nexus—govern men’s and women’s dealings with one another.” This corrosive spirit, she says, “prompts a powerful indictment of the mercantilism of the age.”25 Perhaps the most sophisticated economizing reader of the play is Lars Engle, although in his hands Troilus becomes not so much a morality as an amorality play. This drama reveals “a rabid allegiance to market forces.” He is “startl[ed] to find” in it “an unrelieved economism with almost no residue of inherited absolutist conviction to work upon.” “Inhabiting a playworld as free of foundational absolutes as The Importance of Being Ernest . . . all characters in Troilus and Cressida seem to know” that theirs is a “marketworld” with nothing holding it up. “[A]ll its characters [are] part of the same deflationary market”; all questions of value open onto “a bottomless flux of evaluations.” This is Shakespeare’s “foremost antifoundational intuition.” An “ancient code of values,” says Engle, is in this drama “radically demystified by being viewed through the lens of a market economy.”26 Clearly, there is a great deal to this. A derisive skepticism pervades Troilus, most pungently articulated by the sneering Thersites. Honor? Noble aspiration? There is much talk of these, but the aristocrats on display often behave like so many scheming businessmen and women. Commercial language, as critics have often noticed, comes easily to them.27 Troilus compares Helen to “silks” bought from a “merchant.”28 Between him and Cressida Pandarus goes, “our convoy and our bark” (1.1.100). Paris and Diomedes dicker over Helen “as chapman do” (4.1.77), and indeed it’s hard to think of something in the play that isn’t for sale, including Cressida, who is first peddled to the Greeks for Antenor, and then, according to Dio-

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medes, peddles herself to them a second time, angling for “sluttish spoils of opportunity” like any “daughter . . . of the game” (4.5.63, 64). Each of the characters is preoccupied, it seems, with how he (or she) is rated in the eyes of others. Ulysses speechifies about “right and wrong” and warns that they could devolve into mere “appetite” (1.3.116, 120), but he soon proves an unconvincing moralist. “[N]o man is the lord of anything,” he explains to his dupe, Achilles, “Though in and of him there be much consisting,/Till he communicate his parts to others” (3.3.116–18).29 To have value in this “market-world” is always and only to have perceived value; there is nothing more. And so on. This is not, I think, all there is to Troilus and Cressida, but the description fits well enough. And the notion that usually informs this sort of reading, that the “ugliness many find in the play arises from the intensity with which it forces all its characters to partake of the . . . demystifying” and corrosive economy of early seventeenth-century England, seems more than plausible.30 Moreover, we also have reason to believe that people in England at this time, and indeed throughout the early modern period, found the play as “ugly” as we do. Whether it was performed at all is famously a matter for conjecture. “[H]ere,” the “Eternal reader” is promised in the preface to one 1609 edition, “you have . . . a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar.” In that same year, though, as we know, another edition (or “state”) of the play was published. Its title page announced that Troilus had previously been “acted by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe.”31 If those performances ever took place, they were among the last this drama would see for some three hundred years.32 Between the early 1600s and the very late 1800s, there were no notable productions of Troilus and Cressida. For Shakespeare and the King’s Men, this play was a signal marketing failure. The economic implications of this play and its actual economic fate, its “box office” history (to which we’ll return later) are rarely, if ever, discussed together, but consider the questions that arise when we do just that. To begin with, we might ask, if Troilus was a searching exposé of the corrupted early modern marketplace, as we are told, why did its customers not embrace it in a similar spirit? Instead, they seem to have responded to it with either outright repugnance or hostile indifference. If this was “Shakespeare’s entry in the new up-market fashion in satirical drama initiated by Chapman, Jonson, and John Marston,” why was his entry not received with the same sardonic and knowing approval that, presumably, met theirs? 33



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Note that these are not questions just about the vacillations of taste in the period. The play, after all, was a mass-market performance shaped to meet a certain demand; it was a piece of psycho-cultural engineering designed to tap into the “deepest desires and fears of [Shakespeare’s] audience,” as Stephen Greenblatt puts it.34 In this case, though, something went seriously wrong. Whatever response the play got in the early seventeenth century, it seems to have deviated from the commercial purposes its producers had for it. If we want to take the economics of Troilus seriously, we will want to ask not simply supply-side questions about the choices that its producers made (about the “market-world” they chose to stage, for example), but demand-side questions about the choices that its consumers made too, since it was their decisions that finally decided the play’s fate in the theatrical marketplace. What did they find so off-putting about it? Not, I think, the spectacle of an emerging capitalist economy. If a spectator looked at Troilus through the “lens of a market economy” in 1609 and saw what Engle, for example, sees in 1993, a domain where all “evaluations” descend into a “bottomless” “flux,” she would not be seeing the “marketworld” in which she actually conducted her commercial life. For her, it simply was not the case that there were no underpinnings to her economy. There were, as we have seen: the trust that she placed in others and that others placed in her. This trust might be fragile and often violated, but reliance on it was inherent in most of her market dealings. “For without fayth and fidelitie betwixt man and man,” declared the first English primer on bookkeeping, “it is not possible that our labours and travels can eyther be well maintained, continued or ended.”35 But that, as Muldrew makes clear, is the central problem, both in the early modern marketplace and in this play: trust is a necessary, but is it a sufficient ground for transactions? What happens to market relations when trust is abused, and for no discernable reason, or is used as a pretext for treachery? Despite what we are usually told, the truly disquieting effects that Troilus elicits do not arise from its mere depiction of market-induced vice and delinquency, nor does the play withhold from us the criteria by which to judge the reprobate acts of its characters. In fact, it goes to great lengths to establish the standards by which we might judge these conniving aristocrats. Often they are condemned out of their own mouths (“If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, / . . . Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood,/‘As false as Cressid’” (3.2.179, 190–91). Troilus, as I am going

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to show, is an exceedingly moral piece of work, if by that we mean that it constantly holds out to us the possibility of moral judgment. But never are we allowed to believe that the standards we are encouraged to invoke are fully grasped by the characters onstage, or can even be coherently applied to them. These lordly schemers seem oblivious to any interests other than their own. They speak the language of trust, but most of them have little truck with its imperatives. Notoriously, they are a faithless lot, prepared to break trust if and when it suits them. Perhaps this is one reason why early modern audiences (if any) found Troilus and Cressida so disconcerting and unappealing: the account it offers of market relations in the early modern period is exceedingly cynical. Characters such as Cressida or Ulysses can undo its bonds the moment they seem too constricting, or simply on a whim. These noble con artists operate only in the “short run.” In their “market-world,” no deal survives intact for very long, all credit is extended provisionally, and, as Ulysses (who should know) puts it, “enterprise is sick.” “Each thing meets/In mere oppugnancy,” And appetite, an universal wolf . . . , Must make perforce an universal prey And last eat up himself.  (1.3.103, 110–11, 121, 123–24)

On this reading, what Troilus troubles are the very economic premises an early modern audience could least afford (literally) to relinquish: that market relations are essentially moral relations, that market transactions are to be conducted according to a code of mutuality, reciprocity, and trust. For audiences who were having enough troubles already with the complications of trust in the marketplace, this import might have seemed very unwelcome. We have always known that Troilus and Cressida is a sour exercise that allows no virtue to stand for very long. In a marketplace where it was thought that it was virtue that kept credit flowing, this suggestion may have been a hard sell. But there might be other reasons, reasons having to do with the cognitive repercussions of demand-led economic change. We have already seen that early modern English people, by means of the signals that their marketplace behavior sent out, were able to convey a great deal of information to one another about their work and spending. They were engaged, jointly but tacitly, in solving a mutual “coordination problem,” and to a hard-to-specify degree, they knew it. Perhaps, then, while early modern



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audiences found the “market-world” of Troilus repugnant, they found it implausible as well. The play might exaggerate how vulnerable they felt their trust was to marketplace chicanery and misprision. Again, a “marketworld” that bottomed out into endless flux was not one that they knew. Even the problems of mutual faith that Muldrew delineates were not, on his own account, absolutely debilitating. Much of the time, English people of this time did what economic actors do in an information poor environment: they guessed, took chances, learned from the results, and, in general, managed risk as best they could, with demand itself as a leading indicator. A play in which none of this coordinating behavior was on display, and in which choice was staged an intractable dilemma (as we will see), might not only have been unappealing, but somewhat unconvincing. On this reading, what made Troilus a hard sell was, oddly enough, not its cynicism, but its naiveté. It intimated a species of economic difficulty that was real enough, but that in practice could be accommodated, often enough, by various means. The understanding it offered of the problems of a trust based market was acute but partial. Here, demand was figured as self-consuming “appetite,” and nothing more, not the subtle engine of incentive and information that many in the audience knew it to be. And Shakespeare and Co., we may speculate further, knew better too. Unlike the short sighted and duplicitous aristocrats they presented onstage in Troilus, these entrepreneurs, as I remarked in my preface, were thinking of the “long run.” It certainly was not the case that all economic actors in early modern England were fixed on immediate reward. The directors of the East India Company, for instance, constructed what Patricia Fumerton describes as a “vast decentered network of exchange in which multiple routes of goods and plural orbits of money joined to create a sort of perpetual motion machine of deferred expenditure and delayed profit” (although she also notes that many “investors . . . could not understand the notion of delayed financial return” and forced the Company to “borrow money at high interest rates in order to pay dividends before any profits on investments in fact materialized”).36 And the factors of the Company who went out to foreign climes knew full well that compensation would be a long time in coming and would require shrewd planning and implementation in the interim. But the East India Company was not the only joint stock company with the ability to execute long term strategy. Troilus, if it was put on at all, appeared at the Globe, the theater the King’s Men had the perspicacity to build and that they held onto mostly, it seems, because this enabled them to consoli-

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date and expand their popular audience. As Greenblatt has remarked, what joint stock companies like Shakespeare’s had in common with foreign trading ventures was that both depended for their “survival” on “attracting investment capital and turning a profit,” and that both types of corporations thus “depended on their ability to market stories that would excite, interest, and attract supporters.”37 Whatever the shortcomings of this play, we can be fairly sure that Shakespeare and his partners had their own future interests in mind when they put it on (if they did). But here, it may be, they offered up a story that was out of synch with what both they and some in their audiences knew about their own economy and themselves as economic actors. Theirs was a “market-world” where impulsive and arbitrary behavior could certainly be found, but where it did not produce long term gain. Perhaps the false Cressida and the wily Ulysses were parodies of English consumers of a certain sort: the untrustworthy and the greedy, those whose mendacity ripped holes in the networks of trust and obligation that the kingdom’s economy required. But, if so, the consumers who were expected to patronize this play either did not recognize themselves in them or did not want to. Early modern audiences, it may be, knew more about their own “industrious” inclinations than Troilus and Cressida chose to tell them. Whatever these audiences knew, we, of course, know less. What we can say, though, and what we tend to say so easily, is that Troilus is a product of its time. And so it is, but it takes a real effort of historical imagination to recover the disturbance that this drastically mis-marketed production may once have implied, and for whom. It’s not just that the play “offers a much more complicated, less prescient vision of modernity and the market than critics have on occasion intimated,” as Jonathan Gil Harris has said.38 It is questionable whether the play offers us a “vision of modernity” at all, other than of the particular moment of early modernity when the expanding marketplace was roiled by problems of trust, problems that, as Muldrew notes, are no longer as pressing for us. What may surprise us is that (if I’m right) what we are seeing in Troilus is an attempt by Shakespeare and his company of merchant thespians to take one of the most anxiety provoking, deeply embedded problems in the contemporary marketplace and to stage it as entertainment. As it turned out, they could not do this profitably. Still, as critics have sensed, there is probably no better gauge of the difficulties of the early modern economy than Troilus and Cressida. Even after four centuries, and long after its original power to disturb has faded, the audacity of this attempt is startling.



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iii. “all the argument is a whore” To get a sense of this audacity, consider what is perhaps the best known scene in the play. It epitomizes the bafflement Troilus expects us to tolerate, and even enjoy. This, take note, is a scene about not being able to make up your mind. “This is and is not Cressid” (5.2.153), wails Troilus as he watches her “betray” him with Diomedes. “O, madness of discourse,” he cries, “That cause sets up with and against itself!” (5.2.149–50). “Within my soul,” he reports, there doth conduce a fight Of this strange nature, that a thing inseparate Divides more wider than the sky and earth. . . . Instance, O instance, strong as Pluto’s gates, Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven; Instance, O instance, strong as heaven itself, The bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved and loosed, And with another knot, five-finger-tied, The fractions of her faith, orts of her love, The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics Of her o’ereaten faith, are bound to Diomed.  (5.2.154–56, 160–67)

This might seem an overreaction. Certainly, Troilus has been given reasons to suspect that Cressida is not the paragon of “womanhood” (5.2.135) he desires. She has hinted to him before that her seeming “confession” of devotion to him was “more craft than love.” She “fell so roundly” to it, she says, “To angle for your thoughts” (3.2.148–50). What seemed like honesty, she insinuates, had for her an instrumental value merely. And certainly others do not see Cressida as an exemplar for her “general sex” (5.2.138). To Pandarus, she is a “poor wretch,” his “poor capocchia” (simpleton) to be hustled off to Troilus’ bed as expeditiously as may be. “Would he not— ah, naughty man—let it sleep? A bugbear take him!” (4.2.32–34). To the clever Ulysses, standing right beside Troilus as his world splits apart, she is a sexual entrepreneur whose every movement advertises her “sluttish spoils of opportunity” (4.5.63, 64). But Troilus can think only of the vows they made in “integrity and truth” (3.2.160) and can conclude only that this is not the woman who pledged her love to him . . . or is she? The point here is not only that Troilus is confused, but that we are, and not because there is one Cressida, and we have failed to know her as she really “is,” but because there are too many of her, and to vex us contraries have

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met in one. As Laura Levine has shown in a subtle reading, the spectator to Troilus is consistently forced into the same excruciating crux as Troilus. “What the play does,” she says, “is simultaneously develop two contradictory Cressidas, titillate the expectation that we could choose between them . . . and then frustrate this expectation.” How can Cressida both pledge her heart to Troilus and also dally with Diomedes, declaring that inconstancy is the hallmark of her “sex”: “The error of our eye directs our mind” (5.2.115, 116)? Critics have tried to answer this question, often (tacitly) opting for one or the other of the Cressidas the play gives us. But, for Levine, it’s the structure of the choice that’s pertinent. It’s binary. “There are only two possibilities for interpretation here,” she asserts, as there are at the “half a dozen” other “moments when we have to make critical decisions about Cressida”: “Either [she] is telling the truth, or she is not.” She loves him and always has, in which case she is betraying him now. Or else she has never loved him, and “[s]he is what Thersites says she is: lies and lechery.” For Levine, Cressida is less a character than a node of impacted contradictions. “In another play, we might refer these contradictions to Cressida’s psychological complexity,” she says, “but here she isn’t presented in any psychological complexity apart from the contradictions themselves.” Her claims are rigorous; she refuses to obfuscate how brutally Troilus forces us to decide, and then refuses to let us decide. In some sense, the questions we confront are easy (she loves him/she loves him not). But they are also very hard to answer. Levine aptly describes what we undergo as the “experience of a dissolving criterion.”39 How do we get put in this position? The answer lies not so much in the specific choices Troilus imposes on us, I think, as in the multiplicity of the criteria according to which those choices can be made. As we have seen, critics often talk about something like the “market-world” of the play, meaning the imagined economy that it both presumes and projects. But, really, there is not one “market-world” in Troilus. There are (at least) two, and what Levine says of the structure of the choice we are compelled to make between the two Cressidas pertains to the choice we are compelled to make between “market-worlds” as well. It’s binary. In a day when issues of trust were paramount, two opposed but linked possibilities were coming into view. The one was widely believed, usually taken as foundational, and often put in the form of a proposition, as by Robert South: “without [trust] there can be no correspondence maintained either between societies or particular persons.”40 The other was widely suspected, usually taken as



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subversive, and, even late in the seventeenth century, was hard to maintain except obliquely: “in the Markets . . . every man will get as much as he can have, and . . . Caveat emptor is the only security; . . . therefore every man trusteth to his own wit, and not to the sellers honesty, and so resolveth to run the hazard.” Richard Baxter, who advanced this as what Muldrew calls a “hypothetical objection to honesty,” was quick to assert that this could not be “so among Christians . . . there are no Tradesmen or Buyers who will profess that they look not to be trusted, or will say, I will lye and deceive you if I can.”41 But this attitude is not at all hypothetical in Troilus and Cressida: “Well, well, ’tis done, ’tis past. And yet it is not;/I will not keep my word” (5.2.104–5). It is one (of two) views that the play is ceaselessly urging us to take up, one (of two) views that will help us to make sense of the action before us . . . until it won’t. Thus Troilus repetitively stages the dilemmas of the early modern marketplace. Here again, Troilus is an index of these shifting contradictions. The love between him and Cressida has been presented as a business deal from the beginning. “Go to, a bargain made. Seal it, seal it; I’ll be the witness” (3.2.192–93), Pandarus cries as they make their vows. Troilus has compared himself to a “merchant, and this smiling Pandar / Our doubtful hope, our convoy and our bark” (1.1.99–100), going between him and his lovely supplier. But what sort of a bargain was this? Troilus can’t decide, and neither can we. Together with him, we shuttle uneasily between two incompatible understandings of market behavior. Either a deal is a deal, and he and his lover have made one, in which case, as he concludes plausibly enough, “Cressid is mine, tied with the bonds of heaven,” or a quite different sense of commercial obligation pertains, and the “bonds of heaven are slipped, dissolved and loosed.” A deal can’t both be a deal and not be a deal, it would seem, but the apparent simplicity of this choice is undercut by the fact that we can’t make it. Just as Cressida may or may not be the loyal paramour Troilus wants her to be, the rules of honest dealing may or may not apply here, depending on the “market-world” we choose to see. The marketplace that Troilus chooses to see is disorderly and demanddriven. Greedy consumption, it seems, and particularly Cressida’s, is imbricated somehow in his predicament. “[B]ound to Diomed” is not Cressida herself, but “The fractions of her faith, orts” (leftover food) “of her love, / The fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics / Of her o’ereaten faith,” what’s left of their love after Cressida has chewed on it (and been chewed on). Somehow, the love Troilus thought he had, and the pledge he thought

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he had made and received, has been changed into the detritus of a feast, and the woman he loved has been changed to a mess of leavings.42 Or should he “Rather think this not Cressida” (5.2.139)? Or . . . ? Admittedly, Troilus can be hard to take seriously. How can he claim that Cressida must be other than she appears lest “stubborn” and misogynistic “critics . . . square the general sex/By Cressid’s rule,” especially after Ulysses’ deadpan reply, “What hath she done, Prince, that can soil our mothers?” (5.2.137–40)? Still, there is real pathos here. Something is at stake. As Harry Berger, Jr. has said, Troilus and his fellow Trojans often “look a little fusty or archaic,” their “nobility of thought and speech” pitched at a “level” improbably high, but one of the “most salient qualities of this play is the large scope it gives to noble thought and action. These may in the long run suffer from the way the play’s action tends to bear out . . . cynicism. But they are impressive when we hear them, and they are by no means all to be taken as hypocrisy or pure bombast.”43 Nor should we dismiss Troilus’ touching faith that somewhere somebody is coming up with a set of rules for Cressida’s sort of behavior. His panicky insistence that she ought to clean up her act before she sets a precedent of some kind (though, of course, she will: “‘As false as Cressid’” [3.2.191]) exposes a tendency that we have seen in him before. Troilus is a great believer in communal authority, in mutually agreed upon standards and in adhering to those standards come what may. In this drama, of course, that can be a real disadvantage, and in this scene it proves to be disastrous. But, again, what makes Troilus’ tormented confusion so poignant is not so much that his grasp of the play’s “marketworld(s)” is turning out to be inadequate, but that ours is. After all, the view that trust is and ought to be the ground of human affairs, economic or erotic or both, is hardly untenable. At some points, Troilus itself encourages us to entertain just this view. By the time he arrives in this scene, Troilus has come to represent a distinct understanding of market relations, and when that proves unequal to the spectacle of the bi-fold Cressida, what collapses is both his sense of surety and ours, our trust, that is, in trust. And trust, as we know, was a principle that early modern people took very seriously indeed. To show how Troilus is set up for the fall that he eventually will take, I’d like to revisit a debate that, critics agree, provides a touchstone for questions of value and obligation in this drama. In the second act, the Trojans gather to consider the question: should Helen be returned to the Greeks



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from whom they stole her? Hector claims that she is “not worth what she doth cost/The holding,” and Troilus responds with a well known rhetorical query: “What’s aught but as ’tis valued?” Hector rejoins: But value dwells not in particular will; It holds his estimate and dignity As well wherein ’tis precious of itself As in the prizer. ’Tis mad idolatry To make the service greater than the god; And the will dotes that is inclinable To what infectiously itself affects, Without some image of th’ affected merit.  (2.2.51–60)

Almost without exception, readers have broken down the debate along these lines: “Troilus’ famous question . . . is really a statement of strategic relativism, propounding a skeptical attitude in the realm of ethics.”44 “What is anything,” he is asking, “except as it is valued, and what is property or possessed except what is valued? Here, value becomes baseless, independent of any intrinsic properties of the commodity, completely a function of the evaluating self and the self ’s whims.”45 If there are any “laws,” they are those “of the marketplace.” They alone “govern commodity, and so demand [Helen’s] retention.”46 Hector, on the other hand, “has an answer to Troilus’ question and its implied premise that value resides subjectively in the eye of the beholder.”47 He “tries to lift the debate out of the marketplace frame that surrounds all acts of evaluation in the play.” He “insists on intrinsic value.”48 “[H]e believes in permanent values accessible to reason.”49 He is “making it clear that the sense of value depends for its stability upon something outside itself, objective and absolute, inherent in the object.”50 Readers have been prone to insist, that is, that this Trojan debate is really a debate about markets and the sort of value that they promote. Troilus is cast as the free marketeer who holds that exchange value obviates all other value whatsoever. But in his opponent we hear the “voice of a traditional ethical rationality.” Hector “will not let Troilus’ absolute subjectivizing go unchallenged—it pulls the rug from underneath his whole world of rational ethical discourse: if there is no objective standard of worth, then life and value are arbitrary.”51 This face off corresponds well to the score card from which many critics are reading, which announces Troilus as a grudge match between the Declining Aristocracy and the Rising Bourgeoisie.52 The absolutist Hector

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takes his corner for the first, the relativist Troilus for the second.53 But this conflict is not what is being staged here. As Berger points out, Troilus and Hector essentially agree that, in the marketplace, value inheres in commodities because it is attributed to them. At issue for the Trojans is not whether a commodity’s value is either “intrinsic” or “subjective,” but whether this value can and should be established and maintained individually or collectively. And on these questions both Hector and Troilus are claiming just the opposite of what they are usually said to be claiming. Let’s start with Hector. As noted, he is often held to be a proponent of intrinsic worth, but in an acute and lively reading Berger has proposed that he “is doing something else.” This critic points to the word “image” in line 60 and reads back from that to argue that the emphasis in Hector’s speech is on “the individual will and its attributive power.”54 “[V]alue dwells not in particular will” in the sense that it cannot remain in the particular will. It must look beyond itself for an “image” of something that can be deemed precious and then . . . but here Hector is unclear. As Anthony Dawson puts it, he “runs into problems trying to hold to this position” and seems “to be edging towards Troilus’ position without fully realising it.”55 Either the will then simply recognizes the value of its chosen item, or it then purposefully attrib­utes value to it. Hector seems to want to have it both ways. Value “holds his estimate and dignity/ As well wherein ’tis precious of itself/ As in the prizer.” What Hector seems to be describing is a rather unequal dialectic: value arises out of an engagement between the one who sees and values and the thing that is seen and valued, but the accent is on the activity of the willing, valuing observer. Thus, Berger concludes that “Hector would agree . . . that the universe of the play reveals no fixed intrinsic value in objects. But this does not mean it is neutral; it simply means that it is ambiguous, a chaos packed with possibilities and alternatives. Value is what subjects must therefore create by their imagination and activity.” Hector also wants there to be checks on this creative evaluation, however, and he seeks them, not inconsistently but not all that coherently, in the valued object itself. Having valued, the evaluator must insist, in a circular fashion, on the value of his “prize.” To do otherwise would be “mad idolatry” and “make the service greater than the god.” For Berger, this scene is “focused . . . on Hector’s attempt to make Troilus work out more rationally the position he shares with him.”56 Both the Trojans concur that, while value is in some sense “real,” it cannot subsist in and of itself. It must be “realized” by an exercise of will. “What’s aught but as ’tis valued?”



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However, the dispute does not stop at this point, and, although Berger is shrewd to notice that both Troilus and Hector agree on this, that does not mean they agree on everything. As they argue further, it becomes clear that what we are witnessing is more Troilus’ attempt to make Hector work out rationally the position he shares with him than the other way around. For Troilus, this disputation begins in what Engle calls “erotic mercantilism.”57 “I take today a wife,” he says, and my election Is led on in the conduct of my will, My will enkindled by mine eyes and ears, Two traded pilots ’twixt the dangerous shores Of will and judgement. How may I avoid, Although my will distaste what it elected, The wife I chose?  (2.2.61–67)

It’s hard to read these lines without thinking of Troilus’ “approaching union” with Cressida, although, as Janet Adelman notes, some do.58 He has already expressed his desire for Cressida in commercial language. “Tell me, Apollo, for thy Daphne’s love,” he apostrophizes in the first act, “What Cressid is, what Pandar, and what we? / Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl” (1.1.94–96). Before the Trojans, he upholds Helen as a gem of the same quality. “Why she is a pearl/Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships/And turned crowned kings to merchants” (2.2.81–83). It is undeniable that we see here a “conception . . . of woman as something to be bought and sold.”59 But what concerns this prince is not whether or not market dealings are going on. That is usually a given in Troilus. What he is addressing, rather, is the question that Hector has raised: where does value originate? Does it consist in the activity of a single will, as he has suggested? Is it you, Hector, Troilus is asking, and you alone whose estimation of Helen gives her worth? Troilus’ talk of “traded pilots” concedes that theirs is indeed a “market-world.” But, he wants to know, what principles should govern that world, and what binds the “particular will” if it goes awry? “How may I avoid,/Although my will distaste what it elected,/The wife I chose?” What if I will a certain choice, but then change my mind? Am I truly answerable to my will alone? Troilus stresses plurality and the obligations that collective choices entail. “There can be no evasion,” he goes on,

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Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’ To blench from this, and to stand firm by honour. We turn not back the silks upon the merchant When we have soiled them; nor the remainder viands We do not throw in unrespective sieve Because we are now full.  (2.2.67–72)

Critics often say that Troilus “resorts to mercantile language” here, and of course he does.60 It is this language that provides the source for the ethical argument he is making. It seems distasteful of him to compare Helen to “remainder viands” that might be tossed in the rubbish bin. But Troilus is not saying that she, their captured prize, is herself now irredeemably soiled, nor is he urging that she be discarded. On the contrary, he wants to keep her, and to keep her value high, and he is asking his fellows to think about how she came to be among them and how she came be valued in the first place. Like Hector, he believes that value is assigned. The difference between them is that Hector insists that this value should be credited to the objects in which it seems to inhere (Helen), while Troilus holds that such attribution is not done singly, but jointly, and should rather be credited to the attributors themselves (the Trojans). They underwrite value, even when the commodities in question are stolen wives. “Your breadth of full consent,” he reminds them, “bellied [Paris’] sails,” And for an old aunt whom the Greeks held captive He brought a Grecian queen, whose youth and freshness Wrinkles Apollo’s, and makes stale the morning.  (2.2.74, 77–79)

Helen is beautiful. She is a “pearl” and she has a “price” and they are indeed like “merchants.” Her true value was decided, though, when together “you all clapped your hands / And cried ‘Inestimable!’” (2.2.87–88). It is their united affirmation, and their willingness to continue with that affirmation, that creates Helen’s worth, not whatever exchange value she might have at the moment. Indeed, quite literally, she has no exchange value. Her merit is “inestimable” and exchanging her is exactly what they are declining to do. And so “why,” Troilus asks, do you now The issue of your proper wisdoms rate And do a deed that Fortune never did, Beggar the estimation which you prized Richer than sea and land?  (2.2.88–92)



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To renege on their assessment now would be a “theft most base” (2.2.93), and not just a monetary crime, but one committed in the currency of reputation, and against themselves. To devalue Helen now is to devalue the judgment they made on her, merely out of “fear to warrant in our native place!” (2.2.96). As it develops, Troilus’ argument convinces the council. After the frenzied entry of Cassandra, Paris also reminds the gathering of the “Disgrace to your great worths” (2.2.151) that returning Helen would entail. Although Hector feels the need to tell both Paris and Troilus that they “Have glozed—but superficially, not much / Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought / Unfit to hear moral philosophy” (2.2.165–67), his argument too owes a good deal to Troilus’ advocacy for societal curbs on the “particular will.” “There is a law in each well-ordered nation,” he opines, “To curb those raging appetites that are/Most disobedient and refractory.” At first, he seems to be saying that these laws would send Helen back to Menelaus, her rightful husband, but then he abruptly reverses himself and announces his intent to “keep Helen still; / For ’tis a cause that hath no mean dependence / Upon our joint and several dignities” (2.2.180–82, 191–93). To many critics, this decision has seemed arbitrary, but it seems less so if we see that Hector is capitulating to Troilus’ rhetoric of reputed (not merely monetary) value. Troilus, for one, grasps immediately that Hector has conceded him the point: “Why, there you touched the life of our design!” And he just as pointedly reminds the council that something more than money is at stake in their choice. Helen is “a theme of honour and renown” for them, and even Hector would not forgo her “For the wide world’s revenue.” The “rich advantage” (2.2.194, 199, 204, 206) that they all crave does not come in specie of that kind. Hector, then, is not an exponent of intrinsic value in this debate. He does gesture toward the notion of a thing “precious in itself,” but if we listen closely, he is talking about a value-adding dialectic in which the “particular will” is the crucial agent. He does not invoke marketplace rhetoric, but, in his personalizing of value, he comes far closer to emphasizing “the evaluating self and the self ’s whims” than his interlocutor. Troilus, for his part, is not “propounding a skeptical attitude in the realm of ethics.” On the contrary, he goes to the marketplace ethics of his time to argue that value is not “baseless.” While it is “independent of any intrinsic properties of the commodity,” it has its base in the mutual agreement of buyers and sellers (or what in the period was called “just price”61).

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We can put this in “today’s terms,” as Hugh Grady does when he says that “Troilus actually raises Hector’s argument to another level . . . to what could be called collective subjectivism or . . . social constructivism.” Grady thinks that “the effect [of this] on the audience is precisely to disclose the collective irrationalities at work,” but this, most probably, was precisely not the effect, since the rationalities in question closely matched those of the audience itself.62 What looks to Grady like “collective subjectivism” would in the early modern period have been recognized as the argument from “custom.”63 The controversy between Troilus and Hector is not between an apologist for the marketplace and a critic determined to “lift the debate out of the marketplace frame.” Metaphors drawn from the code of the aristocrat and the lexicon of the merchant are both used here, but almost interchangeably. There is no suggestion that the one transcends or displaces the other. It would go against “honour” to turn “back the silks upon the merchant.” Troilus, in short, is not the avant-garde exponent of “strategic relativism” in this scene, nor is Hector the defender of traditional value(s). With his dogged insistence that people ought to stick to their word, that, when it comes right down to it, what have we got except our willingness to agree, and so on, it is Troilus who becomes the mouthpiece for the truisms of the day. Early modern “[m]arket relations and commerce were interpreted,” as Muldrew observes, “in a way which stressed the importance of trust and the maintenance of human obligation in a world where the complexity of bargaining and competing desires was causing many contradictions.”64 And so too does Troilus. That, I think, is why he wins the debate. Grady has a point, though. Not in this scene, perhaps, but Troilus’ faith in trust will come to seem very dubious. As we spy on him spying on Cressida in the Grecian camp, it will become clear to us that the “rationality” on which he has relied is not adequate to the Cressida-conundrum. His stunned and anguished response would be less moving, though, if his views were completely implausible or if he had not maintained them with some coherence. This is not a drama in which the characters are troubled by overmuch consistency, but a misreading of Troilus’ position in his debate with Hector makes his Cressida-crisis even more incongruous than it already is. Why would a character who, in act two, declares that ethics are “strategic” and “relative” then be shocked—shocked!—to learn, in act five, that Cressida apparently thinks so too? That he does not think this is what makes his confrontation with an ethics of another sort all the more devastating, for him and for us. Act five, scene two presents, in a highly concentrated form,



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the dilemmas that Troilus and Cressida inflicts on us. It heightens to an excruciating degree suspicions that by the turn of the seventeenth century had become inescapable. Several of the passages usually cited as evidence of the play’s “mercantilism” are cases in point, and also reflect the troubled market ethos of the day. Troilus might not want to turn back silks to merchants when they have been soiled, but this is just the sort of sharp practice much of the rest of the cast would be getting up to. “Fair Diomed,” says Paris, you do as chapmen do, Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy. But we in silence hold this virtue well: We’ll not commend what we intend to sell.  (4.1.77–80)

Here, Paris is refusing to take seriously Diomedes’ denigration of Helen. The Greek weighs her life against the number of men slain on both sides. In his estimation, the balance is against her: For every false drop in her bawdy veins A Grecian’s life hath sunk; for every scruple Of her contaminated carrion weight A Trojan hath been slain.  (4.1.71–74)

But Paris has little patience with Diomedes’ labored attempts to assess Helen’s exact worth in dead warriors. He assumes that any deal involving Helen will include, if not outright deception, then misrepresentation as a matter of course. Diomedes is talking her down so that her reputation will be diminished. Thus, she will be easier to “buy,” whether with blood or money doesn’t seem to matter very much at this point. Paris himself is pursuing a matching strategy: measured silence about his wares that is meant to enhance their worth in the buyer’s eyes. The contradictions of this—a strategy of silence that you talk about, the odd suggestion that Helen, whom the Trojans have held onto stubbornly, is “what we intend to sell”—are themselves examples of the layered double talk that most of the characters in Troilus employ when they get down to serious bargaining. The purpose of such talk is not to determine what the market price, fair or otherwise, might be just then (this is a moment to be postponed for as long as necessary). It is rather to get a nuanced sense of the other party, of his (or her) intentions, and to reveal something of one’s own, just enough that a provisional judgment about mutual trustworthiness can be made and, perhaps, a tentative accord can be reached.

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The occasion that has brought Paris and Diomedes together, the temporary entente between the Greeks and the Trojans in the fourth act, is marked by this sort of jovial (dis)regard, a jockeying for position among competitors who realize that they have an enterprise in common. Aeneas to Diomedes: “We know each other well.” Diomedes to Aeneas: “We do, and long to know each other worse.” Paris to them both: “This is the most despiteful’st gentle greeting,/The noblest hateful love, that e’er I heard of.” Followed, predictably, by an aside to Aeneas: “What business, lord . . . ?” (4.1.32–36). The get-together is going to turn out badly, of course. These men will be hacking at one another before very long. But that outcome would have come as no surprise to Troilus’ first audience, and not only because they already knew the end of this famous story. Business affairs often did turn out poorly, and for the reasons that are on display in this scene: trust and distrust were so entangled that, often, they could hardly be distinguished. Or consider the wily Ulysses and how he maneuvers Achilles into fighting Hector. These Greeks and Trojans compete on the “honor-market,” as W. R. Elton aptly terms it in a classic essay.65 But what sort of “market” is this? A stock market-like affair on which reputation is freely traded and value ultimately has no ground, and so on? Or a “web of tangled interpersonal obligation” within which reputation fluctuates depending on shifting loyalty, trust, status, affinity, and so forth?66 Something more like the second, it seems. Ulysses does not operate beyond or against the code of trust; he exploits it. For him, rules are not made to be broken. Instead, it is the rules themselves, and the expectations of trust they create, that allow a canny dealer to come out on top. “Let us,” he says in well quoted lines, like merchants, show our foulest wares, And think perchance they’ll sell; if not, The lustre of the better yet to show Shall show the better.  (1.3.360–63)

Ulysses and Nestor are plotting to advance the “dull brainless” (1.3.382) Ajax, their “foulest wares,” as the man to answer a challenge received from Hector. He may defeat Hector. Or, if he is defeated, the plotters will play him up as a better man so that Achilles, moping in his tent, will be goaded to rejoin the campaign. It works. Achilles “buys” Ajax as a competitor for the acclaim he wants and emerges to battle the Trojan champion.



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But how do Ulysses and Nestor do this? By inveigling him into a “cash nexus”? No, they pull him instead into a “trust nexus” where honor is a volatile commodity, but reputation, not coin, is the going currency. “Heavens, what a man is there!” (3.3.126), Ulysses remarks of Ajax, pretending to believe that personal value might not be entirely derived from what people think of you. “What things again most dear in the esteem / And poor in worth!” (3.3.130–31). But, even as he disparages Ajax, he is duping the “insolent” (1.3.370) Greek into committing his own prestige on the honor mart. He succeeds in this, but not because Achilles is a proponent of intrinsic value. “This is not strange, Ulysses,” he retorts when told that “virtues” shine most brightly “by reflection” (3.3.100, 101, 103). These aristocrats grasp well enough that personal merit shifts along with the opinions of others. “I see my reputation is at stake” (3.3.229), says Achilles when he hears Ajax will take the field. Rather, what eludes him is that the market to which he commits his value is “already rigged.”67 Ulysses and Nestor have made sure that Ajax will win the lottery to do battle with Hector. Everything that Achilles hopes to achieve in the eyes of others he owes, unwittingly, to the connivance of Ulysses. The economy that Ulysses deals in, then, is every bit as ruthless as later money based markets would prove, but not for the same reasons. Ulysses is essentially a profiteer, but money is not his tender. He manipulates what Muldrew calls the “currency of reputation” to cozen unwary investors. To dismiss what he does as mere skullduggery over affairs of dubious honor would be to miss what was market-like about his dealings in early seventeenth-century England. When he says to Nestor, “Let us, like merchants, show our foulest wares,” he means: let’s exploit our customers’ trusting natures to put one over on them. We’ll put the inferior merchandise up front and get full price, and it’ll work because no one will want to believe that we would do this, or quite know what to do if they suspect us. The question that Achilles should be asking himself, and certainly the question the audience was asking itself, is “can I trust Ulysses?”

iv. (not) available in stores, (not) back by popular demand As Troilus and Cressida ends, we recall, Pandarus complains of his “aching bones,” calls us “Good traders in the flesh,” “Brethren and sisters of the

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hold-door trade,” and with a leer “bequeath[s]” us his “diseases” (5.11.35, 45, 51, 56). “[W]hat audience,” Dawson asks, “is likely to enjoy being addressed as bawds and pimps or being bequeathed diseases by a syphilitic old voyeur?”68 Not many, apparently, since so few (if any) made their way to the Globe to see this play. Dawson’s question catches at what must have made Troilus so hard to market: the drama pulls us into a commercial transaction (money for entertainment), but then offers us, besides the contagion of its scabrous rhetoric, the unavoidable suspicion that we ourselves are implicated in its trade. Every query it raises about its debauched “market-world” already pertains to us as buyers and sellers. And “[h]ow did we come to be on familiar terms with a pimp who trades in his niece’s flesh?”69 As is well known, there was a second attempt to merchandize Troilus, this time in print and to a more upscale audience. The uncertain performance history of the play became, in the hands of publishers Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, a selling point. As mentioned, they stopped a 1609 print run of the first edition to insert, into one “state,” an “enigmatic publicity blurb”70 assuring the “Eternal reader” that “you have here a new play, never staled with the stage, never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar.”71 As Zachary Lesser notes perceptively, in this they were actively adapting the play to a changing theatrical marketplace. They had decided to retool it as a city comedy. And, in this, they also produced a “reading of the play. Bonian and Walley are not merely the play’s publishers: when they reconsidered their understanding of the play and inserted their preface, they also became the earliest literary critics to publish on Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. . . . they seem . . . actually to have read the play.”72 Bonian and Walley may even have been in attendance at some performance of Troilus, though of course we can’t know this, any more than we can know whether there were any such performances, something they chose to deny. Nor do we know if this preface succeeded as an advertisement, whether the partners recouped their investment. As a piece of literary criticism, it must be said, the preface falls short of the mark. Its insistence that Troilus was a comedy must have seemed unlikely even at the time. And, as an advertisement too, the preface seems desperate, determined to rescue the play from marketing oblivion by cajoling and intimidating the “Eternal reader” into buying. I would like to close by suggesting, though, that it is just these tactics that, perhaps inadvertently, make the preface the subtle register of Troilus and Cressida that it is. In trying to remarket the play, Bonian and Walley also do a remarkable job of rehearsing its constitutive tensions.



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Critics usually say that the preface is calculated to appeal to a “discriminating readership,” one that disdains the popular theater and chooses instead to buy play-scripts as books. Their values are “neoclassical, learned, even academic.”73 And, true, we are told that Troilus “deserves such a labour as well as the best comedy in Terence or Plautus” (121). However, there is another and not unrelated reader implied in the preface too, someone rather more grim. This reader may be a literary connoisseur, but he can’t shake the suspicion that all fictions, performed or printed, are forbidden. Those “grand censors, that now style [plays] such vanities” (120) quickly become a preoccupation in the preface, whether because they might forbid customers to buy the printed Troilus or because they might be customers for the printed Troilus is never quite clear. Both, most likely. The assumed reader of the preface seems always to be looking over his shoulder, intrigued by the play’s cutting edge topicality but hoping that no one sees him buying it. Shrewdly, Bonian and Walley incorporate this ambivalence into their marketing strategy. The ferocious hostility of the theater’s critics to “vanities” is not just assumed; it becomes the precondition for marketing the play-text. Perhaps the partners had in mind someone like William Pyrnne. He scourged players, but might have been willing to buy his own copy of Troilus because, as he explained in Histriomastix (1633), “a man may read a Play without any prodigall vaine expence of money, or over-great losse of time . . . Stage-plays may be privately read over without any danger of infection by ill company, without any publike infamy or scandal . . . without any incouraging or maintaining of Players in their ungodly profession.” Reading a play, he argued, avoided all these perils, as well as the many “heathenish oathes and execrations” the playgoer was likely to hear.74 The sensibility of the reader of the preface, who finds his haunts far from the “smoky breath of the multitude” (121) and likes a play because it has been “never staled with the stage,” was not unlike this. At the same time, though, it is just this reader who is set up as the buyer’s antagonist, the man he must contrive not to be. These “censors” who believe, as Pyrnne put it, that “men cannot run to Playes and Play-houses with any good intent,” are hypocrites who buy and sell willingly enough among themselves, but won’t tolerate a little honest commerce between a publisher and his customer.75 Usually said to be “figures of authority in church and state,” they are more plausibly civic-minded London merchants, among whom antipathy to the stage was well entrenched.76 If “the vain names of comedies [were] changed for the titles of commodities,” Bonian

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and Walley charge, “or of plays for pleas,” these critics would recognize the value of this entertainment soon enough, and even become customers, “flock[ing] to [plays] for the main grace of their gravities” (120). The point here, notice, is not that the reader should allow himself to feel superior to the marketing of literary texts and performances, but that he should see, as these “censors” refuse to, that such marketing is ubiquitous, and that disdain for book selling or play selling is merely a front for intra-market competition. The same reader who (tacitly) looks down on the commercial stage is now asked to look down on those who won’t give a thriving industry the acknowledgement it deserves. Thus, it’s not just that Bonian and Walley are ambivalent “over exactly how to market” their text and to “fashion it as a witty play suitable for refined tastes.”77 The reader they presuppose is also conflicted at the root. Unable to make up his mind about the worth of the product he holds, he is just as likely to toss it down as he is to “bestow” his “testern” (sixpence) upon it. “Grand censors” who abruptly become avid customers and rush to plays after it is explained to them that theatrical producers are actually (like them) making money, or customers who stubbornly refuse to buy an author’s “comedies” until they are “out of sale” and then “scramble for them and set up a new English Inquisition”—the buyers this preface envisions are nervously poised between extremes, each of them as unlikely as the other. The phrase “English Inquisition” captures this tension exactly: a punitive and hostile readership that insists on interrogating, but then also eagerly buying Bonian and Walley’s merchandize. Such readers have to be threatened into making their purchase: “Take this for a warning, and, at the peril of your pleasure’s loss, and judgement’s, refuse not, nor like this the less for not being sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude; but thank fortune for the scape it hath made amongst you.” “Pleasure,” obviously, is not a motive the publishers can count on for buying. The reader they address is dubious that there will be much of that to be had from Troilus (and not surprisingly) and is of two minds about whether the bad word of mouth the play has gotten should prejudice him against it. Will he like the play for being “never clapper-clawed with the palms of the vulgar”? Or “like [it] the less for not being sullied with the smoky breath of the multitude” (121)? Bonian and Walley’s advertisement tries to accommodate both possibilities. To resolve the contradictions of their own marketing campaign, the publishers place the onus squarely on the reader, on his ability to grasp the



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genius of “your brain,” William Shakespeare. In one of the first attempts to cash in on the transforming properties of the Bard, Bonian and Walley assert that “this author’s comedies . . . show . . . such a dexterity and power of wit that the most displeased with plays are pleased with his comedies” (120). The “grand censors’” sudden yen for play-going makes sense in this case, they imply, because Shakespeare’s texts (the distinction between script and performance is blurred here) have a unique “power” to change a dolt into a whiz: “And all such dull and heavy-witted worldings as were never capable of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of them to his representations, have found that wit there that they never found in themselves and have parted better witted than they came, feeling an edge of wit set upon them more than ever they dreamed they had brain to grind it on” (120–21). And, of course, the question that these publishers implicitly put to the reader is: which sort of reader are you? The dullard who has not yet been touched by the edifying wit of Shakespeare (in which case you should probably buy this book in order to tone up your intellect)? Or the clever fellow with more than enough panache to delight in the comedies of “your brain” (in which case you should probably buy this book because, well, it’s just so you). Either option leads to a sale for Bonian and Walley, or so they hope. The reader is forced to choose.78 As he is told, it’s his “judgement” that is at stake. This advertisement is actually something of a logic trap, set out hopefully for passersby at the bookstall of “R. Bonian and H. Walley,” to be found, as both the title pages inform us, “at the spred Eagle in Paules Church-yeard, ouer against the great North doore.” It’s not too much to say, then, that, just as Troilus and Cressida calls up two “market-worlds,” the editorial apparatus of Bonian and Walley calls up two “merchandizing worlds.” In the one, the play has never been performed and is all the better for that. It’s a comedy (despite the word “Historie” on the title page) that has yet to be recognized as a commodity. It soon will be, though, when the reader and other sophisticated early adopters start buying this book. Then, sales are assured. The buyer only needs to get in on this trend before the product disappears. In the other “merchandizing world” (one that the reader could have discovered just by picking up a copy of Troilus with the first, unaltered title page), the drama has been performed “by the Kings Maiesties seruants at the Globe.” It’s a “Historie” and has already had a run in theatrical release before the buyer arrived at the point of purchase. The customer is not buying a new text, but a repackaged

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version of a script given in performance. The play has done well, or poorly, at the “box office.” Troilus is innocent of any merchandizing history. Troilus is replete with merchandizing history. Which is it? We might, like Troilus, say that this is and is not Troilus and Cressida. Bonian and Walley are dealing with us “like merchants,” and so, like Troilus, we are faced with choices that are both exclusive of each other and hard to make, given what we know. This advertisement may have been an attempt to reframe the play for a new round of consumption, but it does not manage to escape the problems of the consumer marketplace in this period. In fact, it recycles them. In its ambiguous address to the reader, in its insistence on choices that must and can hardly be made, the prefatory note resembles nothing so much as the drama that follows it. Maybe Bonian and Walley did go to see Troilus and Cressida after all.

chapter four

“The Allegory of a China shop”: Ben Jonson’s ‘Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’ and ‘Volpone’ Trafficke and trauell hath wouen the nature of all Nations­ into ours, and made this land like Arras, full of deuice, which was Broade-cloth, full of workemanshippe. Time hath confounded our mindes, our mindes the matter; but all commeth to this passe, that what heretofore hath beene serued in seuerall dishes for a feaste, is now minced in a charger for a Gallimaufery. If wee present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole worlde is become an Hodge-podge.1 John Lyly, “The Prologve in Pavle’s,” Midas (1592)

i. “o your chinese!” “What doe you lacke?,” cries a “Shop-Boy” in Ben Jonson’s recently discovered masque, Entertainment at Britain’s Burse. “[W]hat is’t you buy” from “our China man?” Will it be the “Veary fine China stuffes, of all kindes and quallityes” this dealer has for sale, the “China Chaynes, China Braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China kniues, China boxes, China Cabinetts”? Or his exotic creatures: “Birds of Paradise, Muskcads, Indian Mice, Indian ratts, China dogges and China Cattes?” Or perhaps something more mundane: “Vumbrellas, Sundyalls, . . . Billyard Balls, Purses, Pipes, . . . Toothpicks, . . . Spectacles!” “See what you lack,” he urges, and buy.2 The occasion for this pitch was the first performance of the masque in London on April 11, 1609. It opened the New Exchange, a Burse, it was hoped, that would “rival Gresham’s Royal Exchange in the

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City.”3 Since this performance took place on the premises of the Burse itself, the commodities the Shop-Boy hawks would have been all around him, there for the audience to see and to desire, just as he instructed. But what did they see, exactly? Arjun Appadurai has pointed out that in early modern England luxury goods from abroad appeared first of all as “incarnated signs”: not so much fetishized commodities, but “goods whose principal use is rhetorical and social.” For Jonson and his contemporaries, they registered “semiotic virtuosity, that is, the capacity to signal fairly complex social messages,” including the “specialized knowledge” that was a “prerequisite for their ‘appropriate’ consumption,” the fashion sense that their elite consumer could display, and the intricacies of status that could be communicated thereby. Asian luxuries like those the Burse purveyed took their place first of all within the elaborate conventions of Jacobean court society. Their consumption was regulated not only by sumptuary laws, for instance, but by all the considerations of taste and behavior that courtiers applied to one another, and was linked intimately and specifically, among a knowing clique, to “body, person, and personality.”4 Among such persons on this occasion were James I, his family, and many members of his court. The host of the event was Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who had commissioned the masque from Jonson for the occasion. Cecil, the current royal favorite, was the owner of the new Burse as well as an investor in many of the trading companies whose wares the Shop-Boy cried up. The Burse was at once courtly and capitalist, “an aristocratic-sponsored, commercial venture.”5 The Entertainment, most critics think, is a bold declaration of mercantile ideology, although an unusual Jonsonian text for just that reason. Even before it was recently discovered by James Knowles among the State Papers Domestic in the Public Record Office, David Riggs, who relied on “quotes from unpublished manuscripts,” considered the masque “to have been something quite anomalous: a royal entertainment in praise of trade.”6 (“[A]nomalous,” that is, because it suggests that relations between the dramatist and London’s merchant establishment were not prickly as we have often thought.) Martin Butler observes that Jonson did not include the masque in his collected works and generally “preferred to leave the impression” that, unlike other playwrights, he was not beholden to “London’s commercial ideology.” But, as this critic reads the Entertainment, it “celebrates the expansion of British trade into Asian markets, and dwells approvingly on the luxury goods that could be bought from Salisbury’s marvelous



‘Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’ and ‘Volpone’

mall.”7 Knowles himself points out that, “[s]trikingly, this Entertainment stands in direct contradiction of its contemporaneous companion-piece, Epicoene.”8 There, Jonson has Ned Clerimont mock the dandy, Sir Amorous La Foole, who lingers to “watch when ladies are gone to the china houses or the Exchange, that he may meet ’em by chance and give ’em presents, some two or three hundred pounds’ worth of toys, to be laughed at.”9 But in this masque, which itself features a “China howse” (134), this ludicrous clientele, Knowles thinks, comes off better. The Entertainment is a paean of praise, “apparently unironic,” to the “marvels of London’s developing consumer culture.”10 Jonson had been solicited by Cecil for “entertainments” several times before, Knowles observes, and the masque “embodies many of [his] political and personal concerns, especially his interest in the promotion of trade.” It also embodies the imperatives of the Burse itself, and the “conceit” of both is that the marketplace “unite[s] the two directions of English expansionism . . . the westward imperial colonialist thrust and the eastward maritime trading expeditions.” In particular, the “Chinese commodities” that the Shop-Boy touts “embody Jonson’s” and his patron’s “vision of the wonder and mystery of the Burse” and “advertise the Burse’s role in the promotion of the new trade from the growing colonial empire.” The “lengthy lists” of exotic inventory “articulate the excited profusion of possibilities that the explorations [of new worlds to the east and west] opened up to the domestic consumer.” The Entertainment, he says, “present[s] an image of a world united through its links to Britain as the market of its goods, with the New Exchange as the crossroads of the new London, the renewed nation, and the new world.”11 This is an encompassing vision. I am going to say here, though, that a sustained look at the nuances of the Entertainment complicates the story of commercial expansionism that informs, not only readings of this masque, but a great deal of otherwise sophisticated critical work that attempts to take early modern global trade into account. The masque is a minor text among Jonson’s works, to be sure, but, as it develops, a pivotal one. Large economic and geo-political questions are implied in it, but the answers that have been assigned to it misconstrue, I think, both the complexities of the economic situation it implies and Jonson’s subtle treatment of it. That the Entertainment should indicate, and perhaps also “celebrate,” the growing ascendancy of English power and the widening of its commercial sway does not at first seem unlikely. “Globalization,” Crystal Barto-

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lovich tells us, is not only a contemporary development. On the contrary, “from 1492 onwards, and even before, the globalization process of capitalism was well underway,” integrating England into a world-spanning nexus of trade.12 “Gradually,” says Walter Cohen in this vein, “a more appropriately global picture of west European expansion has” been coming “into view.” “Shortly before Shakespeare’s birth,” he asserts, “England initiated its modern imperial adventure by embarking on the oceans of global trade under the leadership of London’s merchant elite.” And it was during his life that “its greatest international successes came.” These were “in Europe and western Asia, rather than across the Atlantic.”13 And the Entertainment does confirm that the merchant gaze in early seventeenth-century Britain was turning more and more eastward. It might seem that, whatever its historical merits, this familiar story of English supremacy has at least the advantage of being an historical outgrowth of the early modern period itself, which, as we have been told in broad terms often enough, was an “age of discovery” when European travelers and explorers traced out the foundation for later empires. It is crucial to recognize, though, that this is not an early modern conception of the world. It is rather an artifact of much later empires, and in particular the British imperialism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This narrative has been vastly influential. “[A]mong Western scholars,” Kenneth Pomeranz has observed, there is a “long-standing tendency . . . to see the West as the active (and desiring) agent in the knitting together of the world.”14 And, as another historian points out, one of the undergirding premises of much economic history over the last century has been that “European commercial expansion necessarily and inevitably involved what would come to be called colonial expansion, that is to say the creation of areas of political conquest and political control.” On the one hand, there was ineluctable “commercial expansion; on the other, this led to “necessary territorial expansion.”15 But this narrative is nonetheless far from accurate, as the Entertainment in a small way can begin to show. Readings by critics who find that the masque “present[s] an image of a world united through its links to Britain” clearly participate in the desire for agency of which Pomeranz speaks, or, at least, they attribute that desire to Jonson and his coterie of onlookers. And perhaps that desire is present in the masque. It is not completely a mistake to see it as a collective imagination of a much wished for hegemony. It seems more than likely that those in Jonson’s audience would have wanted the



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world to be otherwise than it was, would have wanted to fashion, if only in their minds, a compensatory pre-eminence. Perhaps it was offered as and taken as a theatrical simulacrum of an English-dominated market that did not yet exist, trade routes all in place, a kind of global imaginary that was very, very much avant la lettre. But it would be a mistake to think that the Entertainment could have convinced anyone that this hegemony was, or was likely soon to be, a reality. Simply put, the English of Jonson’s day did not yet have the ideological means to impose this belief on others, much less fully inhabit it themselves, and would not have those means for some time. At issue is an economic driver that we have considered before in On Demand: demand itself. Here, though, the questions are not only, “what were the effects of this in England?,” but “what were its effects on a global scale? And where was it most concentrated?” The answer, as some historians have been arguing recently, is not England. As I mentioned earlier, an emerging school of historians argues that, in the early modern period, it was “Asia, and especially East Asia, [that] was already dominant and remained so until—in historical terms—very recently, that is less than two centuries ago.”16 These claims, put forward by Pomeranz and others in the so-called “California school,” are contested. Not everyone accepts that Asia and Europe were this unbalanced.17 For our purposes, though, what matters more than the relative size of these economies is the relative advantage of European and Asian merchants in one another’s trading venues. China and Japan presented European merchants (like those of the English East India Company, for instance) with markets in which they could buy Asian products (mostly non-competing goods such as spices, silks, and ceramics) for lucrative resale at home. But Asian markets for their own goods were mostly closed. And Chinese and Japanese merchants showed scant interest in accessing European markets. This put English merchants abroad at real disadvantages. Asian prices and exchange rates fluctuated, and information on them was prized but often hard to come by. The hazards of shipping goods to, from, and in the Far East were severe. Jan de Vries has calculated that, until the late eighteenth century, “European companies were prepared to lose one life for every 4.7 tons of Asian cargo returned to Europe.”18 In Asia, as in England, deals were mostly face to face, and again, as in England, profits depended on elaborate relations of trust that allowed for credit to be conferred and transferred. Trade “was largely carried [out] on an individual basis and finance was personal rather than in any way institutionalized; so that if borrow-

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ing were necessary, it tended to be confined to tight family or communal units.”19 Despite, and also because of, the social nature of Asian markets, financial risk was intrinsic to almost all transactions. English commercial travelers understood that they had entered into a sphere of commerce that was not, in certain respects, much different from their own. What they also understood, but what we have mostly forgotten, was how drastically overmatched they were in that sphere. If trade between countrymen was difficult, it was enormously more so for foreigners whose home markets lay thousands of miles behind them. Consequently, English merchants who wished to prosper in Asian markets often had to insinuate themselves as interlopers into existing trade networks. They had to “‘go native’ . . . because of their own weakness and because of the variety of local laws and traditions that governed commerce” (another reason, perhaps, that about four in ten of the Europeans who left for Asia before about 1800 never returned home).20 One way to do this was to marry into a local trading family, but in these marriages it was often the bride who controlled the funds and had the connections, and, to their annoyance, European men found themselves to be mere subsidiaries in the partnership. It was not until the 1700s that these local wives came to be called “concubines” and barred as such by corporate overseers. This shift in name came with a “general hardening of European racial attitudes and increased belief in Europeans’ own superiority.”21 But, in the early seventeenth century, English traders in Asia, the ones who procured the goods on display at the Burse, were still marginal players in commercial networks that had long pre-existed their arrival and now had little use for them and almost no need for the wares they had to offer. What Asian markets did want from Europeans, though, was silver bullion, most of it looted from the New World. Between one-third and onehalf of this silver ended up in China, the world’s great sink for bullion. Robert Markley points out that, since “Europeans manufactured almost nothing that was in demand in the Far East . . . the bulk of their exports— almost 80 percent of the English and Dutch East India Companies’ before 1800—were in bullion, which paid for luxury items: cottons from India, silks, porcelain and increasingly tea from China, and spices from Southeast Asia and India.”22 Conservative estimates put the amount of silver passing through Europe on its way to Asia at 150 tons a year.23 We should see, then, that the very presence of the fabulous items on display at the Burse marked a disparity between the demand exerted by



‘Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’ and ‘Volpone’

the English consumers in Jonson’s audience and consumers in China and Japan.24 The relation between them was not reciprocal. English shoppers wanted the goods that Chinese merchants had to offer; Chinese shoppers did not want the goods English merchants had to offer (their silver, of course, was another matter). Demand, true, was making itself felt on both sides of the equation. Pomeranz, as I’ve said, has argued that an “industrious revolution” was occurring on both continents. He argues further that demand was as high in parts of Asia as in the most prosperous sectors of Europe. And this helps us to put English demand in context. Much has been made in this study of the rising demand among the early modern English for consumer goods, and especially for the merchandize that Asia had to offer: gewgaws, but also pepper and spices and then, later in the seventeenth century, tea, coffee, copper, silks, and cotton. But this demand was not what was driving global trade, for which “demand-side forces emanating from within China were a sine qua non.”25 As Pomeranz points out, it has been usual to see the growing demand among European consumers for Asian goods as responsible for the shape of the world economy in this period. But when we realize that it is instead the Asian demand for New World silver that makes possible that appearance of goods such as “China Chaynes, China Braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes” (134) in London’s China houses, then the economic dynamic shifts, and it becomes as plausible, if not more plausible, to see the early modern Chinese as the “‘active’ force in creating a global economy.”26 And then it is arguable that, as Andre Frank claims in his pithy fashion, it was not Europe that made the world over in its image, it was “the world that made Europe.”27 These global comparisons and their later readjustments are beyond our scope here. What is not beyond our scope, however, are the implications of this line of revisionist argument for the early modern marketplace. Before British imperialism could make the world safe for consumerism, we need to ask, how did English consumers and merchants relate themselves to a world that was in fact chronically unsafe, where English mercantile interests usually operated at a disadvantage, and where, even in their own eyes, it “was Asia which was the developed area and Europe the underdeveloped”?28 We can refine this question by applying it to the text at hand: in 1609, could an English audience be expected to receive, with any great degree of equanimity or belief, the announcement that the global economy had found its meeting place in London, in Robert Cecil’s New Exchange, where England’s growing predominance in Asian trade was “celebrated”?

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The question is not as simple as it might seem, since it goes not only to what was true of England’s position in the world, but what the Jacobean understanding of that position would have been; that is, it goes to both demand and its epistemic consequences. Would the merchants and financiers assembled at the Burse have known that they were minor players in the global money game? And, knowing that, would they have chosen to dissemble, with the connivance of Jonson, that knowledge in favor of an “entertainment” that allowed them an imaginary supremacy that, at the same time, they knew was not and might never be theirs? If so, then Jonson’s masque is a fairly early instance of what Pomeranz identifies as the desire among some Europeans to see themselves as, precisely, desiring agents, knitting the world together out of their own demand, but that is all it would be. I think, though, that the Entertainment is something more than a vehicle for economic wish fulfillment. It is also an investigation of its own wishes and a commentary on the likelihood of their fulfillment. Whether the assembled audience could have truly known their own place in the world was just the sort of question that the masque itself asks them to consider. Even today, this Entertainment reads like what it surely was: a mostly light-hearted diversion meant to amuse an elite coterie assembled, just then, at the launch of a financially risky endeavor. It did this partly by rehearsing the anxieties of that moment, partly by poking fun at those anxi­eties. We can easily imagine the sort of hobnobbing, self-promotion, and deal making that went on before, after, and probably during the performance. But it is just because it is an ephemeral piece that it is also, I suggest, an acute register of the calculations, financial and epistemic, that were entailed by trade with Asia in this time, when the world’s great economic engines were located far from England’s shores. It is a mediation on a specific set of problems in commercial epistemology, conducted on the premises of a business establishment that promoted long distance foreign trade and that served as a point of purchase for exotic consumer goods. In the Entertainment, I suggest, Jonson considers the implications of what one economic historian calls an “economics of uncertainty,” an economics that merged almost seamlessly with his well known skepticism about foreign travel and travelers, as well as with the anxieties of his audience.29 Jonson’s dubiousness produced a piece of theater closely aligned with their market-driven suspicions, their commercial preoccupations. The Entertainment is an exercise in dramatic risk management, if you will, not



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in the sense that it seeks to eliminate commercial risk, even ritualistically, or to assuage the fears that go with it, but rather to enact them, taking delight in making of them both profit and game. Standing at a specific locus in a traffic that winds from Asia to England and back, the masque is a commentary on that trade. It is also, in a way that we must find hard to recognize, an “advertisement” for it, one that reaches down to the epistemic and psychic substrate of an “essentially precarious economic system.”30 I propose to read this masque, then, not in the light of our own economic assumptions, the light which shines through our intuitive sense that markets are certain, predictable, and knowable, but instead through the darker glass of the informing intuitions in the early seventeenth century. Jonson’s Entertainment, I claim, is both a proto-consumerist fantasy and a market analysis. In it, imagination and interrogation are at work together as Jonson explores—a favored trope of his—the epistemic conundrums of the Asian trade.31

ii. an economics of uncertainty To get a sense of these conundrums, let’s approach the Entertainment as its first audience did, through the preamble of “The Key Keeper” (played on that occasion by Nathan Field). As this character steps forward, he feels the need, after greetings to the royal family and a deferential “Your Maiestie will pardon me?,” to acknowledge the novelty of the Burse and, by implication, of the overseas trade and the domestic marketing that it represents. From the beginning, Jonson associates this “mall” with terra incognita. It is a new sort of place, he implies, one that brings alien climes into contiguity with London streets and, by so doing, gives rise to problems of knowing that no one, not even the king, could hope to escape. “I thinke you scarse knowe,” says the Key Keeper to him, “where you are now nor by my troth can I tell you, more then that you may seeme to be vppon some lande discouery of a newe region heere, to which I am your compasse.” If this Keeper is a compass, though, he seems to be a wavering one, for he proceeds not to orient the king, but to describe at length a recent peregrination through the surrounding neighborhood. Everyone he meets wants to know about the new Burse, “About the howse, the roomes, the floore, the roofe, the lightes, the shops, the very barres and padlockes; Not a grayne in the waynscot, but they haue hade my affadauit for.” But no one

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understands it. In part this is because he has been dealing with “my great Cosin the multitude,” and they dwell, he implies, in “ignoraunce.” It’s clear, however, that the Keeper hasn’t been able to do much to enlighten them either. Once, he confides, he had been an innkeeper and a bartender, and then he “coulde entertayne my guests in my veluet cap, and my red Taffata doublett; and I coulde aunsuer theyr questions, and expounde theyr riddles.” But now, he implies, as he goes about to beguile those present at this Entertainment, he must shift out of a comic style that depends on an easy recitation of known truths and into one that makes a virtue out of “ignoraunce,” that performs unknowing for satiric effect. The people he meets, he says, imagine “such thinges as an age of the wisest Constables, that euer were, could not inuente.” Notice, though, that something other than epistemic snobbery is being asked of us. The Keeper’s jovial preamble asks his auditors to make judgments on what they themselves know, and it provides them with the means to deflect their own confusions. If they are first compelled to acknowledge their own inability to make complete sense of this new mall, they are also allowed to displace this “ignoraunce” onto the “multitude,” where it can be both recognized (as perhaps their own) and genially mocked. The position they are thus placed in is neither one of privileged confidence, nor is it what Eve Sedgwick, in a subtle discussion, calls the “privilege of unknowing,” where it is the observer who has, or can pretend to have, “less broadly knowledgeable understanding . . . who will define the terms of the exchange.”32 Instead, it is a somewhat wry via media between these, where a rueful awareness that you don’t know quite what to make of something is mixed with the gleeful apprehension that someone else is even more baffled than you, and this is overlaid with the sense that it is just these problems of mutual incomprehension that bind the more and the less knowing together. The king, who “scarse knowe[s]” where he is, and the Key Keeper, who left his ability to expound riddles behind at his previous places of employment, are joined in amusement at the “perplexityes” of the buying public, which “woulde haue drawne a mourners laughter vppon them.” “[B]efore the shops were vp” to let them know what the enterprise is about, each one has a different opinion, usually self-interested, and soon these interests start to collide. A citizen “woulde haue it a lombarde, to deale with all manner of pawnes, but the Broker woulde excepte stolen goods, or he would be hangd for it.” Another wants a “store howse” for “Corne . . . wood and Sea-



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cole. . . . But the vitaylers woulde none of that.” Some desire a “publique Banque,” some hope for a library, but a “veary priuate” one, and so on. Before it opens, the Burse is imagined this way and that by multiple wouldbe patrons, all of whom conjure up an establishment that will benefit them directly and in economic terms that make immediate sense to them. The Keeper’s preamble, though, is one long comic dilation upon the inscrutability of this marketplace. That it seems to make no sense to anyone is the point, the shared joke. The most facetious, or perhaps the most perceptive, among the crowd wonder whether it is a place of active commerce at all. It may be a “fayre front, builte onely to grace the streete, and for noe vse” (132, 133), the kind of place, that is, that resembles nothing so much as a stage, where any business done will be conducted as a charade or performance—rather like the one being enacted at the present moment. And, as in a theater, the implication goes, profits are dependent on the good will and lively understanding of the customers, though this can easily be withheld. We are familiar, of course, with Jonson’s sometimes antagonistic relation with the commercial theater, and with his often expressed conviction that the audiences to whom he exposed his work were anything but attentive and hospitable. In the Entertainment, we can see his distrust of the acuity and durability of popular perception, but with a difference. Here, Jonson puts himself in the place not only of the author who must inveigle the approbation of the crowd (as he does at the start of Bartholomew Fair), but of the masque’s “producers,” Cecil and the other proto-capitalists who have a stake in the Burse and who must also hope that Londoners will be able to make sense of and patronize their new enterprise. Jonson’s chronic ambivalences about catering to the populace are continuous here with those of a particular community, represented on this occasion by a king, his favorite, his domestic circle, various courtiers, financiers, merchants, and middlemen, a dramatist, his helpers (two of whom had “satt vp” one “nyght wryting the speeches, songes and inscriptions”), and so on.33 Most of these must and will be involved in catering to the public if the Burse is to succeed. In the Entertainment, Jonson’s own anxieties about popularity are served up as comedy, but also made the occasion for a reflection on the vagaries of demand-driven marketing. (This is all the more striking because, as Joseph Loewenstein remarks, “Jonson suffered communal creation badly throughout his career.”34) As it announces the inauguration of the Burse, this masque turns simultaneously toward (at least) two audiences: an inner one, made up mostly

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of a courtly entrepreneur and his partners in commerce, and an outer, made up of the consumers who must be convinced of the worth of “China Chaynes, China Braceletts, China scarfes” (134) and of the plausibility of the foreign trade that delivers them. And what the first audience seems most interested in, it appears from this preamble, is their relation with the second, a skeptical public so absorbed in its own picayune affairs that it may well fail to grasp the business opportunities at hand. “I wonder how such men could keepe theyr braynes from being guilty of imagining” the Burse as a mere theater-like façade, marvels the Keeper, “rather . . . [than] a place to twiste silke in, or make ropes,” or any profitable trade, or even “to play a shittlecocke”; this would be “better then nothing” (133). The Key Keeper’s spiel raises, and then makes entertainment out of, the questions his immediate audience seems to have been pondering. What will be the public’s reaction to the new Burse? What complaints and objections might they raise against it, along with their unreasoning desires? Demand itself, and the pressure it will exert, is very much on the minds of these businessmen, but it figures as a somewhat incoherent force. Consumer confidence, and confidence in consumers, it is fair to say, has yet to be established.35 What are we to make of this tone of bemused perplexity? Why is it that, in the China trade, no one seems to know exactly what he is about? Let’s think again about the foreign goods that the Shop-Boy cries up to his audience. As we have seen, Appadurai argues that, in the early modern period, such objects functioned as “incarnated signs.” But increasingly, he says, there were other “pulls” on them as well. They were coming to function as commodities as we now understand them, taking their value from the “play of the marketplace”—a marketplace that, as the Entertainment implies, derives its motive force from demand and, on a global scale, from Asian demand in particular. Appadurai, though, has a correlative to add. In this period as in our own, Appadurai argues, commerce between regions sets in motion not only goods, but knowledge. “[R]elatively complex, longdistance, intercultural flows of commodities” entail “unstable distributions of knowledge,” and, as trading societies become more complex and differentiated, there develops alongside the merchandizing of goods a “traffic in criteria”; “knowledge about commodities is itself increasingly commoditized.”36 The understanding of how goods are to be made and transported, and how they are to be appreciated, priced, and consumed is for sale too, although not at every point along the circuit of exchange.



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Instead, these apprehensions are unevenly dispersed. They may coalesce here and be quite inaccessible there. Along the trade routes that in 1609 joined Chinese artisans to customers in London, someone, for example, knew how to fashion the “China boxes, China Cabinetts, Caskets” (134) that the Shop-Boy touted, just as someone knew how to move them over land and sea and by which routes, how to bribe or cajole local officials as the goods passed through various principalities, and what price such items might command at the point of either origin or sale. But all this knowledge was distributed, not concentrated, and was plural, not singular. What distinguished a fine “Cabinett” aesthetically from an inferior one in Beijing, for instance, would be quite different from what set it apart in London, if indeed the first canon of taste was even available to the customers of the Burse. The same could be said for the other criteria that were being trafficked: what some knew others did not, and most knew very little about the manufacture, transportation, and eventual uses of the stuff that passed through their hands, the “Waxen pictures, Estrich Egges” and “Christall globes” (134) that signified, but obscurely to them, an increasingly globalized trade. When knowledge accompanies goods, then, the relevant question is not always who knows exactly what, but how that knowledge is (or is not) being moved about and exchanged. Appadurai presents the traffic in criteria as proceeding along a “shifting series of local (culturally regulated) commodity paths,” where each locale is organized as a particular nexus of (mis)understanding. “At every level where a smaller system interacts with a larger one, the interplay of knowledge and ignorance serves as a turnstile, facilitating the flow of some things and hindering the movement of others.” And he makes the point, crucial for us, that as the distance—“(institutional, spatial, temporal)”—between these locales increases, the knowledge that is in transit among them becomes “partial, contradictory, and differentiated.”37 Generally speaking, the greater the distance mercantile information must travel, the less accurate it is. An economic historian of the period, however, makes the case for the debilitating effects of doubt and distance on trade in Jonson’s day even more strongly. Given the “unpredictability and risk” of such commerce, Peter Musgrave has said, it is a mistake to apply the “economic rationality” of our own era to “an essentially precarious economic system,” and particularly to “the long-distance trade with Asia.”38 At a time when “[i]formation . . . moved in general no faster than the fastest horse”—at most about one

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hundred and twenty five miles per day—and a single, tightly integrated world market had yet to emerge, merchants operated in what Musgrave terms a “doubly-opaque market system.”39 Knowledge about price fluctuations, local conditions at the on-load point, and shipping hazards moved in tandem with goods, but as a rare and valuable commodity. In the absence of certainty, rumor thrived, so much so, Musgrave claims, that it became structural to Europe’s mercantile trade, built into its “laws.” To consider this trade without allowing for this “economics of uncertainty,” he insists, is to risk severe anachronism. Musgrave’s claims, however, may be overstated. Exactly how intrinsic such uncertainty was to early modern economic theory and practice is itself uncertain. Take, for example, the commercial epistemology of the English East India Company.40 It operated a “multilateral trade system centred on London,” and, as K. N. Chaudhuri tells us, this corporation made every effort to ensure that the knowledge it had was reliable.41 It was also willing to adjust its trading practices to market realities. In the early stages of its enterprise, for instance, its business consisted of importing and then re-exporting Asian goods for European markets. It developed this trade because, by around 1600, it had “acquired a fairly accurate knowledge of the nature of the East India trade” and had realized that English woolens were not likely to be much valued there.42 It also established the so-called “factory system”: “factors” abroad served as the Company’s representatives to Asian merchants and as agents in distant markets. To communicate with these factors, the Company organized a postal system, and a highly efficient one. Letters, sometimes coded, were sent home to England on every departing ship, with duplicates often taking an overland route. Yet, for all this, Chaudhuri notes, the “habitual . . . feeling” of the governing body of the Company was that “they had no means of arriving at the true state of affairs in the Indies.”43 Part of the problem lay in the factors themselves: some might be exceeding their mandate, or running up expenses, or lying about the arrangements in place. So far from Asia, where their business was being done, Company officers in London had no way of verifying the accounts they received, except, that is, if other factors in the vicinity chose to inform on the ones they suspected. But then which accounts to credit? As Markley points out, even the East India Company’s rivals, the Dutch East India Company, “operated at the end of lines of communication, supply, and commerce that stretched thousands of miles and, in practice, many months or years into the (or a hoped-for) future.”44



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These problems had been part and parcel of the proceedings of the East India Company from the beginning. Its official patent, granted in 1600, just nine years before the Entertainment was put on, sounded a note of epistemic ambition. It licensed “Trade of Merchandise, of, or to the EastIndies, beyond the seas, or any other the places aforesaid,” and by way of such “passages alreadie found out, or discovered, or which heereafter shall bee found out, and discovered.”45 And to read the voluminous accounts of East India trading missions published in Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625) is to realize just how much these English merchants came to know on their travels. Their descriptions are detailed and circumstantial. On the eleventh of April, 1609—that is to say, the very date of the first performance of the Entertainment—while Jonson and his audience were contemplating the perplexities of the Asian trade, William Keeling, an agent of the East India Company, was on the island of Banda in the South Moluccas bringing nutmeg aboard his ship and worrying about conniving Hollanders who had got there before him. “Note,” he advised, “that now the wind every morning, bloweth hard Easterly.”46 Alexander Sharpey, also an agent, was “Anchor[ed] in the Roade . . . against the Citie” of Aden. This city, he would later report, “is under the Dominion of the Great Turke, and is the Key of all Abrabia foelix.” He had handed on “Letters from the Kings Majestie of England to the Bashaw of Zenan.”47 And William Finch, also of the Company, was in Agra, having passed by Dolpore nine days earlier. “Within 2 c. of the Towne,” he wanted administrators back in London to understand, “you passe a faire River called Cambere, as broad as the Thames, short of which is a narrow passage, with hills on both sides, very dangerous. The Castle is strong, ditched round, and hath foure walls and gates one within an other, all very strong, with steep ascents to each, paved with stone; the Citie is inhabited most-what with Gentiles.”48 The knowledge that accumulated in the archives of the East India Company would enable its directors, they hoped, to conduct trade over long distances and despite long distances, every particular of geography, politics, wind and weather up to date and precise. But, for all that, what these accounts also show is that, while the agents of the East India Company were acute observers, these were often at a loss when it came to understanding the people with whom they had to deal, though not for want of trying. As Craig Muldrew points out, the problems of commercial trust were not confined to England alone. If trust was hard to maintain over short distances and became more difficult the more

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distance grew, English merchants who trafficked outside the kingdom had perhaps the hardest task of all: dealing with strangers. “[I]n overseas trade . . . connections were much harder to establish, and merchants often had to trust customers about whom they had little knowledge.”49 Merchant correspondence from the period is replete with anxious inquiries: Who does the agent abroad know? What is the “character” of these acquaintances? Have bargains been made? Adhered to? Again, this hesitant note was struck from the beginning. In 1600, the Company sent out its first fleet, commanded by James Lancaster. Some twenty two months into the voyage, with many suffering from scurvy, they made land at the “Baye of Antongill” in the Indian Ocean to barter for fruit. “[S]ome men . . . were appointed to be buyers,” but they could not bring the indigenes to “any reall trade,” they said later, “for all these people of the South, and East parts, are very subtill, and craftie, in their bartering, buying and selling, that unlesse you hold a neere hand with them, you shall hardly bring them to trade in any plain sort.”50 And that same year, in the same part of the world, Edmund Scot was discovering that the “Chineses” in Java were a “very crafty people in trading, using all kind of cousoning and deceipt which may possibly be devised.” It’s not, of course, that Scot is not curious about foreign ways; he is. He displays just the same desire to know that we see in other English factors. He wants to be told, for instance, about funeral customs among the Chinese. But, he reports in sulky tones that will be familiar to anyone who has been baffled by the doings of strangers, that “I have demaunded the meaning of it many times, but I could never have other answer, but that it was the fashion of China; and surely many such like things they doe, not knowing why, or wherefore, but onely that it hath beene a fashion amongst them.”51 They don’t know what they’re doing, you notice, not Scot. But I suspect that what Scot has come to realize (without quite realizing) is the extent of the “knowledge deficit” that English merchants like him must now labor to fill, and how frustrating this work is likely to be.52 Knowledge of map coordinates is one thing; knowledge of the intricacies of cultural and commercial practices that do not map onto your own is another. A going trade requires both, and while the factors of the East India Company tried hard to acquire both, they had mixed success. For our purposes, then, what is essential is this: the early modern merchants and investors assembled at the Burse to witness the first production of Jonson’s Entertainment (some, no doubt, associated with the Company)



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did not conduct their operations in a sphere of commerce that was even allegedly regulated, mechanistic, or transparent. Rather, they were subject to the vagaries of a fragmented, shifting trans-national “system” (if it can be called that) where knowledge was to be had, but could not be fully trusted. Information arrived from distant places along with imported goods, true, but this information was mediated, always, and quite often distorted. Their own understanding—or, just as likely, their misunderstanding—of what they learned could either frustrate or advance them in their trade, and they did not always know which office it might serve. The “incarnated signs” the Shop-Boy promotes, therefore, the exotic or semi-familiar “Purses, Pipes, rattles, Basons, Ewers, Cups, Cans, voyders,” were, for this audience, as much the emblems of an uncertain foreign trade as they were of a more easily ascertained domestic status. Their own demand, and that of their customers, was helping to call the Asian import trade into being. But the knowledge they had of the places from which such things came was “partial, contradictory, and differentiated,” and, as much to the point, they knew it.53 That this is so is suggested, moreover, by the Entertainment itself. Consider its treatment of China. Following the Shop-Boy comes another character, the “Master” of the establishment. “Peace Sirrah,” he chides, “Doe it more gently. What lack you nobilityes?” As he invites them to “take a neerer view” of the “excellencies” he has for sale, though, he also accompanies his spiel with a running disquisition on the difficulties of marketing those goods, and in this he does not make England sound like an emerging imperial or commercial power, but something closer to the last stop on a very long and tenuously articulated distribution network. “A few shelues, somewhat thin, and rarely furnished I confesse!” But, still, “all the Magazines of Europe” could afford no better. There are “other China howses about the towne,” to be sure, but what do they offer? “Trash,” or counterfeit goods. “Not a peece of Purslane about this towne, but is most false and adulterate, except what you see on this shelfe” (134).54 Of course, some of what Jonson is parodying here is a shopman’s sly attempts to disparage the wares of other merchants. He makes exaggerated claims the audience would have realized were specious (“Carpets wrought of Paraquitos feathers, vmbrellas made of the winge of the Indian Butterfly”! [136]). But, even so, this commentary is revealing. The English are in competition with the Dutch for Asian goods, and most of the audience is so little assured of the success of the trading ventures on which Cecil

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and his co-investors have embarked that they “thinke to haue” the same goods “cheape . . . at the next returne of the Hollanders fleete from the Indyes.” But “Warde the man of warre”—that is to say, the pirate—“hath taken theyr greatest Hulke,” the Master confides, and “it is thought they will come whom verye mvch dissolued” (136). So “Therfore as ye pleace my comodityes shall not beg to be sould” (136–37). The China man’s shelves are meager, but sheer scarcity, it appears, is not the crucial issue for the Master and his customers. Artifacts from China and other points east are to be had in London. It is more the implied contrasts between China and its competitors that trouble this masque. After enumerating some of his wares, this entrepreneur holds up a cat (one of the “China Cattes,” quite probably) and offers it as an “Embleme” with an “elegant morall”: “The play of your cat, is the death of your mouse.” “O your Chinese,” he expostulates suddenly and immediately after this, “The onely wise nation vnder the Sun” (135). “Sir Iohn Mandeuill” had been the first traveler to return to Europe bearing knowledge of the exotic realms to the east, he says, but what he took back had made the knowledge of his countrymen seem paltry; he “brought scyence from thence into our clymate” (136). The wisdom of the Chinese, the Master insists, far predates that of the English, since “They had the knowledge of all manner of Arts and letters, many thousand yeares, before any of these parts could speake” (135–36).55 According to his (parodic?) history, while Europe was still in a state of literal barbarism, the sapience of the Chinese was imported into it, contained in “Hieroglyphicks” (136) such as the “Embleme” he has just held up (the China Cat that “playeth with the mouse” [135]), and then “dispensd” throughout the region by such “Mysteryes.” Mandeville, as Jonson and his audience would certainly have known, was a fabricated figure. The Master’s choice of him as an authority, and the apparent gusto with which he cites him, “possibly suggests the fantastic nature of his knowledge,” as Knowles says.56 At the same time, what this audience does truly know or can know of China, and what the source of that knowledge might be, are just the questions the Master’s discourse raises. Compared to Chinese erudition, as he implies, the learning of the English is inevitably belated. It depends on dubious texts that announce that the Chinese both precede them and exceed them in discernment and long have done so. It’s hard not to miss the tacit sense of cultural impoverishment and inferiority that lingers about this per-



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formance, just as the slightly edgy implications of the predatory Chinese cat toying emblematically with mouse-like lesser “nations” can be felt even through the jocularity. In fact, Jonson seems to expect a response to his “Hieroglyphicks” that parallels the response literal Chinese characters were getting from Western readers in this same period. As David Porter says, “Chinese script presented a multivalenced cipher to the European imagination. Not only were the characters themselves unintelligible, the means by which they conveyed or embodied ideas remained a provocative mystery.”57 It is in its ability to resist deciphering that Jonson’s masque is most “Chinese.” As it happens, it is “Chinese” emblems such as this that the Master indicates, almost in passing, are essential to construing the lessons of the Entertainment itself. “[H]e that would study but the Allegory of a China shop,” we are assured, “might stand worthely to be the Rector of an Academy” (136). The meaning of this masque, just as we might expect, is “allegorical,” complex and multi-layered. But what stands for what here? The key to such a reading is not offered within the masque by such characters as the Key-Keeper. Instead, the knowledge by which we might read the allegory is displaced out of it in the direction of China. The larger significance of the Master’s China shop can be found emblematized in its merchandize, the goods his Shop-Boy hawks and the marvels he himself presents. But what those items appear to signify is not so much a stable meaning as an economic and cognitive imbalance that makes the very act of reading them an exercise in inadequacy, if not futility. Chinese knowledge was there first, and holding up a China cat to this audience only reminds them of what they already know: they are not in a position of epistemic privilege, any more than they are of financial superiority. Of course, Jonson’s allegory can be construed. These commodities, as Appadurai says, could and did imply a great deal to an early modern audience: status gradations, market conditions, the current state of England’s foreign trade, and so on. And equally, of course, it can not be construed. Porter says that English consumers who simply wanted to enjoy Chinese goods, but who “remained generally oblivious of the ambition . . . to ‘know’ China,” could allow themselves a “delicious surrender to the unremitting exoticism of total illegibility” that “Eastern signs” could provide.58 No doubt, this reveling in (in)significance was possible at the New Exchange too. The exegete in Jonson’s audience who did want to construe this “Allegory,” though, could hardly do so without entering into considerations of global demand that would inevitably undermine any sense of

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confidence in the meaning arrived at. On his way to that sinecure as the “Rector of an Academy,” the allegorist who applies himself to this masque is likely to find himself thinking hard about the powerful and disquieting influences emanating from the Far East. It’s no real surprise, then, that it appears Jonson neither took, nor expected his audience to take, an unqualified delight in a display of Chinese goods. If we listen closely, we can hear the Master’s discourse as one long farrago of sometimes self-subverting truth effects: insinuations, rumors passed on (and no doubt adjusted in transit), wildly implausible claims, and, as we have noted, a bemused meditation on the epistemic belatedness and economic insufficiency of the English. “[I]gnoraunce,” especially that of the city’s “multitude” (132), is just what he steps forth to dispel, but when this is “an inevitable part of a commercial system operating without clear, regular and up-to-date information,” it cannot be disavowed.59 As the Entertainment shows, it is intrinsic to the workings of that system. These workings are on display, in all their intricacy, as the Entertainment ends. Previously, the Master has asked his audience to consider a set of machines: optical glasses, each of them guaranteed, he claims, to yield detailed information, but only about London and its environs. This, he proclaims, is the “spectacle, an excellent payer of mvltiplying eyes, and wer made at Reqveste of an ould Patriarch of vsurers in towne here to see his mony come home in.” And here is a “perspectiue” by which you might stand “in Coven garden familiarely & decipher at Highgate the subtillest carrackt[s] yow cann make, as easily as heere.”60 And soon to come is a “promised . . . glass[e]” that can spot ships “20 leagues at sea” (137). But now, as the masque wraps up, he’s off for a wider world! “I ame goeing shortlye for Verginnia to discover the Insecta of that countrye . . . and so over land to China: to compare him for comoditie . . . perhapes I will call vpon prester Iohn by the waye. if ye will geue me xx for one at my Returne, tis yours, Ile make no piece with ye, any man shall valew it, Ile send it ye home” (140). As he leaves the local scene, something happens. Between London, where you can claim (at least in jest) to be able to “read . . . ye distinction of any mans Clothes ten nay twentye mile” (137) and the sphere that China occupies (along with the fabulous Prester John) there is a noticeable gap in commercial epistemology. A fantasy of fine-grained, upto-the minute knowledge of the city’s affairs shifts into an occulted realm of pure speculation. As the Master announces his itinerary, you can almost feel the shift between what Appadurai calls “levels” of knowledge. Places



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like the Burse, “where a smaller system interacts with a larger one,” he says, are often virtual workshops for fantasies about goods and their origins, and it is into such a self-recognized fantasy that the Master vanishes. He goes to China; he leaves the realm of the truly comprehensible. In the Entertainment, says its editor perceptively, “[w]e are shopping in wonderland,” and “wonder,” as we can see, is indeed a theme and burden of this masque.61 But its “wonder,” I would say, is elicited in response to a subtly represented economic/epistemic configuration: the still inchoate global market that was emerging for its audience, not as a transparent whole, but as what Appadurai describes as “an almost infinite series of small, overlapping circles of knowledge that can” (or cannot, as the case may be) “link original producer and terminal consumer.”62 Even the king here is turned into such a consumer. “Sir,” the Master tells him, “ye looke like a man that would geue good handsell.”63 “And madam let me haue a marte with ye too,” he cries to the queen, “ye looke like a good customer too.” Their royal presence underwrites but is also underwritten by trading relations that, as this audience understands very well, offer both risk and reward. “And god make me Rich,” implores the Master in the last line, “which is the sellers prayer ever was and wilbe” (140).

iii. “others i would not know, sir, but at a distance” One of the most offensive moments in Ben Jonson’s drama, according to Jonas Barish, occurs toward the end of Volpone (1606). Sir Politic WouldBe decides he will escape from Venetian officers sent to arrest him and so hides within an “engine” he has made, “a tortoise-shell, / Fitted, for these extremities.”64 “And to the disgust of three hundred years of literary critics,” says Barish, “he climbs into the ungainly object.”65 He is soon discovered, though not by the Venetians he expects, but by Peregrine, an English gentleman traveler and three merchants from his own kingdom. After prodding him forth, these compatriots humiliate him by imagining him on display “in Fleet street!,” “i’the terme,” “Or Smithfield, in the fair” (5.4.77–78). Sir Pol himself realizes that he will soon be “the fable of all feasts; / The freight of the gazetti; ship-boys’ tale; / And, which is worst, even talk for ordinaries.” He will “shun this place and clime forever,” he vows, “and think it well/To shrink my poor head, in my politic shell” (82–83, 87–89).

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From the start, we recall, his pretensions have been vast, even planetary in scale. When we first see him, he is assuring Peregrine that he is intimately familiar with affairs of state at home, and that those affairs are intimately connected to global conditions that give a wide significance to the meanest details of English daily life. He claims to know of a spy “out of the Low Countries” who “has received weekly intelligence . . . For all parts of the world, in cabbages;/And those dispensed again, t’ ambassadors,/In oranges, musk-melons, apricots, / Lemons, pome-citrons, and such-like.” He “Take[s] his advertisement . . . in a trencher of meat” and “Convey[s] an answer in a toothpick” (2.1.68–73, 77, 78, 80). Nor is he the only Jonsonian character who is lampooned, and mercilessly, for his pretentious belief that the world is one interconnected politico-economic sphere and that he can know it. In Bartholomew Fair (1614), Adam Overdo announces that he is “resolved therefore to . . . make mine own discoveries” among the merchants of the fair, setting himself up as a counterpart to “Columbus, Magellan, or our country man Drake of later times.”66 As one critic points out, the fair itself stands as a microcosm of global trade. It is replete with “Jews, Huguenots, ships, parrots, monkeys,” a black boy, and many another reference suggesting that “London was already permeated by the global.”67 But, as we have seen in the Entertainment, global trade in Jonson’s day, no matter how thriving it might be, could also be a troublesome business. Merchants went forth, and goods came back, and sometimes knowledge too, but it was not always the knowledge that was wanted or needed, and sometimes it was not recognizable as knowledge at all. This too, it seems, is reflected in Jonson’s oeuvre, along with a good deal of xenophobia and insularity, common enough in the period.68 In the Bartholomew Fair, but also throughout Jonson’s plays, exploration is more often than not the secret sharer of epistemic presumption. Overdo’s first investigations proceed from ignorance. “[W]hat can we know?,” he asks himself. “We hear with other men’s ears; we see with other men’s eyes . . . all our intelligence is idle, and most of our intelligencers, knaves.” And they end in failure. His ambition to “measure the length of puddings, take the gauge of black pots, and cans . . . and custards, with a stick; and their circumference, with a thread; weigh the loaves of bread” is ludicrous. At the fair, he is cozened and humbled. “Forget your other name of Overdo,” he is urged, and “invite us all to supper.”69 “There is a greater reverence had of things remote, or strange to us,” Jonson observes in his Discoveries, “than of much better,



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if they be nearer, and fall under our sense. . . . Yet a man may live as renowned at home, in his own country, or a private village, as in the whole world.”70 And so, go “home,” Overdo is urged, and “drown the memory of all enormity in your biggest bowl.”70 How can we explain these contraries in Jonson’s stance toward the larger world then opening up to English trade? Sometimes he asks for our wonderment at its newly arrived splendors, sometimes for our skepticism that it can or should be explored at all. So far, I have been urging the view that Jonson’s works often register, and with considerable sensitivity, prevailing beliefs about the global marketplace. On this view, Jonson’s skepticism about world trade—or rather, his positive conviction that this trade is often incomprehensible and unmanageable—is not as crotchety or misplaced as it can seem to us. Again, our intuitions are a product of a “utilitarian world in which a massive body of economic knowledge is used to operate systems which seek to reduce economic agency into predictable patterns of behavior in order to preserve stability and permit the trajectory of utilitarian economic growth.”72 But Jonson confronted both a different globe and a different globalization. If his works sometimes imply that foreign trade is a venture into an unknown world, one into which only a dullard could proceed with confidence, this was because, as we have seen, the world market sometimes operated in ways that put English merchants at a real disadvantage. Jonson was responding to world trade more or less as it was. The reason that he, like many of his contemporaries, is so very dubious about a knowable, predictable, and global commerce is that he is, in early modern terms, a rational economic actor. Jonson’s intuition that the big world is, to a discerning intellect, not always discernable, not always knowable, is correct. Perhaps, though, the relation of Jonson and his contemporaries to the larger world is more complicated yet. Perhaps he, together with his audiences, not only confronted a marketplace that was “doubly-opaque,” but at times chose not to confront it, or not directly. That the English of this period were well aware of the world beyond them is incontrovertible. But this awareness, I will conclude by suggesting, may well have been the result of epistemic negotiations in which knowledge and self-imposed ignorance were both at work. Again, let’s take the case of China. What were the “wiser sort” among the Jacobeans likely to know about the kingdom? And what does the portrayal of Sir Politic encourage them to acknowledge about it—or not, as

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the case may be? Before 1800, as we have noted, China was “the economic engine for the early modern world—the most populous, wealthiest, and among the most technologically sophisticated nations,” and many of the early modern English, and certainly the more literate among them, understood this very well.73 By 1609, when the Entertainment was put on, English readers had a wealth of translated accounts of China and the East Indies at their disposal.74 China remained for them an antique and distant place, but as Porter has shown, this lent it a prestige. In their minds, the Chinese were contrasted to the “primitive” peoples of the African continent or the Americas, and also the “legendary fallen empires of Egypt, Mexico, and Peru.” China “was acknowledged the seat of a great and ancient civilization whose cultural achievements not only reached back four thousand years but also continued to rival those of Europe into the current age.”75 By the middle of the seventeenth century, China had come to figure largely in European debates over the nature of language (was Chinese the ur-tongue spoken before the fall of Babel?), theology (why did Chinese chronicles seem to pre-date the Old Testament?), and economics (how could the vast Chinese markets be tapped for European exports?).76 From the other side of the world, the Chinese empire could seem ideal.77 European elites had long admired the stability of its government. Even Mandeville, whom Jonson held up with some skepticism in the Entertainment, had presented China as the domain of rigorous and unvarying law. First contacts between the European intelligentsia and Chinese scholars began around this time. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit, is only the best known of the Europeans who made their way to Beijing. He labored to promote crosscultural exchange, presenting the Chinese with a world map of his own devising and translating Chinese works for Europeans. In his more extensive writings, discovered after his death in 1610, he portrayed China as a well regulated domain, united under Confucianism, where “the daily administration . . . was in the hands of a professional bureaucracy. . . . [s]ocial life was regulated by complex laws of ritual and deportment,” and the “working classes knew their place.”78 Nor was this far off the mark. What Jonson intimates in the Entertainment—that the Chinese are a sapient people with an ancient history and a great store of received wisdom—was not only an early modern truism, it was largely true.79 Now, clearly, there was no way for Jonson or his audiences to evade this truth outright, and on the evidence of his works they did not. But there are other ways of dealing with uncomfortable realities. Jonson’s contempo-



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raries, we should keep in mind, had very good reasons to dissemble a little when it came to China. After all, what would have emerged had they confronted the facts of global trade head on? That they had very little power in it, that they were minor players set over against Asian behemoths that neither particularly needed nor wanted anything they had to sell, that Asian consumer markets dwarfed theirs. Here, it may have seemed, was a situation that called for a certain epistemic finesse. Sedgwick can give us a sense of how this might have worked. As I mentioned earlier, she says that sometimes the “epistemological economy” of a “culture” can depend “on a reserve force of information always maintained in readiness to be presumed upon—through jokey allusion, through the semiotic paraphernalia of ‘sophistication’—and yet poised also in equal readiness to be disappeared at any moment, leaving a suppositionally virginal surface.” What people know, she argues, does not always or only arise from the facts at their disposal. It can rather be that what they know (or claim to know) results from the particular concatenation of avowal and dissimulation that they have chosen for themselves. It is possible, says Sedgwick, to know but not to seem to, to disappear your awareness, perhaps inchoate to begin with, into an assumed incomprehension, to adopt, depending on the circumstances, one degree or another of “sophistication,” to eschew “information in fact possessed and exploited from the start,” to inhabit what she calls “knowingness.”80 And knowingness, I think, was just what poor Sir Politic Would-Be was meant to elicit. Not only does he imagine an intelligencer who collects messages “For all parts of the world,” but he imagines himself a citizen of that world. His first words on the stage are: Sir, to a wise man, all the world’s his soil. It is not Italy, nor France, nor Europe, That must bound me, if my fates call me forth.  (2.1.1–3)

As he elaborates his fantasy, he picks up on a facetious suggestion of Peregrine’s “That your baboons were spies; and that they were / A kind of subtle nation, near to China” to assure him that these monkeys are identical with “your Mamuluchi” (Mamelukes, Turks in origin and rulers of Egypt until 1517) and that they are deeply involved in the affairs of Europe. “Faith, they had/Their hand in a French plot or two; but they/Were so extremely given to women, as/They made discovery of all” (88–93). Sir Politic’s world, like the world of the Entertainment, is one in which a kingdom’s borders

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(and even species boundaries!) are porous and in which constant “flows” of knowledge and objects may be observed to move among “state[s]” (104), permeating and saturating the affairs of each. In such a world, Europe can in no way be sequestered from the “active torrent . . . / The currents, and the passages of things” (102–3), but is itself subject to a constellation of global influences, including, at times, the machinations of a “subtle nation, near to China.” Note too that Sir Politic takes it for granted that Asian markets are inextricably linked to his own. A state can do little to impede the “flows” of commerce in and out, nor does he imagine it should. His inane scheme to detect plague-ridden ships by ventilating onions, for instance, is meant to aid a Mediterranean entrepôt in facilitating traffic “from Sorìa” or “all the Levant” (4.1.103, 104). That he will offer his services to Venice as an Englishman does not change his globalizing view in the least. He can leap, so fast that we can hardly follow him, from the smallest of items (a “burst” “toothpick”) to “discourse/With a Dutch merchant, ’bout ragion’ del stato,” (139–41), so confident is he that these are all linked within a web of significance that he is especially well placed to comprehend. The food stuffs scattered throughout his speeches make this point as well. He mingles foreign produce (“oranges, musk-melons, apricots” [2.1.72]) on the same list with domestic (“Colchester oysters, and your Selsey-cockles” [74]). For him, such goods operate by a kind of “commodity fetishism” (in the classic Marxist sense), but in reverse. They do not occlude the far flung labors that have gone into their production, but point up their origins in a well populated, widely distributed economy. Yet, it is just the grandiosity of Sir Politic’s supposed knowledge, the very breadth of the world it intimates, that seems to render it suspect for Jonson and his audience. “It seemes, sir, you know all?,” Peregrine sardonically asks him. “Not all, sir” (2.1.99), Sir Politic replies. But where, as far as the audience is concerned, does his knowledge stop and start? Or better, where is it to be allowed to stop and start? Sir Politic bombastically proclaims a view of the world that corresponds to what everyone already knows or suspects: that English affairs are increasingly entangled with those of other kingdoms and regions, that domestic politics will inevitably have trans-nation­al repercussions, that the consumer items that are beginning to show up in English homes adumbrate a global network of trade routes. But over against Sir Politic’s facile knowledge Jonson sets his auditors’ finely calibrated knowingness. They can either accept his claims at some-



‘Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’ and ‘Volpone’

thing like face value or dial down their own credulity until those claims disappear into mere foolishness. For example, the audience knows, as this character does not, that “The fires at Berwick!” (36) do not betray a ghostly force on the Scottish border, and that the sight in London of six “porpoises . . . above the bridge . . . and a sturgeon” (40–41) does not presage any alteration in the domestic scene, just as they know that baboons have not been taking a hand in French politics. Or do they? Jonson took the first two examples from contemporary reportage, and presumably there were at least some in his audience who had once thought them plausible. So why not Machiavellian baboons? It’s hard to say what the joke was here, at least for the more sophisticated auditor. That the world really did work this way, and that political operatives “near to China” (albeit non-simian ones) may in fact be influencing European affairs? Or that such notions were ridiculous? Who would credit them? Only someone prepared to believe that “a whale discovered, in the river,/As high as Woolwich . . . ’Twas either sent from Spain, or the Archdukes!” (46–47, 50). The more knowing, perhaps, would have been able to entertain both views. Perhaps getting the joke that was Sir Politic would have meant tacitly acknowledging that China really was culturally, politically, and economically dominant. And perhaps it would have meant acknowledging that the world beyond England’s shores was indeed as interconnected as he insisted. But it would also have meant adopting a wised-up skepticism about that world, as the looming image of China disappeared behind a string of topical absurdities. Messages in toothpicks! The very idea! Here, maybe, a certain kind of power arose from having or pretending to have the “less broadly knowledgeable understanding.”81 We cannot know. Sir Politic is a fool who tells a well known truth. As a character, he personifies the ideas, plausible enough in themselves, that the trade-knit world is of a piece and that influences emanate from far flung places, including some in Asia. But every instance he advances of this interconnectedness is wrongheaded.82 Like other Jonsonian characters, he is half written without the response of a discerning audience, and for such an audience, it may be, he was funny because, in his presence, they could slip easily between recognition and derision. Characters such as Sir Politic will not tell us what Jonson himself thought and felt about the Asian markets opening before England’s merchant adventurers. But they can give us a sense of the attitudes the more

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knowing might have taken toward China, and of the ways Jonson solicited and manipulated those attitudes. Faced with Sir Politic, canny playgoers could sort out England’s relation to Asian kingdoms in a worldly fashion, acknowledging what everyone knew, disclaiming what no one wanted to know, giving the obvious but unsayable the wry affirmation of an ironic denial. Jonson (if we had to speculate) probably saw Sir Politic as a laughable caricature of a social type he often derided. But the global sensibility that this character implies was clearly not altogether absent from his own awareness, and Sir Politic would not have been as poignantly comic as he was if his onlookers had been altogether unwilling to see themselves in him. The exact mix of affinity, pity, and contempt that Sir Politic elicited would have been negotiated in performance and on the spot, an example of what Harry Berger calls the “transactional relations between and among sign users.”83 And whatever Jonson’s audience may have felt at the sight of Sir Politic scuttling across the stage in his tortoise shell, it was not, I think, simply “disgust” for a buffoon out of his element in a foreign clime. The epi­ stemic choices he requires of us may have been visible even in his final tortoise crawl. From one angle, this is a scene of crushing reduction: the erstwhile world traveler is forced to leave Italy, to return home to England, to become the butt of a round of jokes there. His folly will be rehearsed at length by roisterers and tapsters. His claim that he is a world citizen has been maliciously devastated. He is revealed to have been “absolutely blind to the world he moves in.”84 From another angle, though, Sir Politic may also serve as an emblem of the greater world that is so opaque to him. Jonathan Goldberg has suggested that the tortoise shell he carries may allude to the “archetypal pillar of the world.” Sir Politic thus “carries a world of meaning with him,” a moving world that signifies, perhaps, just the sort of global interconnectedness that he has proclaimed but has so signally failed to denote.85 To the end, Sir Politic presents Volpone’s first audience (as he presents us) with an emotional and intellectual riddle. We sympathize with him; we despise him. We recognize the tacit truth of his vision of the emerging world; we can find him utterly incapable of representing it aright.

chapter five

“Idleness is an appendix to nobility”: The Preface to Robert Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ Tell me Polititians, why is that fruitfull Palestina, noble Greece, AEgypt, Asia Minor, so much decaied, and (meere carcasses now) falne from that they were? The Ground is the same; but the government is altered, the people are growne slouthfull, idle, their good husbandry, policie, and industry is decaied. Non fatigata aut effoeta humus, as Columella well informs Sylvinus.1

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)

i. “i could not find a fitter taske to busie my selfe about” According to Robert Burton, his countrymen were as greedy as they were lazy. “Idlenesse,” he complains in The Anatomy of Melancholy, “is the malus Genius of our Nation” (1:76). “In most of our Citties, some few excepted,” he charges in “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” his preface to the volume, “wee live wholly by Tipling-Innes and Ale-Houses, Malting are their best ploughes, their greatest traficke to sell ale.” Other nations, he regrets to report, mock the indolence of the English. At the same time, they hasten to make them their customers. “Tush, Mare liberum [the sea is free],” but the Hollanders “fish under our noses, and sell it to us when they have done, at their owne prices.”2 “I am ashamed to heare this objected by strangers,” Burton confesses, “and know not how to answere it.” Foolishly, “[w]ee send our best commodities beyond the Seas, which they make good use of to their necessities, set themselves aworke about, and severally

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improve, sending the same to us backe at deare rates, or else make toyes and bables of the Tailes of them, which they sell to us againe, at as a great a reckoning as they bought the whole” (1:79–80). In consequence, the kingdom’s balance of trade is seriously out of kilter. England has “an open Sea for traficke, as well as the rest,” but its subjects, many of them, are too lethargic to prosper in an expanding, border-crossing economy, and Burton sees the pernicious effects of this lassitude everywhere. London “bears the face of a Citty, Epitome Britanniae, a famous Emporium,” but other burgs in his country are “in meane estate, ruinous most part, poore and full of beggers, by reason of their decaied Trades, neglected or bad policy, idlenesse of their Inhabitants, riot, which had rather begge or loyter, and be ready to starve, then worke” (1:80). Yet, in the midst of this poverty, there is sumptuousness, and far, far too much of it. Though idle, many of the English indulge themselves in “Fine cloathes.” They eat too much meat. They live in “curious buildings.” Their “riot in excesse, gluttony, and prodigalite, a meere vice, . . . brings in debt, want and beggery, . . . consumes their fortunes, and overthrowes the good temperature of their bodies.” Something does not fit here, however. All this newfangled consumption, says Burton, “came into this Island . . . not so many yeares since” (1:97, 98). As we have seen, in Burton’s time the English economy was in the midst of a demand-driven transformation, and he is right to notice that many people were living better and consuming more. The kingdom he depicts is sunk in poverty and decline, but housing starts were up, and household goods were moving briskly. For William Harrison, as we recall, this can be a good thing. “I do rejoice . . . to see how God hath blessed us with His good gifts,” he says, so that “we do yet find the means to obtain and achieve such furniture as heretofore hath been unpossible.”3 Burton seems inordinately hostile to such developments, yet, as he must know, they are operating to benefit him directly. His own corner of the market, the book trade, was booming. Print production surged during the early seventeenth century, and this increase was unhindered even by the troubles of the Civil War and the Interregnum of the mid century.4 Business was especially good in the genres to which a clergyman such as Burton could have been expected to contribute. “[T]here be so many Bookes in that kinde,” he assures us, “so many Commentators, Treatises, Pamphlets, Expositions, Sermons, that whole teemes of Oxen cannot draw them” (1:20).



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

Moreover, the demand for Burton’s Anatomy, his own idiosyncratic product, was particularly high. Burton sometimes slights his booksellers (“Any scurrile Pamphlet is welcome to our mercenary Stationers in English . . . But in Latin they will not deale” [1:16]), and he can be high handed with his readers (“I resolve, if you like not my writing, goe read something else” [1:14]). And he professes dismay at the profusion of books with which there is to contend. (“As already, wee shall have a vast Chaos and confusion of Bookes, we are oppressed with them, our eyes ake with reading, our fingers with turning” [1:11]). But he is shrewd about sales. The Anatomy went through five editions in Burton’s lifetime. He saw the sixth (1638) through the press before he died in 1640. Each of these texts he revised, often interpolating new material. “The 1628 edition was followed by a fourth edition (1632) containing a further 28,000 words, a fifth edition (1638) which added over 8,000 words, and a sixth . . . edition (1651) which included yet more words—2,200 more.”5 “At the first publishing” of the Anatomy, he reports in the 1651 edition, “The first, second, and third Edition were suddenly gone, egerly read” (1:15), and he has a pretty good idea why: “orexin habet Authoris celebritas” (an author’s reputation produces an appetite [for his works]) (1:14). In the early eighteenth century, memories still lingered of the commercial success that this massive volume once had been. “No book sold better,” wrote Thomas Hearne in his diary in 1734, “than Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, in which there is a great variety of learning. . . . It hath a great many Impressions,” so that “the bookseller” had “got an Estate by it.” 6 It’s true that by his time the Anatomy had become, as Jonathan Sawday points out, “virtually unreadable.”7 “’[T]is now disregarded,” Hearne goes on to say, “and a good fair perfect Copy (altho’ of the 7th impression) may be purchased for one shilling, well bound.”8 By 1833, Charles Lamb could ask his much quoted questions: “what hapless stationer could dream of Burton ever becoming popular?” “What need” could there be of “unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest fashion to modern censure?”9 But the closer we get to the living Burton, as yet unmuffled in the winding-sheets of later fashion, the more lively the sales of the Anatomy become, and the less hapless the stationers who dealt in it. Reservations about the state of the English economy, therefore, did not stop Burton from composing and recomposing the Anatomy, adding each time more prose for aching eyes to read, more pages for aching fingers to

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turn. How can we account for his curious industry, premised, as it seems to be, on an almost complete lack of trust in the reciprocal industry of the reading consumer? Why does Burton try so hard to shape his Anatomy to the demands of the burgeoning book trade and then disparage not only that trade, but the developing ethos of consumption that is shaping it? Did Burton not grasp that without the habits of buying that were currently energizing the marketplace—a “riot in profuse spending” (1:97), he calls them—his book was scarcely likely to have gone to six editions? Is he, like many Englishmen of his day, oblivious to the benefits of a demandled economy, despite his sustained involvement in the supply side of the equation? Does he really see nothing but “idlenesse” and “prodigality” in the market behavior of his contemporaries, his own customers? As a rule, Burton has little good to say about his fellow countrymen. “[B]egin then where you will, goe backward or forward, choose out of the whole packe, winke and choose, you shall finde them all alike” (1:66). Nor does his reader escape his condemnations. “Thou thy selfe,” as Burton famously says in the first paragraph of his book, “art the subject of my Discourse” (1:1). And therein, I think, lies the key. The reader who is the subject of Burton’s “Discourse” can also shape that “Discourse,” depending on how he reads it. We have seen a similar problem before, and a similar address to the reader, when we considered Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse. That author expected his reader to recognize himself in the overindulgent consumers who were excoriated in the text. Much of the dubious, somewhat shamefaced pleasure to be taken from his tract depends upon a reader who understands that it was he who is “Maister Diues, heere in London,” and that is on him that Nashe’s “pen meanes to dine withall.”10 Burton, though, demands another reader. He does in fact see most Englishmen as lazy, but he is not, I’d say, writing for them. The reader for whom he writes is one who is willing to unpack the Anatomy and take it for the invitation to work that it is. I will argue here, moreover, that by soliciting this reader, and by rewarding him for the exegetical labors that he undertakes, Burton is both appealing to and trying to bring into being a still incipient social category, or what in the period would have been called a “sort.” The “sort” implied in “Democritus Junior to the Reader” is not, I think, reducible to any one of the several described there, not to the dissolute aristocracy that it condemns, not to the downtrodden poor that it pities. The “sort” for which the Anatomy is meant is the one that is produced, by the reader, chivvied along by the author, out of the book’s demanding prose.



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

As several critics of the Anatomy have reminded us, what we take away from this treatise has less to do with its pronouncements than with the effort we put into trying to comprehend them. Burton, says Joan Webber, asks the reader to “endure with him the pains and gratifications of selfdiscovery rather than easily reading the conclusions abstracted from the experiment. In a sense, reading the book under these conditions becomes the same task that writing it was; Burton’s prose is singularly exhausting to read.”11 And this stress on exegetical labor persists whether or not critics agree that Burton’s final meaning can be reached. In his influential reading of “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” Stanley Fish argues that reading the ramifying sentences and paragraphs of the preface is, and is meant to be, a confusing and unpleasant experience. His detailed analyses of the Anatomy’s rhetoric show that the “mutual and interrelated confidence in the speaker, in the reader, in the tractability of the material they confront[,]” is “eroded and finally destroyed by the experience of the prose.” “To a great extent the preface (and finally the whole of the Anatomy) is a series of false promises which alternately discomfort the reader and lead him on.” Even here, though, the point is that proceeding in this text takes work. We “continue . . . to turn the pages in search of something that will never be found.”12 For Fish, thus, and for many other readers of Burton, consumption of the Anatomy is finally production: production of the meaning (or, Fish might say, the non-meaning) that the author has made it our responsibility to derive from his intricate, bewildering, and insinuating prose. This treatise is something other than a rigmarole of early modern fact and fancy, they claim, precisely because of “labour,” both that of author as he strives to “informe” our “understanding” (1:18), and ours, as we strive to make sense of him. And in this they are right. As Webber says, reading this book is hard work. And where were these hard working readers to be found in early seventeenth-century England? Among that still inchoate “sort,” I argue, whose changing habits of work and spending were slowly transforming the English economy, those of an “industrious disposition.” Keep in mind that in this period social categories were not givens. They emerged through ongoing negotiation among somewhat ill-defined groups, and even struggle among them. In part, the early modern English defined their belonging in one “sort” or another by what they bought, their clothes, utensils, food, and so on. All of that went to establish their social standing. But they also spent preemptively, buying to achieve a certain status before it could be appropriated by others. (This is called “defensive consumption”: “social

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comfort is . . . achieved” by “consuming goods to defend against the consequences of the consumption practices of others.”13) And they tried to restrict other people’s spending too. Sumptuary legislation, diatribes against lazy, playgoing apprentices, protests over the import of luxury goods, or of foreign goods instead of their domestic counterparts, were all efforts by one group of English consumers to block or redirect the acquisitive habits of another. Invariably, one’s own buying was good. Theirs was “luxurious.” “Luxury,” says one historian, “was the evil twin of consumption, the debased, debauched, and debilitating form . . . that effeminated and impoverished England.”14 Your own consumption came in the other form; it was well-earned and properly English. Conflict among social groupings in early modern England was not only “about” consumption, then, whose was legitimate, and so on. Often, it was consumption itself, and differing styles of consumption, that was bringing into definition the ins and outs of the groups in conflict. Burton’s preface to the Anatomy partakes of this tendency to displace the problems of kingdom-wide getting and spending onto the consumption of a particular “sort.” In the treatise, he paints the elite as the consumer class par excellence. If we look closely at his denunciations of “idlenesse,” many resolve into pointed criticisms of those he held most responsible. “For as the Princes are,” he states as a principle, “so are the people, Qualis Rex talis grex [‘As is the king, so is the herd’],” for it is “their examples [that] are soonest followed, vices entertained. If they be prophane, irreligious, lascivious, riotous, Epicures, factious, covetous, ambitious, illiterate, so will the Commons most part be, idle unthrifts, prone to lust, drunkards, and therefore poore and needy” (1:70). As a scholar himself, Burton has a low opinion of “rich men” in general. As “Aristotle observes . . . great wealth, and little wit goe commonly together: they have as much braines some of them, in their heades as in their heeles” (1:104). He cringes to see “wise men, learned men . . . attend upon” a “golden asse . . . with all submission, as an appendix to his riches, for that respect alone, because he hath more wealth and mony” (1:48).15 He also has much to say on the consequences of this misspent wealth for the greater commonwealth. Power, he is not the first to find, is inevitably corrupting. He fulminates against the proud and the wealthy, “Statesmen” who remain “secure at home, pampered with all delightes and pleasures, take their ease and follow their lustes.” Alongside these critiques he sets portrayals of those who suffer while their betters indulge themselves: the “poore soldiers [who] endure . . . wounds, hunger, thirst &c. . . . lamen-



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

table cares, tormentes, calamitys & oppressions” (1:41), the “poore sheepstealer . . . hanged for stealing of victuals, compelled peradventure by necessitie of that intollerable cold, hunger and thirst, to save himselfe from starving” while a “great man in office, may securely robbe whole Provinces . . . [and] inrich himselfe by spoiles of the Commons” (1:48). But for all such delinquencies Burton has a solution: work. “I see no reason,” he says, quoting More’s Utopia, “why an Epicure or idle drone, a rich glutton . . . should live at ease, and doe nothing . . . in all manner of pleasures, and oppresse others, when, as in the meane time, a poor laborer, a smith, a carpenter, an husbandman that hath spent his time in continuall labour . . . [shall] lead a miserable life” (1:93). In the early modern period, the Anatomy was renowned for its encyclopedism. The book contained such a “variety of learning,” Hearne later wrote in his diary, that “it hath been a common-place for filchers.”16 Readers, he believed, had been taking away only fragments of knowledge from the book, bits and pieces that they could use to polish up their conversation or lend their prose a borrowed weight. I suspect, though, that in its own day “Democritus Junior to the Reader” was meant for the non-elite, striving reader who did more than raid the Anatomy for the odd tag. As I will show, Burton’s preface pulls that reader in, where she is quickly put to work piecing together, sentence by sentence, passage by passage, section by section, a sense of the demand-led economy that is coming into being around her, that, indeed, her own work in other venues is helping to bring into being. In the “textual economy” of the Anatomy, choice is hard, but work is rewarded. It has a yield. For the exegete canny and dedicated enough to read much beyond the frontispiece, the preface to Burton’s Anatomy is an invitation to work, to eschew idleness for a labor that matches the author’s own. “I owe thee nothing, (Reader),” he boasts, “I looke for no favour at thy hands, I am independent, I feare not” (1:112). But earlier he has told us: “I . . . labour wholly to informe my Readers understanding. . . . I shall lead thee . . . through [a] variety of objects, that which thou shalt like and surely dislike” (1:18).

ii. “i will descend to particulars” “I have overshot my selfe, I have spoken foolishly, rashly, unadvisedly, absurdly, I have anatomized mine own folly. And now me thinkes upon a sudden I am awaked as it were out of a dreame, I have had a raving fit,

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a phantasticall fit . . . and now being recovered . . . [perceive] my errour” (1:112). It could be objected that the Anatomy is, after all, not an ordered exposition. It is an extended and rambling address to its reader, and it goes about getting her “gratious acceptance” (1:113) by means of a copia of invective and abuse, sly insinuation, hyperbole, heartfelt lamentation, selfmockery, classical citation, “Politicall and Oeconomicall” (1:97) analyses, topical jokes, disclaimers, trans-historical comparisons, global geography lessons, theatrical role playing (“you must consider what it is to speake in ones owne or anothers person, an assumed habit and name” [1:110]), and outright self-contradiction. On this view, Burton’s advocacy for an industrious “sort” would not amount to much, really. Truly recognizing England’s demand-led economy for what it was, and militating for those doing the leading, would involve more than holding forth against upper crust dissipation. It would also mean rethinking consumption, and perhaps even acknowledging, as so few could do in this period, that indulgence could be of benefit economically. Burton seems reluctant to say this, even when the consumers in question are the deserving strivers he wants to uplift. And it’s true: often his purposes seem split, refracted among various permissive and punitive impulses. When, for instance, he sets aside a weekly time for the laboring poor to sing and dance (essentially what we know as the “weekend”), he cannot help but add “though not all at once.” Is he for such celebrations or against them? Excessive gratification of any kind by anyone seems to make him nervous. Although most of his strictures are aimed at the rich wastrel, some target the fellow at the bottom of the social ladder who shuns work or who simply enjoys a good time too much or too often. “I will suffer no Beggers, Rogues, Vagabonds, or idle persons at all, that cannot give an accompt of their lives how they maintaine themselves” (1:93). A liberal proposal to let the working man recreate himself “as well as his master” turns, with almost shocking speed and no discernible transition into a litany of hard penalties for indulgence: “If any be drunke, he shal drinke no more wine or strong drinke in a twelvemonth after. A banckrupt shall be Catamidiatus in Amphitheatro [to be flogged in the public theatre], publikely shamed, and he that cannot pay his debts, if by riot or negligence he have beene impoverished, shall be for a twelvemonth imprisoned, if in that space his Creditors be not satisfied, he shall be hanged.” In three sentences, we have gone from a rude mechanical at play to a swinging corpse on a scaffold.



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

It gets worse. In the next sentence, the man who commits sacrilege loses “his hands,” while the perjurer has “his tongue cut out” (1:94). And who’s to say that the “artificer” who sings and dances during his days off is not the same man who gets drunk, bankrupts himself, and ends up on the gallows? Burton’s prose seems to suggest that the first indulgence leads almost inevitably to this denouement. But then why allow this man to run these risks to begin with? Why give him a time, however “set,” in which he might lose himself in “riot” and “idlenesse”? What is Burton trying to say about the dangers of consumption? If the Anatomy were nothing more than a farrago of self-subverting rhetoric effects (as Fish would have it), then it would still be one of the most delightful works of the seventeenth century—a tour de force of opinionated learning in which, as it happens, certain economic observations are made, almost in passing, and without much coherence. But I do not think that is all it is, at least not for the exegete who is paying attention. This reader will come across some pointed instructions. “Proceed now a partibus ad totum,” says Burton, “or from the whole to parts, and you shall finde no other issue [than the madness of the world], the parts shall be sufficiently dilated in this following Preface. The whole must needs followe by a Sorites or induction” (1:65). What he will offer us, Burton is attesting, will be mostly specifics. As he says soon after this, somewhat wearily: “according to my promise, I will descend to particulars” (1:66). And, for the most part, he stays among them throughout the preface. But we have been alerted to another, ongoing level of argumentation, the one that ascends above the particulars to the “whole,” and to which we must rise by “induction.” The “Sorites” Burton mentions is a species of argument, the predicate of each premise forming the subject of the next, but, crucially, it is an incomplete form of argument. You “followe” a sorites by filling in the missing steps. It demands an active participant. What the more perceptive reader of the preface will do, then, the reader that Burton himself calls for, is not to trail him into the welter of “particulars” with which he litters his text, but to trace the argument that he leaves out, the one that moves from parts to the whole and that allows this reader to sort out his claims into something like an overall order. Burton has explicit economic arguments to make in his preface. They have to be read as a seventeenth-century reader might have read them, though, bemused by the author’s ornate rhetoric, perhaps, but prepared to grasp the implications of what she reads. Moreover, the arguments to which the reader has to attend are compli-

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cated, but they are not just complicated. These are the complications of a specific moment in the stutter-step history of English consumption. To get a sense of these, Jan de Vries’ arguments can again be helpful, as long as we are willing to reframe them. Taking his cue from the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, he suggests that in the “[p]re-commercial societies” of Europe luxury “was generally a prerogative of the privileged classes of rulers, warriors, churchmen and landowners” and that it found its home especially in royal courts. Elite consumers supported the craftsmen and artisans who provided them with “non-quotidian goods and services,” but they also took these as their due. Luxury bespoke their superior status and their right to appropriate “surplus resources.” It was well known, of course, that too much upscale consumption could lead to debauchery and social decline, and so “luxury was universally understood to be fraught with moral danger.” This de Vries calls the “Old Luxury.” With the emergence of “a far more complex society, with large commercialized and urbanised sectors . . . in western Europe,” luxury underwent a re-definition. Or rather, it lost some of its specificity as a marker of privilege and became more diffusely available. What de Vries calls the “New Luxury” was more “heterogeneous” and was more about “comfort and enjoyment” than rigid status distinctions. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, city dwellers in Europe learned to use their possessions to “communicate cultural meaning, permitting reciprocal relations” among them. “[T]heir aggregate consumption supported larger groups of producers.” These, in turn, “came to form significant industries.”17 A selfenhancing cycle of supply and demand slowly established itself, akin to what de Vries elsewhere calls the “industrious revolution.” And, as elsewhere, de Vries’ analysis of early modern markets extends to the signals that were being sent out. The difference between the “Old” and “New Luxury” was a matter of consumption style as much as anything else. Each mode of consumption had implications for social class. The “Old” presented a “coherent . . . hegemonic cultural message” announcing the supremacy of the consumers-in-chief. With the ascendance of the “New,” the signaling apparatus passed into other hands. Changing work habits fueled new spending, and this spending implied a new “kind of sociability.” Those of an “industrious disposition” knew one another by their works, and by their play too. The message their getting and spending sent out was more diffuse, but it heralded a society divided up along something other than the usual class lines.



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

Here too, we have reasons to be cautious before we transpose this typology onto “Democritus Junior to the Reader.” For one thing, de Vries places the development of a fully articulated “New Luxury” after our period. This begins, he says, “in the late seventeenth century.”18 For another, the distinction between the “Old” and the “New Luxury,” as de Vries himself points out, is “crude,” a “rhetorical device” that he took up from a later phase of the luxury debate to make some points about early modern Dutch society.19 For still another, it isn’t clear what happens when we relocate this distinction across the North Sea from the Netherlands to England. As we have seen, however, it’s when we press hard on the problems that de Vries raises that we get a less “crude” sense of the situation. The “New Luxury” may have been “adequately theorized” only in the latter part of the seventeenth century, but what of its prototypical forms, the ones that pre-exist “theorization”?20 Taken up by another historian, de Vries’ “highly differentiated categories” become something more nuanced. These categories are “difficult to overlay on seventeenth-century English practice,” Linda Levy Peck has said recently, in part because the consumer practice they speak to is Dutch. But English consumers in the period, she argues, were more open to acquisition from abroad than the Hollanders that de Vries­ describes. In England, they “borrowed manners, mentalities, artifacts, products, skills, and trade from abroad throughout the seventeenth century and, as a result . . . reconfigured earlier patterns of trade.” Peck, that is, links the uneven development of newer habits of consumption in early modern England to the willingness of some among the English, though not all, to try out “alien” commodities and the consumption habits that went with them. This more promiscuous indulgence had consequences that were specific to the English kingdom: it broke up the “Old” regime of luxury without altogether allowing for the definitive emergence of a “New.” She proposes a less “simple” history of English consumption, one characterized by the “overlapping . . . of old luxuries and old consumers, old luxuries and new consumers, new luxuries and old consumers, new luxuries and new consumers.” Now, as it happens, this is just what we do see in the preface to the Anatomy. Indeed, de Vries’ arguments, as elaborated by Peck, might almost predict such a text. Not only do the Dutch, the exemplars of “New Luxury” in Burton’s world, feature largely in the Anatomy, but the openness of the English to foreign markets and commercial practices is just what Burton recognizes and hopes to encourage. It is because Burton’s views are not

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always reducible to either term of the “binary division” of “Old” and “New Luxury” that they answer so well to the more variegated history that Peck proposes, and that they signal a gradual shift from the one to the other in the English kingdom.21 Take, for instance, the way in which Burton intimates the solution to the problems that vex his native kingdom. He does not do this by addressing them directly, but by an implied comparison to economic actors across the seas. Burton believed, as we have seen, that one reason for England’s slump was the inequality of its foreign trade. The kingdom exports only raw materials or crude, unfinished goods; it then imports the refurbished trinkets that clever foreigners have transformed that stuff into. Explicitly, he declares that many of the English are simply too lazy to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by global commerce. Implicitly, he has another analysis to offer: the English lack what today we would call “infrastructure.” Burton finds it an “Eye-sore,” for example, that England “want[s] conduct and navigable Rivers” (1:82). These are for the “most part neglected” (1:83), even though in former times repairs were kept up. “[G]ood ships have formerly come to Exeter, & many such places, whose Channels, Havens, Ports are now barred & rejected” (1:84). While Burton may have had current English projects in mind with these comments, the immediate comparison is both patent and inexplicit: England is not the Netherlands.22 During the years that saw the publication of the Anatomy, Dutch municipalities, united by a desire for faster and more convenient trade and passenger transport, began constructing a system of canals, trekvaarten, that ran among them. As de Vries observes, the development of this network was crucial to the surging economic success that the Dutch enjoyed in this period. The commercial space that they laid out, criss-crossed by a “well-designed, highly-connected network” of transport and open to foreign trade, also created a “‘time frame’ . . . which, by its stability, permitted the development of ‘modern’ notions of time, distance, and the role of these two concepts in economic life.” Among the factors that put the early modern Dutch in a capitalist frame of mind, that is to say, was the canal system that they built for themselves. It shaped not only their productivity and overall wealth, but the ways in which they experienced and organized their work. Time became money, and “foreign observers frequently marvelled at the fact that the barges actually observed their published schedules.”23



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

From England, though, Burton says only that “Admirable cost and charge is bestowed in the Low-Countries on this behalfe” (1:82) and grumbles about the lack of similar initiatives in his own kingdom. The dearth of inland waterways leaves England inert at the center. Commerce is attracted to the few port cities, while, because “We contemne this benefit of carriage by waters, [we] are therefore compelled in the inner parts of this Iland, because portage is so deare, to eat up our commodities our selves, and live like so many Boares in a sty, for want of vent and utterance” (1:84). Pig-like English consumption, as usual, is condemned by Burton. But he also demonstrates that this indulgence is a direct effect of a dilapidated transport system. If his fellow citizens could gain entry to the larger, more dynamic arena of inter-kingdom commerce, perhaps they could stop gorging themselves on their own homemade commodities and sell them abroad. They could do without the tricked up junk that their trading partners dump on them. But, without waterways, they can’t. Still, Burton hasn’t given up hope on all of his readers. The relation between infrastructure and ideology is manifest in the Dutch canals Burton so admires, and some of his readers, he seems to think, will grasp it. What Burton wants is a less insular, more aggressive approach to marketing English goods on the world market. In making this appeal, he relies on just that quality that Peck says distinguished some among his English readers: a willingness to take on the consumption traits of others. Be like the Dutch, Burton insinuates, or at least think like them. Then you will be the “sort” of buyers and sellers who are truly fit for participation in world trade. Implicitly, then, Burton is offering his industrious readers a template for their industry. Compared to the Low Countries, with “their . . . excellency in all manner of trades” (1:76), England looks, and is, poor indeed. Work, not the antiquated luxury and indolence of the aristocracy, will produce the goods that the English can sell to foreigners, thus breaking their own addiction to imports. And who exemplifies this “industry”? Who but the Dutch? “[T]heir chiefest Lodestone, which drawes all manner of commerce & merchandize, which maintaines their present estate, is . . . industry that enricheth them, the gold mines of Peru, or Nova Hispania may not compare with them” (1:77). “Yea, and if some traveller,” Burton wishes, “should see . . . those rich united Provinces of Holland, Zeland, &c. over against us; those neat Cities and populous Townes, full of most industrious Artificiers . . . so many navigable channels from place to place, made by mens hands, &c. and on the other side so many thousand acres of our Fens lye drowned,

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our Cities thin, and those vile, poore, and ugly to behold in respect of theirs, our trades decayed, our still running rivers stopped, and that beneficiall use of transportation, wholly neglected, so many Havens void of Ships and Townes . . . I thinke sure hee would finde some fault” (1:74–75). Today, economists sometimes talk of the “resource curse”: countries with plentiful natural resources will often grow more slowly than those without. For Burton, resources are a blessing (combined with the willingness, in the case of the Spanish, to seek out and ruthlessly exploit them), but they are not what a kingdom needs for its prosperity. It is to the “united Provinces” that the English must look. They “have neither gold nor silver of their owne . . . little or no Wood, Tinne, Lead, Iron, Silke, Wooll, any stuffe almost, or Mettle.” And yet they flourish, “all by reason of their industry.” The Netherlands appears both splendid and distant. “’Tis our Indies, an Epitome of China” (1:77). Holland is what England could be if its people could overcome their sloth and if their diligence was met with sound government policy. Then, they too could have the canals, the ports, and the thriving foreign trade that goes with them. The Dutch have made the English into their customers, but it could be the other way around. This too Burton expects his readers to understand. If the Dutch have to rely on their system of canals to retool their minds for seventeenth-century commerce, though, Burton seems to think that the English will have to rely on his Anatomy to do that office. This becomes especially clear in the part of “Democritus Junior to the Reader” that features the author’s most explicit economic proposals. “J. Max Patrick has complained,” notes Fish in his agile reading of the preface, “that some readers seem not to have noticed that there was a Utopia” in the Anatomy. “The explanation is simply that there isn’t one, at least not one sustained enough to allow it to stand out.”24 Well, there is one. It is to be found between pages ninety-seven and one hundred and seven in the edition of the Anatomy that Fish used.25 Its description is both sustained and coherent, and it includes a severe critique of economic injustice in England. This places it in a genre that stretches back (at least) to Thomas More’s Utopia, from which, of course, Burton borrows the name of his ideal polity.26 “I will yet to satisfie & please my selfe, make an Utopia of mine owne,” he declares, “a new Atlantis, a poeticall commonwealth of mine owne.” Burton conjures up his Utopia at a site “whose latitude shall be 45 degrees” but whose “longitude for some reasons I will conceale,” a well regulated principality of some “12. or 13. Provinces.” The kingdom he envisions



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

is open to the flow of commerce, but its economy is highly structured—by him! “I will freely domineere, build Citties, make Lawes, Statutes, as I list my selfe. And why may I not?” (1:85). He will have his Utopian cities for “most part . . . situate upon navigable rivers or lakes,” and he will concentrate the shipping and sale of goods mostly in them: “no market townes, markets or faires, for they doe but beggar Cities . . . except those Emporiums which are by the Sea side.” This was because, as we’ve seen, he was impressed with the commercial vitality of London, and he wanted his Utopians to have the equivalent of “Antwerpe, Venice, Bergen of old” (1:86). The fruits of Utopian trade will be dispersed, since there will be “opportune market places of all sorts” (1:87), and, though many live frugally, there will be enough luxury goods to tax. His imaginary country is open to the globe. “[D]iscreet men” go out every year to conduct commercial espionage in “all neighbour Kingdomes,” and “certaine ships [are] sent out for new discoveries” (1:90). All this seems plausible enough. As he puts forth his Utopia, however, Burton has another target in view as well: the invidious social distinctions that accompany the “Old Luxury” in his native kingdom. His first concern, notably, is to avoid extremes of wealth and poverty. He wants a kingdom that somewhat resembles England, whose “forme of government shall be Monarchicall” (1:90) and which will remain hierarchical. Since “Utopian parity is a kinde of government, to be wished for, rather then effected. . . . I will have severall orders, degrees of nobilitie, and those hereditary” (1:89). He finds “Platoes community in many things” to be “impious, absurd and ridiculous,” and especially in its tendency to “take . . . away all splendor and magnificence.” And so, in his own imagined community Burton wants to preserve the marks, if not the substance of nobility. In early modern England, sumptuary laws were one way of enforcing such distinctions, and, though they were mostly ineffectual, Burton supports them. “The same attire shall bee kept” in his commonwealth, “and that proper to severall callings, by which they shall be distinguished” (1:95). The reader Burton has in mind, though, seems able to maneuver around such pronouncements. She appears to be more interested in upward mobility than in stable hierarchy. “Splendor and magnificence” have their place, certainly. The point is now to spread them around some. Though Burton’s Utopia features a nobility, Utopians with money will be able to buy their way into it. “I will have such a proportion of ground belonging to every Barony, he that buyes the land, shall buy the Barony” (1:89). Burton up-

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holds aristocratic privilege, but the effect of his proposals is to supplant it with earned wealth. His nobles have “ancient demeanes” and hereditary “patrimonies,” but anyone with cash can find himself a place among them, and some can even be elected, for “I hate these severe, unnaturall, harsh, Germane, French, and Venetian Decrees, which exclude Plebians from honours, be they never so wise, rich, vertuous, valiant, and well qualified.” And those aristos who waste their money will soon lose their credentials. “[H]e that by riot consumes his patrimony, and ancient demeanes, shall forfait his honours” (1:89). Indeed, the nobility that Burton describes resembles nothing so much as the English nobility of his own time, which was increasingly fluid in membership and permeated by commercial wealth. Burton is also, it will not surprise us, an enthusiastic proponent of what we now call “sin taxes.” “Of such wares as are transported or brought in, if they be necessary, commodious, & such as neerely concerne mans life, as corne, wood, cole, &c. and such provision we cannot want, I will have little or no custome paid, no taxes; but for such things as are for pleasure, delight, or ornament, as Wine, Spice, Tobacco, Silke, Velvet, Cloth-of-gold, Lace, Jewels, &c. a greater impost” (1:90). There are to be “no private Monopolies, to enrich one man, and begger a multitude” (1:96), for example, and he is hard on ostentatious wealth. “Luxus funerum [extravagance of funerals] shall be taken away, that intempestive expence moderated, and many others” (1:95). By the same token, when it comes to land, he mandates large but uniform estates, not in order to confirm ancient tenure, but because it is in the general interest. You can be observe, he says, that “the richest Countries are still enclosed, as Essex, Kent, with us.” Nor should these estates be barren of tenants and yet replete with sheep, as some were thought to be in his time. Instead, Utopian holdings are “all inclosed,” but “yet not depopulated, and therefore take heed you mistake mee not” (1:88). In his hypothetical commonwealth, rural tenants will have “long leases, a knowne rent, and knowne fine, to free them from those intolerable exactions of tyrannizing Landlords” (1:89). For urban dwellers, he is just as solicitous. Each “Metropolis” (1:86) will have “convenient Churches,” “Commodious Courts of Justice,” “Hospitalls of all kindes,” “publike schooles” (1:87), well regulated trade guilds, and a set calendar of “recreations and Holydaies . . . feasts and merry meetings, even to the meanest artificer, or basest servant, once a weeke to sing or dance . . . or doe whatsoever he shall please” (1:93–94). “(O)pportune mar-



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

ket places of all sorts, for corne, meat, cattle, fuell, fish, &c.” (1:87) will be provided, but businesses whose trades are dangerous or environmentally unfriendly, “noysome, or fulsome for bad smells” (1:90), will be set apart. And all this infrastructure will be, if not owned by the public (who does own it isn’t clear), then at least accessible to it. The average Utopian, Burton insists, will not have to rely on the charity of “gowty benefactors, who, when by fraud and rapine they have extorted all their lives, oppressed whole Provinces, societies, &c. give something to pious uses, build a satisfactory Almes-house, Schoole, or bridge, &c. at their last end” (1:87). This author may not be able to imagine doing away with the existing aristocracy, but he does not want it to domineer in his ideal polity either. All in all, what Burton seems to want, and what the reader he anticipates seems to want, is for the slow transmutation of “Old” into “New” luxury to continue, but not so much or so fast that mere market chaos is induced. Better far is a controlled transition in which the elite keep their titles, but economic clout passes to the plebian customers who make up, for the most part, the market for the Anatomy. If he seems to prefer hierarchy, it is mostly because it is conducive to general order. Economic life in his Utopia is organized so that, even if the noble and the rich remain, their depredations are strictly limited, and space is left open (quite literally) for honest commerce and the newer sort of luxury that it promotes. Moreover, Burton’s stated views on Utopian hierarchy are only part, it develops, of a larger, indirect argument he is conducting. The insouciance with which he sketches out his ideal polity (which Fish mocks: “[r]ivers flow exactly where they are needed”) conceals another polemical point he wants to make.27 During the decades when Burton was writing and rewriting his Anatomy, a cadre of economic writers was also airing their views: Edward Misselden, John Wheeler, Thomas Mun, Gerard de Malynes, and others. Today, these are the market theorists we are most likely to read, in part because, as David Hawkes remarks, we consider them the precursors of the “science” of economics.28 Burton, arguably, deserves a place among them. He was interested in economics both theoretically and practically. He served as Clerk of the Market at Oxford for three years, an experience, it has been suggested, that is reflected in the specific proposals he makes in his preface.29 His personal library, which numbered at least 1700 volumes, included John Wheeler’s A treatise of commerce (1601), Dudley Digges’ The defence of trade (1615), Thomas Mun’s A discourse of trade (1621), and Edward Misselden’s Free Trade (1622), and other works in that vein.30 His policy

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proposals in “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” in the opinion of one editor, reveal him to be a “sound political economist.”31 More to the point, though, is that Burton not only owned these volumes, but read them as well, avidly.32 We know this because he sometime wrote in them. In one such book, The Petition and Remonstrance of the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading to the East Indies (1628), “he marked the mercantilist argument which stresses ‘making our commodities which are exported to overbalance in value the foreign wares which we consume.’”33 Though now we usually lump together all the writers in Burton’s library and call them “mercantilists,” in fact the lines he marked represent a particular variant of that thought. “Mercantilist,” as a term, has been much abused. As David Kutcha explains, all these market theorists “shared the assumption that the state should regulate trade.”34 But some of them (Wheeler, for instance) could best be described as “court capitalists.” Writing early in the seventeenth century, they aligned themselves with merchants in the import business, merchants who were in turn aligned with the crown and the aristocracy. Often, such theorists promoted conspicuous consumption, at least for their own clients. A splendid court, they claimed, was the sinecure of the realm and the mainstay of peace within it. Given their alliances, they had every incentive to hold that spending on finery and luxuries was a stay to “rightful and manly honor.”35 “Obiecters” to the import trade, scoffed Thomas Mun in 1621, “might aswell deny vs the vse of Sugars, Wynes, Oyles, Raysons, Figgs, Prunes, and Currandes; and with farre more reason exclaime against Tobacco, Cloth of gold and Siluer, Lawnes, Cambricks, Gold and Siluer lace, Veluets, Sattens, Taffaeties and diuers others manifactures, yearely brought into this Realme . . . all which as it is most true, that whilest we consume them, they likewise deuore our wealth; yet neuerthelesse, the moderate vse of all these wares hath euer suted well with the riches and Maiestie of this Kingdome.”36 Over the years that Burton was shepherding the Anatomy into print, however, other writers, equally “mercantilist,” began to promote another understanding. Usually, they allied themselves with homegrown businesses, with the cloth industry, for example, and they regarded foreign goods as a threat to their profits. Consequently, they “tried to refocus economic theory and policy . . . toward the promotion of export production and the restriction of import consumption.”37 While upholding virile home industries, they urged the larger public to avoid corrupt foreign manufac-



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

tures and imported wares. English people working hard to buy English goods and only English goods. That’s what these commercial lobbyists wanted. In point of fact, then, neither coalition of “mercantilists” had much to offer in the way of sound economic theory. Those who lined up with the importers were deeply invested in the corporations they promoted. (Mun, for instance, was a director of the East India Company.) Those who lined up with the domestic industries were motivated mostly by a hostility to their corporate rivals. And which is Burton’s position in this internecine debate? His own proposals have been described as “largely mercantilist,” but what he does is subtler than reading off a fixed program, since in fact there was no fixed program, but a roiling debate.38 As “mercantilists” split into two deeply self-interested camps, Burton leans toward, without promoting, the one most in line with his readers’ interests. The merchant crony who advocated for “‘conspicuous consumption’ in the most literal sense of the phrase: consumption that . . . make[s] the social order conspicuous,” would have found his views everywhere refuted in the Anatomy.39 Burton will have nothing to do with “riot in excesse, gluttony, prodigality, a meere vice” which brings on “hereditary diseases.” Those among the rich foolish enough to indulge themselves “consume . . . their fortunes, and overthrowe . . . the good temperature of their bodies” (1:98). He will have no truck with the claim that displays of greed imply the proper workings of hierarchy. He is deeply and articulately hostile to an oligarchy that has made its own exorbitant spending the index of the kingdom’s economic well being. Mere splurging by the nobility is not going to help the poor, as many courtly apologists claimed (the “trickle-down theory” of the day). Burton understands this, and he expects his reader to understand it too. The “mercantilist” of the second sort who perused the Anatomy, however, might have found much there to his liking, but not much that was presented straightforwardly. On imports, Burton has little to say, except to dismiss much of what comes into the kingdom as junk, “toyes and bables” (1:79). But, really, Burton is neutral. Nowhere does he refer to the views of either court or corporate capitalists.40 Nowhere does he mention the deeply held financial investments behind these deeply held beliefs. He excoriates the arrogant lord or the dissolute drone, but the economic theory that underwrites their extravagance gets a pass. If he mentions England’s domestic industries, it is only to wish that they could be better managed and regulated.

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What Burton does offer his readers instead is a way of looking at the world and a way of reading that renders both brands of crony capitalism parochial and inadequate. The geographic, even interplanetary reach of Burton’s Anatomy has often been noticed.41 “I never travelled but in Mappe or Card,” he tells us, “in which mine unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated” (1:4). But Burton’s invocations of other places have a point: they force the reader out of an insular frame of mind and into one in which her kingdom appears in its interrelatedness to the larger world, and especially the larger world market. Burton is the very opposite of what he has been described as, “a little-Englander, a protectionist.”42 He is outward looking, not so much interested in keeping world trade out of his kingdom as in opening it up, as long as England can dominate. And, in a world in which Holland can be China, and England might be Holland, what matters is the ability to “followe” the “Sorites” and to see connections between the parts and the whole that make up the global marketplace. “Tell me Polititians,” he says in the passage quoted at the head of this chapter, “why is that fruitfull Palestina, noble Greece, AEgypt, Asia Minor, so much decaied, and (mere carcasses now) falne from that they were? The Ground is the same; but . . . the people are grown slouthfull, idle, their good husbandry, policie, and industry is decaied” (1:77). The lines both diagnose the problem and, tacitly, offer the cure. The reader who can trace the consequences of lethargy from Greece to the Ottoman Empire and back to little England is the reader who is most likely to value commercial contact with that world, the reader whose labor will help drive her kingdom’s trade out into it. This, then, is Burton the economist of the “New Luxury.” In his sometimes harsh, sometimes bemused admonishments to his countrymen, Burton praises foreign competitors and castigates the inefficiencies of English markets. Though the world market seems vast and ill defined, he shows it to be made up of discrete places that can be described and usefully compared to his own kingdom. Though England’s economy is now wasteful, locked in, and burdened at the top by a cabal of overbearing plutocrats, another sort of market, and another sort of luxury, he intimates, is possible, if only his readers will realize it. The English might, after all, turn around and start buying and selling their “best commodities beyond the Seas” (1:79), and they should. The constant possibility of change is implied in every exasperated dig at English sloth, indulgence, and ostentation. What Democritus Junior seems to want, Utopian as it may seem, is an



The Preface to Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’

economy that works to the benefit of all and that countenances the getting, spending, and consuming of all, not just some. Like More’s Utopia, Burton’s is not, or not only, some site elsewhere, “it may be in Terra Australis Incognita . . . or else one of those floting Islands in Mare del Zur” (1:86). It is a place with obvious relevance to the “Common-wealth” (1:69) of his readers. As in More’s Utopia, the excesses of privilege are restrained. But here gold is not despised. Burton’s Utopians do not make chamber pots from it. Their commonwealth is a going commercial enterprise. At a time when only aristocratic consumption could find any kind of warrant, the Utopia of the Anatomy is radical simply in its acceptance that everyday economic life will include things that are “necessary, commodious, . . . & such provision,” but also “such things as are for pleasure, delight, or ornament, as Wine, Spice, Tobacco, Silke, Velvet, Cloth-of-gold, Lace, Jewels, &c.” (1:90). In Burton’s Utopia, the appearance on the market of these commodities signals business as usual. What, this author seems constantly on the point of asking, would consumption be like if it were not (as it is for most of his readers) an expense of spirit in a waste of shame? What if luxury were not the stated prerogative of the elite alone? What would it be like to eat and drink, to shop, to consume—in Utopia?

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Coda: Butter Buyers But how am I fallen from the market into the alehouse?1 William Harrison, Description of England (1587)

William Harrison has a complaint: middlemen are ruining local economies all over England. “It is a world . . . to see how most places of the realm are pestered with purveyors,” he remarks in his Description. They “take up eggs, butter, cheese, pigs, capons, hens, chickens, hogs, bacon, etc., in one market under pretense of their commissions and suffer their wives to sell the same in another or to poulterers of London.” To Harrison, the rector of a village in Essex, the trade that brings local produce to the metropolis means just one thing: high prices. When his parishioners were “enforced” to bring their goods to the “market towns,” he remembers, “our butter was scarcely worth 18d.” But now, with all the “butter buyers . . . stirring,” he pays “3s. 4d. and perhaps 5s.” a gallon. These annoying entrepreneurs “come to men’s houses for their butter faster than can make it” and whisk it off for other tables far away. And it isn’t just the butter buyers. Now, there are traveling “chapmen” and “a superfluous number of dealers in most trades” who are busy shifting goods about the kingdom. There are the wealthy farmers who speculate on the grain market and the “bodgers” (itinerant dealers) who are doing the same. These canny operators buy up grain and then store it to sell later, he charges. And why? “[S]o that they may fill their purses and carry away the gain” (251). “And to say the truth,” Harrison says, “these bodgers are fair chapmen, for there are no more words with them but, ‘Let me see it, what shall I give you? Knit it up, I will have it, go carry it to such a chamber, and if you bring in twenty seam [horse loads] more in the weekday to such an inn or solar [loft or garret] where I lay my corn, I will have it and give you [—] pence or more in every bushel for six weeks’ day of payment than

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Coda

another will” (249). Some might think, he concedes, that as a “minister” he should keep his thoughts on such practices to himself. But “[c]ertes I may speak of them right well,” he counters, “as feeling the harm in that I am a buyer” (253). In many ways, Harrison was right about the middlemen he castigates. Their buying and selling was indeed upending the local economies of places such as Radwinter, while at the same time grafting them ever more closely into regional and kingdom-wide trade networks. By the late sixteenth century, many urban centers, and particularly London, could no longer support themselves as they once had. The food tradesmen of that city, the “butchers, brewers, bakers and cooks” had “long since outgrown the capacity of the street markets to supply all their needs.” They had to have produce, lots of it, and for it they went to small towns in the environs of London and to the middlemen who kept farm goods moving in their direction. Urban demand helped create a cadre of wholesalers “who would not and could not be put down,” despite entrenched suspicion among the rural poor and, often, the royal government.2 In the view of both, the local marketplace was the proper site for commercial activity, and transactions there should be governed by a code of neighborliness and fair dealing. The bodger, however, was likely to be a “hard-fisted bargainer . . . who bought in bulk from farmers and bypassed, if [he] could, the traditional open market and its regulations.”3 If there was less grain in the countryside, either because of drought or unequal distribution, he might be threatened by the irate, and he might be sanctioned by the crown. He was a commercially essential but an often reviled figure. “[A]t a time when . . . inherited ideas were being undermined by the realities of economic life,” the bodger was a constant reminder of the spreading gap between them.4 And in which was Harrison invested, older ideas or emerging realities? The answer, as for other writers we have considered in On Demand, turns out to be more involved than first appears. As I noted at the beginning of this study, historians often quote Harrison’s remarks on the recent prosperity of his Essex neighborhood, taking them as evidence of growing economic well being in the English kingdom. What their quotations usually miss, however, is how antagonistic Harrison can be to the developments on which he reports, and how uncomprehending of them he can seem. Harrison, for instance, seems oblivious to the workings of demand in his parish. It is his parishioners, after all, who are buying the goods that the chapmen bring to their doors and selling their produce to the purveyors



Butter Buyers

who come to take it away. With customers in London waiting for their eggs and butter, they can ask for more money from the middlemen who come knocking, which is cash that they then have to spend. These country folk are not being “pestered” by butter buyers and their ilk. They are active and willing participants in the growing consumer economy that Harrison deplores, as he must tacitly admit when he acknowledges that “whilst our country commodities are commonly bought and sold at our private houses, I never look to see this enormity redressed or the markets well furnished” (251). This clergyman, however, is quite clear in his mind on what a “market” is, or at least should be: a small local affair where “all things are to be sold necessary for man’s use; and there is our provision made commonly for all the week ensuing” (253). A “market,” he feels strongly, should be placed near a village so that “no buyer shall make any great journey in the purveyance of his necessities, so no occupier [dealer] shall have occasion to travel far off with his commodities” (246). Indeed, he wishes some law might be enacted to compel each farmer to take his grain to “his next market . . . and not to run six, eight, ten, fourteen, or twenty miles from home to sell his corn” (252). Nor can he see any advantages to distributed trade. There can be only one reason for bodgers and such to invade his neighborhood, and that is disreputable: “to seek for the highest prices” (which, as he correctly observes, are “commonly . . . near unto great cities, where round and speediest utterance is always to be had” [246]). If the transport of goods throughout the land could somehow be halted, he thinks, if the distribution chain that brings bacon and butter to London could be unlinked for just “two or three market days,” then a smaller, cheaper market would emerge again, and prices would settle at a more accommodating level. “[T]hen we may perfectly see these wares to be more reasonably sold” (251). But he is not hopeful. Harrison, as I read him, though, is not simply the retrograde clergyman he appears, and nor is he as inattentive as he seems. It’s rather that he does not quite know what he knows, or does not know how to express what he knows, about demand. His Description, like other works we’ve looked at, implies a gathering tendency of behaviors, desires, and thought that has yet to find a fully articulated rationale, and that must co-exist, perforce, with a very powerful strain of entrenched opinion. It mingles a nostalgia for an older order with an awareness of a newer one, outrage at the way things are

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going with the recognition that they will probably keep going that way for quite some time. Harrison can see how a demand-driven economy is making his neighbors act, the strangers it brings to Essex, and the business that transpires between them. As a buyer, he feels the consequences of demand in his purse on market day. It’s just that this aggregation has no observable being. His market analysis is scaled for one-on-one dealings. Demand, for him, is like an occluded planet. It can be detected by its effects alone. He feels the gravity; the source is invisible. And, in this, he isn’t all that different from his neighbors. They might benefit from the salesmen who come to traffic in their chickens and hogs, but that would not stop some of them from turning on the bodger when times were hard. Like Harrison, they take part in a consumer economy, but the language and the ideas in which they frame their consumption are hovering just on the cusp of clarity. If Harrison’s grasp of the consumer marketplace coming into being in England is limited, moreover, his animus toward it is limited too, limited to his stays in Essex, that is, where he knows first hand how the “poor artificer and laborer cannot make his provision in the markets” (249). When he goes out of town, it is another matter. Harrison is also a choreographer. His Description is a massive compendium, “intend[ing] no less than a total portrait of Elizabethan England, of the land and the people.” The first edition of 1577 included a “lengthy chapter [devoted] to an imaginary voyage around Great Britain, in the course of which he names over three hundred offshore islands, describing many in detail and regretting only his inability to fulfill his intention ‘at the first to have written at large of the number, situation, names, quantities, towns, villages, castles, mountains, fresh waters, plashes, or lakes, salt waters, and other commodities of the afore-said isles.’”5 Most of his material was taken from previous sources, of course, but Harrison himself was fairly well traveled. He held some livings in London.6 Later in the Description, he inserts a “table” of distances from place to place in the kingdom. “From Canterbury to London 43 miles,” “From London to Uxbridge or Colnbrook 15 miles,” “From Uxbridge to Beaconsfield 7 miles” (403). His list includes one hundred ninety nine stages in all, and it lays out, from point to point to point, fully two thousand eighty miles of British roadway. Some of these distances he had traversed himself, and no doubt he knew the value of a well appointed inn, of which, he told his readers, there “there are twelve or sixteen . . . at the least” (399) in each locale. In Radwinter, we recall, it had been his elderly parishioners who had alerted him to the comforts of a “bed of down or whole feathers” (201).



Butter Buyers

This, it now appears, would have come as no news to their rector. “And it is a world to see how each owner of [these inns] contendeth with other for goodness of entertainment of their guests, as about fineness and change of linen, furniture of bedding, beauty of rooms, service at the table, costliness of plate, strength of drink, variety of wines, or well using of horses.” And they advertise! “[T]here is not so much omitted among them as the gorgeousness of their very signs at their doors, wherein some do consume £30 or £40, a mere vanity in my opinion,” he must add, but not without its purpose: “to procure good guests to the frequenting of their houses in hope there to be well used.” This opulence weighs down Harrison’s “table” with a luxury he can hardly deny, if, indeed, he would want to. It is almost as if, moving among the butter buyers and bodgers on the highway, he can own up to his delight in fine things, or at least allow his readers to do so. Here too, we find a mind whose understanding is not reducible to its own self-characterizations. As we have noticed before in On Demand, to say that consumption was condemned in early modern England is only to begin to account for the responses it provoked. What cannot be acknowledged in one place often finds its tacit expression in another. For Harrison, it is enough to set out the itinerary he has followed, and to invite the reader to do so too. “Lo, here the table now at hand, for more of our inns I shall not need to speak” (399).

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preface 1. Gurr, Shakespearean Playing Companies, pp. 115, 117, 296. 2. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society, pp. 141, 142. Leinwand probably misunderstands the motives of old time rockers, who tour as nostalgia acts mostly, though of course not entirely, because these tours are highly lucrative. “Exhilaration” enters in, no doubt, but the profits from these performances, along with onsite sales of memorabilia, make these acts the highest earners in the music industry—even as profits from the sale of “compact disks” continue to drop. 3. Leinwand, Theater, Finance, and Society, pp. 140–41. 4. Leinwand, Theater, Finance, and Society, p. 140. 5. A heterogeneous list of recent economic criticism of early modern English literature includes Halpern, Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society, Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace, Bruster, Drama and the Market, Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, and Harris, Sick Economies. The essays in Woodbridge, Money and the Age of Shakespeare, showcase a variety of approaches. 6. Bruster, “On a Certain Tendency,” pp. 69, 70, 72, 73. 7. Bruster, “On a Certain Tendency,” p. 74. 8. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society, pp. 1, 5. Leinwand’s emphasis. 9. “Short run” and “long run” are economists’ terms. In the “short run,” while some “inputs” can be adjusted in response to market conditions, at least one cannot. In the “long run,” all inputs can be adjusted. Thus, for instance, if Shakespeare and his colleagues in the King’s Men wanted to increase attendance at their performances, in the short run they could put up more playbills, but not reconfigure the open air Globe theater, a problem in the winter. In the long run, they could acquire a warmer indoor venue, as they did in 1608 when they took over the lease to Blackfriars. 10. On the specifics of Shakespeare’s financial arrangements with the Burbages

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Notes to the Preface and the Chamberlain’s / King’s Men, see Gurr, Shakespeare Company, pp. 31–37, 85– 119, and Shakespearean Playing Companies, pp. 115–19. 11. For de Vries’ latest claims, see Industrious Revolution. 12. See Britnell, Commercialisation of English Society. 13. Stevenson, Praise and Paradox, pp. 1, 6, 7. 14. For a nuanced overview of the place of “demand” in both economic and sociological theory, see Swann, “There’s more to the economics of consumption than (almost) unconstrained utility maximasation.” 15. de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” p. 102.

1. marvelously altered 1. Harrison, Description, pp. 200, 201. 2. McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 13. 3. Fairchilds, “Consumption,” p. 851. 4. McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 27. 5. See especially Shammas, Pre-industrial Consumer, pp. 18–51, 157–93, and Weatherill, Consumer Behavior, passim, for the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Weatherill’s “A Possession of One’s Own” analyzes probate inventories with an eye toward the differences in “material and cultural values” between English men and women in the same period. Probate inventories from Cornwall and Kent are examined in Overton et al., Production and Consumption, passim, and from several English locales in Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 22–36. De Vries discusses the evidentiary implications of probate inventories in “Purchasing Power,” pp. 101–7, and, in “Fictions,” pp. 51–83, Orlin takes a shrewd look at the fallibilities of probate inventories and our ways of reading them. 6. See van Zanden, “The ‘revolt of the early modernists.’” 7. Thirsk, “Popular Consumption,” p. 52. 8. On “protoindustrialization,” see Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization. 9. See Palliser, Age of Elizabeth, pp. 35–69 (and especially pp. 67–69), 449–52, Youings, Sixteenth-Century England, pp. 130–53, Coleman, Economy of England, pp. 12–30, 99–103, Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, pp. 115–31, and Chambers, Population, Economy, and Society, pp. 9–32 for nuanced discussions of the relation between population, prosperity, and prices in early modern England. 10. See, for instance, the synopses of these developments in Wood, Foundations, pp. 14–21, Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety, pp. 1–7, and Pollard and Crossley, Wealth of Britain, pp. 83–124. 11. Brenner and Isett, “England’s Divergence,” p. 610. 12. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 26. 13. Robert Brenner, for instance, is a recent exponent of this Marxian approach. See Aston and Philpin, Brenner Debate. For a critique of the approach, see Overton,



Notes to Chapter 1

Agricultural Revolution, pp. 180–207. On enclosure, see Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman. 14. Pomeranz, “Beyond the East-West Binary,” p. 552. 15. “[E]xcluding wines,” Robert Brenner adds. Brenner is contrasting these imports to the exports of the Merchant Adventurers, mostly woolen cloth; these, he says, may have been “approached, or even possibly surpassed” (Merchants and Revolution, pp. 27, 28) by imports in 1630. 16. Thirsk, Economic Policy, pp. v, 8. 17. Thirsk, “Popular Consumption,” p. 53. 18. Shammas, “Explaining Past Changes,” p. 62. 19. Harrison, Description, p. 35. 20. Fisher, “The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (London and the English Economy, pp. 105–18). See also Clay, Economic Expansion, 1:197–213, as well as the essays in Material London, especially Sacks, “London’s Dominion,” and Archer, “Material Londoners?” On London’s growth from 1650 to 1750, see Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth, pp. 133–56. Useful overall treatments are Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, and the essays in Beier and Finlay, eds., London 1500–1700. 21. Fisher, London and the English Economy, p. 112. 22. Edmund Howes, in the letter dedicatory to John Stow, Abridgement of the Chronicles of England (London: 1611), quoted in Archer, “Material Londoners?,” p. 175. 23. John Stow, A Survey of the cities of London and Westminster (London: 1755), quoted in Newman, Fashioning Femininity, p. 131. See p. 172, n. 3 on the dating of the passage. 24. Glennie and Thrift, “Modernity,” p. 428. 25. Quoted in Davis, Fairs, Shops, and Supermarkets, pp. 72–73. 26. See Hoskins, “Great Rebuilding.” Hoskins’ claims have been adjusted by later research. See Machin, “Great Rebuilding,” Shammas, Pre-industrial Consumer, pp. 158–69, and Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 21. 27. Thirsk, Economic Policy, p. 16. Thirsk is quoting Smith, Discourse, pp. 125– 26. 28. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society, p. 13. 29. Overton, “Household Wealth,” pp. 13, 14. 30. Thirsk, Economic Policy, p. 8. 31. Shammas, Pre-industrial Consumer, p. 1. 32. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 32. On standards of living in late medieval England, see Dyer, Standards of Living and “English Diet.” 33. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 31. 34. Overton, “Household Wealth,” p. 5. 35. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 20–21. Muldrew’s emphasis.

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Notes to Chapter 1 36. Gurr, Shakespeare Company, p. 92. 37. Bruster, Drama and the Market, p. 18. 38. Phelps Brown and Hopkins, Perspective of Wages, p. 23. 39. Bruster, Drama and the Market, p. 18. 40. Gurr, Shakespeare Company, p. 92. 41. Overton, “Household Wealth,” p. 20. 42. Voth, “Seasonality of Conceptions,” p. 127. Clark shows a strong correlation between population increase and real wage decrease (“Condition of the Working Class,” pp. 1310–11). 43. de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” p. 95. 44. de Vries, “Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” p. 255. 45. Martines, “Renaissance and the Birth of Consumer Society,” p. 195. 46. See Gurr, Shakespeare Company, pp. 90–91. 47. The debate over the decline of real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) in early modern England, like the debate over the rise of nominal wages, is lively and continuing. Calculations of the nominal / real wage differential in the period are usually based on the wage rates of craftsmen and laborers in the building trades, an approach pioneered by E. H. Phelps Brown and S. V. Hopkins. They assembled a hypothetical “basket of consumables” (including fish, butter, textiles, and so forth) and calculated the purchasing power of the wages of craftsman in the building trades in southern England from the thirteen to the twentieth centuries (see Perspective of Wages, p. 19). As van Zanden notes, however, “it is unclear how representative [builders’] wages are for the rest of the [early modern] labour force” (“‘revolt of the early modernists,’” p. 622). Thirsk follows Woodward (“Determination”) in suggesting that “[b]uilding labourers may prove to be a special group with a distinctive pattern of employment, life course, and income. Their money wages may not correctly represent their disposable income” (“Popular Consumption,” p. 54), or that of other wage earners. The figures of Phelps Brown and Hopkins have also been recalculated using larger data sets. See, for instance, Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, pp. 638–44, and Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, pp. 148–61. For a cogent discussion of the uses of real wage indexes, see de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” pp. 89–98. For an overview of work and wages in the building trades, see Woodward, Men at Work. 48. Boulton, “Wage Labour,” p. 276. Nominal wages (wages not adjusted for inflation) in London and elsewhere in England increased over the sixteenth and seventeenth century, though by how much is a matter of debate. Widely cited figures for building craftsmen and laborers in southern England are provided by E. H. Phelps Brown and S. V. Hopkins, whose essays are collected in A Perspective of Wages and Prices (see p. 3). See also Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, pp. 145–50, Boulton, “Wage Labour,” Allen, “Great Divergence,” p. 417, and Clay, Economic Expansion, 2: 28–31. 49. Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, pp. 158–61. With London as his focus,



Notes to Chapter 1

Rappaport argues that, pace Phelps Brown and Hopkins, the drop in real wages is “not as severe as so many historians have imagined” and that Londoners would have managed it by several means, including commodity substitution. He points out that simply replacing the more expensive with cheaper types of food in the basket of consumables, rabbit for mutton, say, yields a seventeen percent decline in real wages for the period from the 1490s to the first decade of the 1600s, not the twenty-nine percent of Phelps Brown and Hopkins (Worlds within Worlds, p. 151). Rappaport also uses retail rather than wholesale food prices, since the costs of “manufacturing and transporting processed foods . . . did not increase as much as the prices of raw materials” (Worlds within Worlds, pp. 127–28). Van Zanden, among others, concludes that the “Rappaport . . . price indices for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are clearly a better guide to what happened to the cost of living [in London] than the P[helps]B[rown]H[opkins] index” (“‘revolt of the early modernists,’” p. 629). See also Woodward, “Determination,” p. 25, and Archer, Pursuit of Stability, pp. 11–12. 50. See Boulton, “Wage Labour,” pp. 270, 273, 276, 277, and Phelps Brown and Hopkins, Perspective of Wages, pp. 3, 4. 51. Gurr, Shakespeare Company, p. 92. On the makeup of London theater audiences, see Gurr, Playgoing, pp. 55–80. 52. Sacks, “Metropolis,” p. 154. Sacks extrapolates from the overall figures provided in Gurr, Playgoing, 21. 53. See also de Vries, “Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution” and “Industrious Revolution and Economic Growth.” 54. Voth, “Seasonality of Conceptions,” p. 127. See also Mokyr, “Editor’s Introduction,” pp. 64–66, 93. 55. See, for instance, Voth, “Seasonality of Conceptions.” Broadberry and Gupta find a “modest trend rise of the real wage in north-western Europe” (“Early Modern Great Divergence,” p. 8). 56. de Vries, “Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” p. 255. de Vries’ emphasis. 57. de Vries, “Industrious Revolution,” p. 47. de Vries’ emphasis. 58. de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” p. 108. 59. de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” p. 130. See also pp. 108–9. 60. Boulton, “Wage Labour,” p. 272. See also Earle, “Female Wage Labour.” 61. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 71. de Vries’ emphasis. 62. de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” pp. 114–15. 63. de Vries, “Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” p. 257. 64. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 27. 65. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, pp. 71–72. 66. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 72. 67. de Vries, “Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” p. 262. 68. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 25.

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Notes to Chapter 1 69. de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” p. 85. 70. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 5. 71. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 72. 72. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 10. 73. de Vries, “Industrious Revolution,” pp. 50–51, and de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” p. 110. See also Voth, “Seasonality of Conceptions.” 74. Pomeranz, “Political Economy and Ecology,” p. 426. 75. Clay, Economic Expansion, 2: 32. 76. See also Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, pp. 151–53. 77. Appleby, “Ideology and Theory,” p. 501. 78. McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 14. 79. McKendrick et al., Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 13. 80. Misselden, Circle of Commerce, p. 132. 81. Harrison, Description, pp. 146, 357, 359. 82. On the typing of consumption as female, see, for the early seventeenth century, Newman, “City Talk” in Fashioning Femininity, pp. 131–43; for the later seventeenth century, Weatherill, “Possession of One’s Own.” 83. See Hudson, “Proto-industrialization,” pp. 54–55. On female occupations and wage rates in London later in the early modern period, see Earle, “Female Labour Market.” 84. Wright, Passions, pp. 315–16. 85. On “leisure preference” in the early modern and later periods, see Mathias, Transformation, pp. 148–67, de Vries, “Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” p. 258, and Clay, Economic Expansion, 2:32. 86. See de Vries, “Purchasing Power,” p. 111 for an illustration of this curve. 87. Quoted in Mathias, Transformation, p. 148. On the growth of agricultural productivity in early modern England, see Wrigley, “Urban Growth,” Clark, “Yields per Acre,” and Allen, “Growth of Labor Productivity.” 88. Tawney and Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents, II, pp. 342, 344. 89. Quoted in Heckscher, Mercantilism, vol 2, p. 115. 90. Glennie and Thrift, “Modernity,” p. 429. 91. North, Discourses Upon Trade, p. 14. 92. See Appleby, “Ideology and Theory.” 93. The first edition of The Fable of the Bees, then entitled The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves Turn’d Honest, was published in 1705; it occasioned little comment. An enhanced edition was published in 1714 and a further enhanced edition in 1723; two more editions followed in 1728 and 1732. It was this last edition that drew public controversy. 94. Mun, England’s Treasure, p. 7. 95. de Vries, “Luxury,” p. 41. 96. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 2.6.38–41. 97. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 5.2.57–59.



Notes to Chapter 2

98. Nashe, Works, I, p. 200. 99. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 1.5.103–4, 2.5.14–16. 100. Pomeranz, “Political Economy and Ecology,” pp. 426, 427. 101. Markley, Far East and the English Imagination, p. 12. 102. See Huang, “Development of Involution,” Duchesne, “On the Rise of the West,” and Brenner and Isett, “England’s Divergence.” See also Pomeranz’ answer to his critics, particularly Huang, in “Beyond the East-West Binary.” 103. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, pp. 18, 19, 82. 104. Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 21. 105. McCulloch, Early English Tracts, pp. 34, 35. On Mun’s economics, see Barber, British Economic Thought and India, pp. 8–27, and Markley, Far East and the English Imagination, pp. 41–48. 106. See O’Rourke and Williamson, “When Did Globalization Begin?,” Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon,’” and “Path Dependence.” 107. Wrightson, “‘Sorts of People,’” pp. 30, 34. 108. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 126. 109. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 178. 110. Wrightson, “‘Sorts of People,’” p. 33, Wrightson, “Social Order,” p. 191. 111. De Vries, I should say, has been consistently willing to cite “cultural” sources. In “Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” he acknowledges an eighteenth century “body of literature” made up “primarily of novels, diaries, and essays.” This literature spoke to “material culture in the broadest sense,” and it must, de Vries allows, count for something. “[T]he essayists and poets who waxed eloquent on this theme could hardly have been tilting at wholly fictional windmills.” “And who can say that they were entirely wrong?” (pp. 258, 259). See also de Vries’ thoughtful remarks on the variables intersecting in the market for early modern Dutch art, “Art History.” 112. Nashe, Works, vol. I, p. 214.

2. nashe, ‘pierce penilesse,’ and consumption 1. Nashe, Works, I, p. 200. All further references to this text will be given parenthetically. 2. Lanham, “Thomas Nashe and Jack Wilton,” p. 202. These lines, as well as Lewis’ comments on the nullity of Nashe’s meaning, are quoted at the head of Jonathan Crewe’s Unredeemed Rhetoric. Crewe says that the “Nashe problem” arises when “ ‘theme’ or ‘content’ (saying something) are taken to be primary” while “‘writing’ is taken to be secondary.” Nashe himself, Crewe argues, “reverse[s]” these “priorities,” privileging “writing” (p. 1) over content. But see Hutson’s commentary on these and related claims (Thomas Nashe, pp. 6–8). She points out that Nashe was not dismissed in his own time as altogether unintelligible, except by enemies such as Gabriel Harvey. His “more sensitive and even brilliant readers—Shakespeare,

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Notes to Chapter 2 Jonson, and Donne, for example—did not find the tonal and thematic discontinuity of his style enough to thwart them from developing its very considerable creative potential.” He was therefore “intelligible,” at least “aesthetically” so (Thomas Nashe, p. 7). 3. Lewis, English Literature, pp. 416, 412. 4. Nashe, Works, II, p. 207. 5. Lewis, English Literature, pp. 411, 412. 6. Hutson, Thomas Nashe, pp. 8, 6. 7. Lewis, English Literature, p. 416. 8. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric, p. 70. 9. Nashe says as much at the end of The Vnfortvnate Traveller, where he promises “more paines in this kind” if he has pleased those who “wish me well” (Works, II, p. 328), otherwise he will abandon any thought of a sequel. In the event, none appeared. 10. Hutson, Thomas Nashe, p. 19. 11. Hutson, Thomas Nashe, p. 26. Hutson quotes Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses, pp. 52–53. 12. Hutson, Thomas Nashe, pp. 26, 27. 13. On associations between women and consumption in the early modern period­, see Newman, Fashioning Femininity, pp. 131–43, and Vickery, “Women and the World of Goods.” 14. See Cowan, “Consumption Junction,” pp. 262–63. 15. Hutson, Thomas Nashe, p. 8. 16. Nor will reading on in the passage do much to enlighten us. The demon to whom Nashe’s question is addressed tells him that “Poets and Philosophers, that take a pride in inuenting newe opinions, haue sought to renoume their wittes by hunting after strange conceits of heauen and hell,” but notes unhelpfully that “not two of them iumpe in one tale.” Besides these comments, which sound uncannily like a description of what Nashe himself has been doing in this passage, he can contribute only the theological truism that hell “is a place where the soules of vntemperate men, and ill liuers of all sorts, are detayned and imprisoned till the generall Resurrection, kept and possessed chiefly by spirites” (Nashe, Works, I, pp. 218–19). 17. Hutson, Thomas Nashe, p. 21. 18. All citations from Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 2. Nashe closes Pierce Penilesse with an address to “heauenlie Spencer” and “thy famous Fairie Queene.” Interestingly, Nashe mentions Spenser in order to chide him for “forgetfulnes” in omitting “thrice noble Amyntas” (still unidentified) from his “catalogue of our English Heroes” (Nashe, Works, I, pp. 243–44), lending weight to the suggestion that Spenser’s treatment of memory in Book II may have been on his mind. 19. See Nashe, Works, IV, p. 128. 20. Lewis, English Literature, p. 415. 21. Hutson, Thomas Nashe, p. 7. 22. Hutson, Thomas Nashe, p. 4.



Notes to Chapter 3

23. In Strange News (1592), Nashe himself writes both of “The tale” and of the tales as distinct (“in the one,” “for the other”), and does this in the same sentence. (Nashe, Works, I, pp. 320, 321). The slippage is revealing. The stories do imply and are linked to one another, though so oddly that any “single” tale they might make up seems bifurcated and almost incoherent. 24. See, for instance, R. B. McKerrow’s comments in Nashe, Works, IV, pp. 139–40, Hibbard, Thomas Nashe, pp. 81–84, and Nicholl, Cup of News, pp. 112–21. Nicholl’s political reading is particularly developed. 25. Harvey, Works, II, p. 54, Works, I, p. 205. 26. Nashe, Works, III, p. 214, Works, I, pp. 320–21. 27. Nashe allowed, however, that while the fox was meant to “figure an hypocrite” allegorically, it might be “Martin, if you will, or some old dog that bites sorer than hee, who secretlie goes and seduceth country Swaines” (Nashe, Works, I, 321). Nashe had fingered an easy target: “Martin Marprelate.” By naming him, Nashe was not offering much of a concession to those who wanted to pick apart the “state meaning” of Pierce Penilesse. “Martin Marprelate” was a composite “author,” a front for several Puritan controversialists who had been engaged with Nashe and others in vigorous polemic. This “author” was both unpopular and unidentifiable. Nevertheless, critics usually take it that here he has tipped his hand, and they proceed to assign names to the bear, the fox, and the other animals as well. The first is said to be Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the second possibly Thomas Cartwright, the Puritan divine. The chameleon might well be John Penry (also sometimes thought to have been “Martin”), and so on. Their judgment is not unanimous—G. R. Hibbard speculates that the bear might be Philip of Spain (Hibbard, Thomas Nashe, p. 83)—but they concur that the fable should be read in this way. 28. On these incentives, see Thirsk, Economic Policy. 29. McRae, God Speed the Plow, pp. 145, 146. Tusser’s Five Hundred Points, when published in 1557, was titled A good hundred pointes of husbandrie. 30. McRae, God Speed the Plough, p. 145. McRae quotes Gervase Markham’s The English husbandman (1613). 31. McRae, God Speed the Plough, p. 166. 32. McRae, God Speed the Plough, p. 207. 33. Williams, Keywords, pp. 68–69.

3. shakespeare’s ‘troilus and cressida’ 1. Scott, Essay of Drapery, p. 25. 2. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology, pp. 25, 26. 3. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 199, 20–21, 328. Muldrew’s emphasis. 4. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 2, 101. 5. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 3. 6. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 199. On the vagaries of early modern

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Notes to Chapter 3 bookkeeping, see Carruthers and Espeland, “Accounting for Rationality,” and Thomas, “Numeracy.” 7. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 174. 8. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 203, 3, 327. 9. See, for instance, Levine, “Extending Credit,” p. 410, Perry, “Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia,” pp. 44–45, Netzloff, “Lead Casket,” pp. 162–63, Jowett, “Middleton and Debt,” pp. 221–22, Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society, p. 42. 10. Jowett, “Middleton and Debt,” pp. 221–22. Jowett quotes Robert South, Sermons, 487. 11. Perry, “Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia,” pp. 44–45. Perry quotes Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 2–3, 174. 12. Levine, “Extending Credit,” pp. 406, 410, 412. 13. McGowen, “Credit and Culture,” p. 129. 14. Levine, “Extending Credit,” p. 406. 15. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 5, 6. 16. Muldrew, “Interpreting the Market,” pp. 163, 164, 169. 17. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society, p. 1. 18. Levine, “Extending Credit,” p. 411. 19. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 173, 174. 20. Agnew, Worlds Apart, p. 10. I am appropriating Agnew’s deft shift from society to institution here, as well as his larger argument, though my own focus is somewhat different. He sees the early modern English theater as a “proxy form of the new and but partly fathomable relations of a nascent market society” (p. 11). But while he holds that it is the “formless, qualityless, characterless nature of the money form” (p. 9) that most troubles these relations, I claim that more pressing were the “partly fathomable relations” of (mis)trust that the credit economy engendered. 21. Mead, “‘Thou art chang’d,’” p. 238. 22. Bevington, “Introduction,” p. 73. As Bevington sums up the narrative behind the standard economizing reading: “The decline of feudal aristocracy in the late sixteenth century was synchronous with an increase in bourgeois mercantilism. Clinging to an outmoded feudal ideology and to the orthodoxies of an unchanging social order based on order and degree, those who had ruled medieval England found themselves displaced to an ever-increasing extent by new wealth.” (“Introduction,” p. 17). See also Clarke, “‘Mars His Heart Inflam’d,’” Stafford, “Mercantile Imagery,” Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, pp. 85–94, Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, pp. 147–63, Mead, “‘Thou art chang’d,” and Barfoot, “Troilus and Cressida.” 23. Bruster, Drama and the Market, p. 107. 24. Barfoot, “Troilus and Cressida,” p. 46. 25. Greene, “Shakespeare’s Cressida,” pp. 136, 137. Greene’s use of Marx’s notion of the “cash nexus” (“Shakespeare’s Cressida,” p. 136) is a striking example of historical back-projection. “Money,” as Craig Muldrew points out, “was . . . never used” in early modern England “on a large enough scale to alienate economic exchange from social exchanges in the Marxist sense of a ‘cash nexus’” (Economy of Obligation,



Notes to Chapter 3

p. 101). Despite the influx of bullion from the Americas, the “amount of . . . gold and silver currency in circulation was small, and the inflation of the period meant that its value shrank over time, even though more gold and silver were continually coming into the country” (Economy of Obligation, p. 98). The money supply, though growing, was far outstripped by the demand imposed by an expanding consumer-driven economy. By the start of the seventeenth century, the supply of money had grown by about sixty-three percent, but in the same period the demand for money grew by an astonishing five hundred percent! Money in circulation amounted to a few pounds and shillings per person, and when that person died the money inventoried for probate would probably consist of little more than loose change. On the sixteenth-century money supply, see Challis, Tudor Coinage. 26. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, pp. 148, 149, 150, 157. 27. See, for instance, Stafford, “Mercantile Imagery.” 28. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 2.2.69. Further references to this play will be provided parenthetically. 29. See Eagleton’s acute reading of these lines (Shakespeare and Society, pp. 13– 14). 30. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, p. 163. 31. Shakespeare, Troilus, p. 124. 32. Dawson makes a compelling case for at least a few performances at the turn of the seventeenth century (“Introduction,” pp. 6–9). After that, Bevington lists one performance in Dublin “sometime prior to 1700” (“Introduction,” p. 90). Hodgdon notes four productions of Dryden’s adaptation of 1679 “in the first half of the eighteenth century” (“He Do Cressida in Different Voices,” p. 256). 33. Yachnin, “‘The Perfection of Ten,’” p. 317. 34. Greenblatt, Will in the World, p. 12. 35. John Mellis, A Brief Instruction and Maner how to Keepe Books of Accompts After the Order of Debitor and Creditor. London: 1588, p. 2, quoted in Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 128. 36. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, pp. 181, 186–87. 37. Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, p. 148. 38. Harris, Sick Economies, p. 100. 39. Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing, pp. 40, 43, 42. As Janet Adelman also points out, some dramatic characters simply do not “permit us to respond to them” as “whole psychological entities” (“This Is and Is Not Cressid,” p. 140), and Cressida is one of them. On Cressida’s predicament as a gendered character, see also Hodgdon, “He Do Cressida in Different Voices.” 40. Robert South, Sermons Preached upon Several Occasions, quoted in Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, pp. 125, 126. 41. Richard Baxter, Chapters From a Christian Directory, quoted in Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 126. 42. Note that this is just the sort of “remainder viands” to which earlier Troilus has earlier compared Helen (cf. 2.2.69–72).

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Notes to Chapter 3 43. Berger, “Troilus and Cressida,” p. 130. 44. Dawson, “Introduction,” p. 38. A notable exception to this line of reading is Paul Yachnin, who argues, as I do here, that “for Troilus the market is . . . not ruled by impersonal forces but rather is a scene of individual and collective agency and commitment where we are called to honor our long-term investments in order to guarantee our own value as ethical subjects.” He does so, however, in the service of the thesis that “there is throughout Troilus and Cressida a recognition of the value of theatrical labor,” or “artisanal value,” presumably something like the sort of value that Troilus promotes. The “working and trading lives” of Shakespeare and his company, he says, “would have generally been small-scale, hands-on, and involved with others whose faces they would have known well” (“Perfection of Ten,” pp. 311, 325). This is true enough. The point of this chapter, though, is that face-to-face relations themselves were in crisis in this period. The stability of “artisanal value” is just what the play ends up implying cannot be guaranteed. 45. Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, 88. Grady’s emphasis. 46. Bruster, Drama and the Market, p. 105. 47. Bevington, “Introduction,” p. 68. 48. Dawson, “Introduction,” pp. 38, 39. 49. Eagleton, Shakespeare and Society, p. 25. 50. Ellis-Fermor, Frontiers of Drama, p. 65. 51. Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, p. 89. 52. See, for instance, Clarke, “‘Mars His Heart Inflam’d.’” 53. Engle, for his part, has an interesting take on this: he assigns the aristocratic position to Troilus. The prince believes that “his evaluations of things should set their value and that this set value should henceforth remain safe from time. . . . What is honorable should remain so, and aristocrats are committed to this conservative activity, which is opposed to the acceptance of value fluctuation in marketplaces.” This, however, misstates Troilus’ position, which is not that of an antimarket snob, but a proponent of markets of a particular sort: those governed by the protocols of trust and right dealing. Troilus does not think that “his evaluations” alone should determine value, but that collective judgment does, which is how early modern prices were set, at least in early modern economic theory. Such prices relied on a communis aestimatio and, if needed, government intervention (on this, see de Roover, “Concept of the Just Price”). Engle asserts that Troilus “uses mercantile language . . . to protest against mercantile thought” and “resorts to mercantile language . . . even as he asserts noble motive” (Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, pp. 158–59). In fact, it is just this language that reveals Troilus as the sort of market theorist that he is. His adoption of this rhetoric is not a grudging concession. It signals the main line of his thought. 55. Berger, “Troilus and Cressida,” p. 128. 55. Dawson, “Introduction,” p. 39. 56. Berger, “Troilus and Cressida,” pp. 128–29. 57. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, p. 152.



Notes to Chapter 4

58. Adelman, “This Is and Is Not Cressid,” p. 135. 59. Greene, “Shakespeare’s Cressida,” p. 137. 60. Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, p. 159. 61. See de Roover, “Concept of the Just Price.” 62. Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf, p. 89. 63. See Manley, Convention. 64. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 125. 65. Elton, “Shakespeare’s Ulysses,” p. 103. 66. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 6. 67. Elton, “Shakespeare’s Ulysses,” p. 103. 68. Dawson, “Introduction,” p. 10. As David Hillman has argued, though, to think of the play in these terms alone is to do “little more” than to “reproduce Thersites’ bitter invective against the body—echoing his perspective rather than interpreting it” (Hillman, “Gastric Epic,” p. 298). 69. James, Shakespeare’s Troy, p. 96. 70. Bevington, “Introduction,” p. 1. 71. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, p. 120. Further references to this prefatory note will be given parenthetically. 72. Lesser, Renaissance Drama, pp. 2, 9. Lesser’s emphasis. 73. Bevington, “Introduction,” p. 1. On this more refined audience, see also Lesser, Renaissance Drama, pp. 2–4. 74. Pyrnne, Histriomastix, p. 930. 75. Pyrnne, Histriomastix, p. 943. 76. Lesser, Renaissance Drama, p. 1. 77. Lesser, Renaissance Drama, p. 3. 78. Of course, the reader could also choose to ignore these labored come-ons, refuse to recognize himself in the publishers’ caricatures and refuse to buy as well.

4. “allegory of a china shop” 1. Lyly, Works, III, p. 115. 2. Knowles, “Jonson’s Entertainment,” pp. 133, 134. This includes both an edited text and Knowles’ commentary on it. Further references to the edited text will be included parenthetically. See also Knowles, “Cecil’s shopping centre,” pp. 14–15, in which Knowles announced his discovery of the Entertainment among the State Papers Domestic in the Public Record Office. I have drawn upon both this article and his scrupulous and informative edition of the Entertainment throughout this chapter. See also a limited edition of the masque, The Key Keeper. A Masque for the Opening of Britain’s Burse April 19, 1609, ed. James Knowles (Tunbridge Wells: Foundling Press, 2002), with an introduction by Stephen Orgel. On this masque, see Dillon, Theatre, Court, and City, pp. 109–23, and Scott, “Marketing Luxury.” 3. Knowles, “Cecil’s shopping centre,” p. 14. 4. Appadurai, “Introduction,” 38. Appadurai’s emphasis. The specific example

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Notes to Chapter 4 he gives, citing Mukerji, Graven Images, is of calico imported to Britain from India in the seventeenth century (p. 39). For the most developed treatment of the signifying dimension of consumption, see Baudrillard, Consumer Society. 5. Knowles, “Jonson’s Entertainment,” p. 115. 6. Riggs, Ben Jonson, pp. 157, 371. 7. Butler, “Jonson’s London,” p. 18. 8. Knowles, “Jonson’s Entertainment,” p. 115. 9. Jonson, Epicoene, 1.3.36–39. 10. Knowles, “Jonson’s Entertainment,” p. 115. 11. Knowles, “Cecil’s shopping centre,” p. 15. 12. Bartolovich, “‘Baseless Fabric,’” p. 13. Bartolovich is quoting Harvey, “Globalization,” p. 2. Whether or not “globalization” was underway in the early modern period is a matter of debate. See, for instance, O’Rourke and Williamson, “When Did Globalization Begin?,” and Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon,’” “Cycles of Silver,” and “Path Dependence.” 13. Cohen, “Undiscovered Country,” pp. 128, 129. 14. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 161. 15. Musgrave, Early Modern European Economy, p. 164. 16. Frank, ReOrient, p. 7. My emphasis. 17. For the revisionist claims of the “California school,” see, Pomeranz’ Great Divergence, Frank’s less nuanced, but more bracingly polemical ReOrient, as well as Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, Blaut, Colonizer’s Model, and Wong, China Transformed. In “Problem of the ‘Early Modern’ World” and “Rise of the West,” Jack Goldstone rethinks the notion that Europe was more “advanced” than Asia in the early modern period. And, in Unbroken Landscape, Frank Perlin argues that European and Asian “societies, economies and state-forms” (p. 32) in this period were interlinked and undergoing similar changes. For critiques of Pomeranz in particular, see Huang, “Development or Involution,” Duchesne, “On the Rise of the West,” and Brenner and Isett, “England’s Divergence.” For Pomeranz’ reply to his critics, particularly Huang, see his “Beyond the East-West Binary.” Among critics, Robert Markley has done the most to extend this cross-cultural historiography to literature. See his Far East and the English Imagination. 18. de Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia,” p. 74. 19. Musgrave, Early Modern European Economy, p. 173. 20. Pomeranz and Topik, World that Trade Created, p. 6. See also De Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia.” On the tactics by which European merchants found a place for themselves in Asian markets, see Wills, “European Consumption and Asian Production.” 21. Pomeranz and Topik, World that Trade Created, p. 37. 22. Markley, Far East and the English Imagination, pp. 11–12. 23. Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon,’” p. 203. 24. Historians who argue for Asian economic dominance over Western Europe in the early modern period sometimes compare the habits of consumers in the two



Notes to Chapter 4

regions. Pomeranz, for example, notes that Europeans “certainly ate more meat and far more dairy products than most peoples in Asia” (Great Divergence, p. 35), but, he says, this intake was dropping quickly and would do so until the nineteenth century. In Asia, there was no drop (Great Divergence, p. 96). Europeans bought and ate more sugar than previously, as Sidney Mintz details in his well known book, Sweetness and Power. But the Chinese, it appears, bought and ate still more than they, as European visitors to their kingdom remarked (Great Divergence, pp. 95, 118, 119. See also Mazumdar, Sugar and Society). The Chinese also consumed far more tea: eleven ounces per person per year in China compared to two ounces in Britain, even as late as the nineteenth century (Great Divergence, p. 117). They also bought, and apparently at about the same rate, furniture, jewelry, and many of the other items that delighted English shoppers (Great Divergence, p. 95). The disparity between European and Asian consumption and commerce could be overwhelming for some. “Numerous Europeans—many fresh from London, Paris, or Amsterdam—noted a dazzling array of luxury goods for sale in Indian cities” (Great Divergence, p. 131). Such arguments make for interesting comparisons. In early modern China, Pomeranz asserts, wealth “could increasingly be converted to status through consumption” (Great Divergence, p. 131. Pomeranz’ emphasis). This produced social problems and opportunities that will seem familiar to us, but that we are more likely to associate with early modern England. In both kingdoms, the well to do accumulated luxury goods more or less indiscriminately, sometimes bankrupting themselves. Moralists castigated this overindulgence and bemoaned the deleterious consequences for the polity. Sumptuary laws were passed. Conduct manuals were published to show established elites and nouveaux riches how to conduct themselves in a burgeoning culture of consumption (see Great Divergence, pp. 130–35). 25. Flynn and Giráldez, “Path Dependence,” p. 90. Flynn and Giráldez’ emphasis. 26. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p. 161. Pomeranz even doubts that demand across Europe did much to stimulate Chinese silk production (Great Divergence, p. 191). See also Flynn and Giráldez, “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon,’” pp. 202–3. 27. Frank, ReOrient, p. 3. 28. Musgrave, Early Modern European Economy, p. 172. 29. See Musgrave, “Economics of Uncertainty.” 30. Musgrave, “Economics of Uncertainty,” p. 10. 31. On Jonson’s sense of “exploration,” see Peterson, Imitation and Praise, pp. 9–13. 32. Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 23. Sedgwick’s emphasis. 33. Knowles, “Jonson’s Entertainment,” p. 117. 34. Loewenstein, “The Script in the Marketplace,” p. 268. On Jonson’s inclination to establish “communities” (such as the “tribe of Ben”) in his writing, especially his poetry, see Stanley Fish, “Authors-Readers.” 35. In an acute essay, Alison Scott shows that the “Entertainment” is a “highly ambiguous celebration which illuminates,” not only the “moral and economic risks

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Notes to Chapter 4 of the developing trade in luxury goods,” as I have been arguing, but “contemporary uncertainties about luxury consumption” (Scott, “Marketing Luxury”). A further reason that the public might remain skeptical about the Burse is hinted at in the suggestion that it be set aside for “studyes, for young return’d trauaylors,” with the “walke belowe for them to discourse in.” But, the Keeper has to note, “they studyed little and trauayld less for that” (133). In 1609, English travel to the Continent was still opening up after the prohibitions of Elizabeth’s reign, just as merchants were still developing the routes that brought goods like the “veary fine China stuffes” to the Burse. The implication might be that foreign trade is like foreign travel: both promise to yield something (knowledge, in the case of travel, which was often touted in the period as educational), but neither does. There is little study abroad and no acquired “discourse” among young English travelers upon their return. And all this exotic bric-a-brac, what does it really come to? The masque explores this linkage between alien knowledge on the one hand and alien commodities on the other, with the new Burse standing as the locus on which anxieties regarding both are concentrated. 36. Appadurai, “Introduction,” pp. 38, 41, 54. Appadurai’s emphasis. 37. Appadurai, “Introduction,” p. 56. 38. Musgrave, “Economics of Uncertainty,” p. 10. See also Musgrave, Early Modern European Economy, pp. 81–83. 39. Musgrave, Early Modern European Economy, pp. 81, 211, “Economics of Uncertainty,” p. 15. 40. On the East India Company, see Keay, Honourable Company, Chaudhuri, English East India Company and Trading World of Asia, and Bowen et al., Worlds of the East India Company. For an acute reading of the implications of “investment” in the Company, see Forman, “Transformations of Value.” 41. Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 8. 42. Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 13. For a pithy summary of the complexities of the East India Company’s multilateral trade in the seventeenth century, see Markley, “Riches, power, trade and religion,” p. 501. 43. Chaudhuri, English East India Company, p. 87. 44. Markley, Far East and the English Imagination, p. 49. 45. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. II, pp. 375, 376. 46. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. II, p. 531. 47. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. III, p. 66. 48. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. IV, p. 38. 49. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 191. 50. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. II, pp. 401–2. 51. Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. II, pp. 443, 444. 52. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society, p. 3. 53. Appadurai, “Introduction,” p. 56. 54. “Purslane” is an editorial emendation; the text reads “Pursla.”



Notes to Chapter 4

55. In the text, “thousands” has been changed to “thousand,” a revealing emendation given that the Master is here asserting, probably with some humor, that there was a time when the Chinese were civilized and the English barbarous. That the writer, presumably but not necessarily Jonson, seems to have been undecided about the length of time to be indicated suggests that he wanted both to acknowledge Chinese superiority and to truncate the period when belittling comparisons would apply. On the various hands that contributed to the single existing manuscript, see Knowles, “Jonson’s Entertainment,” pp. 117–23. 56. Knowles, “Jonson’s Entertainment,” p. 145. 57. Porter, Ideographia, p. 78. 58. Porter, Ideographia, p. 134. 59. Musgrave, “Economics of Uncertainty,” 14. 60. “[P]ossibly ‘character’ or letter,” Knowles speculates, drawing on the OED, “but in context it may be that ‘charact,’ that is ‘cabbalistic or magical sign or emblem’ is intended.” (Knowles, “Jonson’s Entertainment, p. 147.) 61. Knowles, “Cecil’s shopping centre,” p. 15. 62. Appadurai, “Introduction,” p. 43. 63. Or at least potentially. According to Knowles, citing the OED, a “handsell” is “either . . . a present expressive of good wishes offered to inaugurate a new enterprise . . . or . . . a first payment, often the first money taken by a trader in the morning, an earnest or pledge of what is to follow” (“Jonson’s Entertainment,” p. 150). The two definitions, note, offer two roles to the king: patron and customer. Some combination of both is implied, though James probably chose to hear the former. 64. Jonson, Volpone, 5.4.51, 54–55. Further references to this play will be given parenthetically. 65. Barish, “Double Plot,” p. 103. 66. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 2.1.38–39, 5.6.36–37. 67. Bartolovich, “‘Baseless Fabric,’” pp. 22, 23. 68. On early modern English attitudes toward foreigners and foreign travel, see Warneke, Images of the Educational Traveler. 69. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 2.1.18–21, 27–29, 35–36, 5.6.94–95. 70. Jonson, Complete Poems, p. 419. 71. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, 5.6.96–97. 72. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 6. 73. Markley, Far East and the English Imagination, p. 11. 74. See, for instance, Giovanni Botero, The Travellers breviat (1601), Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Iohn Huighen van Linschoten his Discours of voyages into ye Easte and West Indies (1598), and J. G. de Mendoza, The Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China (1588). 75. Porter, Ideographia, pp. 2–3. 76. On these controversies, see Porter, Ideographia, and Markley, Far East and the English Imagination.

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Notes to Chapter 4 77. On the idealization of China in the early modern period, see Porter, Ideographia, and Ramsey, “China and the Ideal of Order.” 78. Spence, Chan’s Great Continent, p. 33. On Ricci’s map, and on the parallels between European and Chinese mapping generally, see Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise. 79. On the history of China in the early modern period, see Perdue, China Marches West, pp. 51–133. For an overview of Chinese / European relations in the period, see Mungello, Great Encounter. 80. Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 222. 81. Sedgwick, Tendencies, p. 23. Sedgwick’s emphasis. 82. Along somewhat similar lines, Goldberg points out that Sir Politic “brings to Venice . . . an English mind schooled in absolutist” thinking. His politics, therefore, according to which “there are secrets behind all events” and “there is always a conspiracy,” are “perfectly correct in principle” ( James I, pp. 72–74) and would have cohered neatly with many Jacobean understandings. 83. Berger, “Archimago,” p. 21. 84. Goldberg, James I, p. 73. 85. Goldberg, James I, p. 72.

5. “idleness is an appendix to nobility” 1. Burton, Anatomy, 1:77. I cite the edition of the Anatomy edited by Thomas C. Faulkner et al. Further references to its volumes will be included parenthetically. 2. Here and throughout, I use the translations from the Latin given in the commentary by J. B. Bamborough and Martin Dodsworth in Burton, Anatomy, vol. 4. 3. Harrison, Description, p. 200. 4. See Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, p. 19, and Peck, Consuming Splendor, pp. 237–40. 5. Sawday, “Shapeless Elegance,” p. 178. 6. Hearne, Remains, p. 409. 7. Sawday, “Shapeless Elegance,” p. 175. Bamborough points out that the Anatomy “came into fashion again at the end of the eighteenth century, after a century of comparative neglect” (“Introduction” to the “Commentary” on Burton, Anatomy, vol. 4, p. ix). 8. Hearne, Remains, p. 409. 9. Lamb, Essays of Elia, Last Essays of Elia, p. 204. 10. Nashe, Works, vol. I, p. 199. 11. Webber, Eloquent “I,” p. 101. Although, Ruth Fox adds, Burton’s “industry in creating . . . the book is ‘playing labour’ which cures confusion by indicating the order to be reclaimed through constant work on the rude matter of the world” (Fox, Tangled Chain, p. 264). 12. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, pp. 303, 304, 312, 352. On the influence of



Notes to Chapter 5

Fish’s reading, see Sawday, “Shapeless Elegance,” p. 174. “There is,” declares Fish, “a ‘double motion’ in the preface—one rational and distinguishing, in the direction of making sense of things, and the other irrational and inclusive, leading to the discovery everywhere of nonsense—and the first is prosecuted with just enough conviction and plausibility to make us forget the (literally) disillusioning implications of the second” (Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 315). Fish is adept at discovering the ways that Burton’s writing perplexes the reader, and he is right to say that the scope of this obfuscation is vast. It “include[s] everyone, it also includes every thing, every structure, every institution, every profession, every nation, every concept” (Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 314. Fish’s emphasis). The preface to the Antaomy, as he says, limns a world given over to madness. Nor does the reader escape this indictment. “[A]ll the world is of this humour (vulgus) and thou thy selfe art de vulgo, one of the Commonalty, and he, and he, and so are all the rest” (Burton, Antaomy, 1:65–66). But we should not conclude from this that Burton thought that madness was so ubiquitous that there were no exceptions to it whatsoever. Burton goes out of his way to say that his ideal reader escapes the symptoms he describes, or rather can choose to escape them by renouncing what is “mis-affected, melancholy, mad, [and] giddy-headed” (Burton, Antaomy, 1:25). “Yet one Caution let mee give by the way to my present or future Reader, who is actually Melancholy,” he says pointedly, “that hee read not the Symptomes or prognostickes in this following Tract, least by applying that which hee reads to himselfe, aggravating, appropriating things generally spoken, to his owne person (as Melancholy men for the most part doe) hee trouble or hurt himselfe, and get in conclusion more harme then good” (Burton, Antaomy, 1:24). Actually melancholy readers should avoid the Anatomy, but there are also, apparently, rational, or semi-rational readers who can recognize madness when they see it and who can get some good out of the text. 13. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 22. 14. Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit, p. 13. 15. Although it also perturbs him “To see a Scholler crouch and creepe to an illiterate Pesant for a meals meat” (Burton, Antaomy, 1:53). That Burton identifies with neither the profligate at the top of the social scale nor the impoverished at the bottom, but, tacitly, with the ill defined class that the “industrious revolution” is slowly bringing into being is part of my point here. 16. Hearne, Remains, p. 409. 17. de Vries, “Luxury,” pp. 41, 42, 43–44. 18. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, pp. 44, 45. 19. de Vries, “Luxury,” p. 43. 20. de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 58. 21. Peck, Consuming Splendor, p. 13. I’m concentrating on the implications of one aspect of Peck’s claims here. For the most part, she treats the consumption of the upper tier in early seventeenth-century England. Her arguments on English consumption styles, I’m suggesting, also apply below that stratum.

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Notes to Chapter 5 22. On river navigation in seventeenth-century England, see the commentary in Burton, Anatomy, vol. 4, p. 129. 23. de Vries, Barges and Capitalism, pp. 326, 24. 24. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 329. 25. Fish used the 1932 edition of the Anatomy edited by Holbrook Jackson. On Burton’s economic thinking, see Patrick, “Robert Burton’s Utopianism,” and Mueller, “Robert Burton’s Economic and Political Views” and Anatomy of Robert Burton’s England. 26. Some of Burton’s denunciations have probable antecedents in the writings of the “Commonwealthmen,” moral reformers of the mid sixteenth century. On this line of early modern socio-economic critique, see Wood, Foundations. On the relation of Burton’s Utopia to More’s, see Patrick, “Robert Burton’s Utopianism,” pp. 350–52. 27. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, p. 326. 28. Hawkes, Idols, p. 39. On mercantilism, see Finkelstein, Harmony and Balance, pp. 15–97, and Irwin, Against the Tide, pp. 26–44. 29. Patrick, “Robert Burton’s Utopianism,” pp. 346–47. 30. See Bamborough, “Introduction” to Burton, Anatomy, vol. 1, p. xxii. For the many volumes that Burton owned, see Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton. On his reading in economics, see also Patrick, “Robert Burton’s Utopianism,” pp. 347– 48. 31. Jackson, “Introduction,” p. xi. 32. See the entries for Mun, Misselden, and Dudley Digges in Kiessling, Library of Robert Burton. 33. Patrick, “Robert Burton’s Utopianism,” p. 347. 34. Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit, p. 39. On the conflation of economic and political influence in mercantilist thought, see Viner, “Power Versus Plenty.” 35. Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit, p. 27. 36. Mun, Discovrse of Trade, pp. 6–7. 37. Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit, p. 70. 38. Burton, Anatomy, vol. 4, p. 133. 39. Kuchta, Three-Piece Suit, p. 21. 40. See the “Bibliography of Authors and Works Cited in the Anatomy” in Burton, Anatomy, vol. 6, pp. 297–437. Neither Mun nor Misselden, for instance, is cited in the Anatomy. 41. See, for instance, Chapple, “Robert Burton’s Geography of Melancholy” and Barlow, “Infinite Worlds.” 42. Jackson, “Introduction,” p. xi.

coda 1. Harrison, Description, p. 247. Further references to this text will be given parenthetically.



Notes to the Coda 2. Davis, Fairs, Shops, and Supermarkets, p. 65. 3. Wrightson and Levine, Poverty and Piety, p. 5. 4. Wrightson and Walter, “Dearth,” p. 31. 5. Edelen, “Introduction,” pp. xv, xix. 6. Archer, “Material Londoners?,” p. 176.

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Index

Adelman, Janet, 81 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 68–69, 160n20 Appadurai, Arjun, 94, 104–5, 111–13 Appleby, Joyce, 20, 62 Asia: compared to Europe, 27–28, 97– 99, 110–12, 164–65n24; trade with, 5, 27–30, 94–101, 106–12 Barfoot, C. C., 69 Barish, Jonas, 113 Bartolovich, Crystal, 95–96 Baxter, Richard, 77 Becker, Gary, 15 Berger, Harry Jr., 78, 80–81, 120 Bonian, Richard, 88–92 Bruster, Douglas, xii–xiii, 12, 14, 18, 69 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” xvi, 32, 121–41. See also “Democritus Junior to the Reader” Butler, Martin, 94 Cecil, Robert, 8, 94–95, 99, 103 Chauduri, K. N., 28, 106 China, 27–30, 97–99, 105, 109–12, 115–20, 134, 140 Clay, C. G. A., 19–20 Cohen, Walter, 96 Consumption, xv–xvi, 15–18, 125–26;

critiques of, 21–27, 33–34, 39–41, 60, 126; growth of, xv, 1–13, 62–63; and “Old” and “New Luxury,” 130–32; and signaling, 17–20, 24–26, 29–30, 33–34; and social categories, 9–11, 130 Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 40 Davenant, Charles, 23 Dawson, Anthony, 80, 88 de Malynes, Gerard, 137 Demand: causes of, 3–6, 9–10, 13, 15–18; and debt, 9–10; and declining real wages, 12–15; definition of, xvii–xviii; epistemic consequences of, xv–xvi, 16–18, 62–68, 72–74, 145–46, 147; and foreign trade, 27–30, 97–99; growth of, xvii, 1–11; and the theater, xiii–xiv, 6–7, 11, 13–15, 19, 33–34. See also Industrious revolution “Democritus Junior to the Reader”: consumption in, 121–22, 125–26, 128–30, 133, 139, 141; foreign trade in, 134–35, 138–40; Holland in, 131–43, 140; idleness in, 121–22, 126, 128–29, 143, 140; mercantilism in, 137–39; “Old” and “New Luxury” in, 130–32, 135, 137, 140; publishing history of, 122–23; reader in, 124–25,

198

Index 127–30, 133, 140; social categories in, 125–28, 130, 136–37, 169; Utopia in, 134–37, 141; work in, 124–25, 127, 133 de Vries, Jan, xv, xvii, 15–21, 24–33, 58, 67, 97, 132; and “Old” and “New Luxury,” 130–32. See also Industrious revolution Digges, Dudley, 137 East India Company, 5, 10, 23, 28–30, 73, 97–98, 106–8, 139 Elizabeth I, 6, 10 Elton, W. R., 86 Engle, Lars, 69, 71, 81, 162n53 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse: China in, 109–12, 116; criticism on, 94–96; and foreign trade, 93–101, 104–5, 108–13; Key Keeper in, 101–4; Master in, 109–13 Fairchilds, Cissie, 2 Field, Nathan, 101 Finch, William, 107 Fish, Stanley, 125, 129, 134, 137, 168–69 Fisher, F. J., 7 Foreign trade, 27–30, 46–47, 93–101, 104–13; epistemic consequences of, 104–20 Frank, Andre G., 99 Fumerton, Patricia, 73 Goldberg, Jonathan, 120 Gosson, Stephen, 39 Grady, Hugh, 84 Greenblatt, Stephen, 71, 74 Greene, Gayle, 69, 160–61n25 Gresham, Thomas, 8, 93 Gurr, Andrew, xi–xiv, 12, 14, 18 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 74 Harrison, William, 1–2, 6, 9, 10, 22, 30, 122, 143–47 Harvey, Gabriel, 54 Hawkes, David, 137 Hearne, Thomas, 123, 127 Henry VIII, 4

Hext, Edward, 23 Hopkins, Sheila V., 12–13, 154n47, 154–55n49 Hoskins, G. W., 9 Hutson, Lorna, 36, 39, 51 Industrious revolution, 15–18, 58, 67, 99; and critiques of consumption, 24–27, 33–34; and foreign trade, 27–30; origins of, xv, 19–21; and signaling, 17–20, 24–26, 29–30, 32–34; and social categories, 30–32, 125–26 James I, 6, 94, 113, 167n63 Jonson, Ben, xiii; Bartholomew Fair, 26, 65, 103, 114; Discoveries, 114–15; Epicoene, 95; Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, xvi, 30, 93–113, 114, 116–18; Volpone, 30, 113–20; views on foreign travel, 112, 114–15, 119–20, 165–66n35; views on trade, 94–97, 100–101, 103–4. See also Entertainment at Britain’s Burse Keeling, William, 107 King’s Men, xi–xiv, xvii, 70, 73–74 Knowles, James, 94–95, 110, 113 Kutcha, David, 138–39 Lamb, Charles, 123 Lancaster, James, 108 Lanham, Richard, 35 Leinwand, Theodore, xi–xiv, 10, 68, 151n2 Lesser, Zachary, 88 Levine, Laura, 76 Levine, Nina, 65 Lewis, C. S., 35–37, 51 London, 2, 5–9, 11, 12–15, 22, 89, 94–96, 99, 105–6, 110, 112, 114, 119, 122, 143–44, 154–55n49 Lyly, John, 93 Mandeville, Bernard, 24 Mandeville, John, 110, 116 Markley, Robert, 28, 98, 106

Martines, Lauro, 13 McKendrik, Neil, 2–3, 11, 20 McRae, Andrew, 58–59 Misselden, Edward, 21, 137 More, Thomas, 134, 141 Muldrew, Craig, 11, 62–68, 71, 73–74, 77, 84, 107–8 Mun, Thomas, 29, 137–39 Musgrave, Peter, 105–6 Nashe, Thomas: Pierce Penilesse, xvi, 26, 33, 35–61, 124; The Unfortunate Traveller, 36. See also Pierce Penilesse North, Dudley, 24 Patrick, J. Max, 134 Peck, Linda Levy, 131–32, 169n21 Phelps Brown, Henry, 12–13, 154n 47, 154–55n49 Pierce Penilesse: contradictions in, 37–46; criticism on, 35–37, 39, 51–52, 157–158n2; and English theater, 48– 49; fable of bear and honey, 52–60, 159n27; and foreign trade, 46–48, 50–51; and histories of consumption, 55–60; reader in, 36–37, 40, 42–44, 56–57, 59–60; Spenser in, 49–50, 158n18 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 3, 27–28, 96, 99, 100 Porter, David, 111, 116 Prices, 4, 12–15, 83 Pyrnne, William, 89

Index Sedgwick, Eve K., 102, 117 Shakespeare, William: economic motives­ of, xi–xvi, 19, 32–34; Hamlet, xiii, 13; Henry V, 13; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 12; Merry Wives of Windsor, 12; Romeo and Juliet, xiv; Troilus and Cressida, xiii, xvi, 12, 26, 62–92 . See also Troilus and Cressida Shammas, Carole, 10–11 Sharpey, Alexander, 107 Sidney, Philip, 45–46, 59 Smith, Adam, 28, 60 South, Robert, 76 Spenser, Edmund, 49–50, 59, 158n18 Stevenson, Laura Caroline, xvi Stow, John, 8 Thirsk, Joan, 3, 6, 9, 10–11, 39 Troilus and Cressida: contradictions in, 75–78; criticism on, 69–71, 79– 81, 84; debate on value in, 78–85; preface to, 70, 87–92; reception of, 70–74; trust in, 63–68, 71–72, 85–87 Trust, 63–68, 71–74, 84, 87 Tusser, Thomas, 58–59

Ricci, Mateo, 116 Riggs, David, 94

Wages, 7, 12–16, 19–20, 22–23, 27, 32, 154n47, 154–55n49 Walley, Henry, 88–92 Webber, Joan, 125 Wheeler, John, 137 Williams, Raymond, 60 Wright, Thomas, 22 Wrightson, Keith, 30–31

Sawday, Jonathan, 123 Scot, Edmund, 108

Yachnin, Paul, 162n44 Young, Arthur, 23

199