Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Change and Exchange 9783030376505

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CROSSROADS OF KNOWLEDGE IN EARLY MODERN LITERATURE

Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Change and Exchange Edited by Subha Mukherji · Dunstan Roberts Rebecca Tomlin · George Oppitz-Trotman

Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature Series Editors Rachel E. Holmes Department of English Language and Literature University College London London, UK Subha Mukherji Faculty of English University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK Tim Stuart-Buttle Department of Politics University of York York, UK Elizabeth L. Swann Faculty of English University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK Rebecca Tomlin Faculty of English University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

This series rewrites the story of early modern epistemology by examining the intervention of the ‘literary’ in a wider conversation about the process, ethics and psychology of knowing, more obviously ongoing across Theology, Natural Philosophy, Economics and Law. Each volume focuses on a particular interdisciplinary threshold, with literature as a running thread, reading these cognate fields as coeval but distinct, and charting certain elusive and ordinarily unassimilable aspects of the experience and texture of knowing by using a unique interdisciplinary route. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15227

Subha Mukherji · Dunstan Roberts · Rebecca Tomlin · George Oppitz-Trotman Editors

Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Change and Exchange

Editors Subha Mukherji Faculty of English University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK Rebecca Tomlin Faculty of English University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

Dunstan Roberts Cambridge, UK George Oppitz-Trotman Cambridge, UK

Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature ISBN 978-3-030-37650-5 ISBN 978-3-030-37651-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Dosso Dossi: Portrait of a Money-Changer, 53.449 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The research for the series, and for this volume, has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 617849.

A Note on Quotations All quotations from the works of William Shakespeare are, unless ­otherwise stated, taken from The Riverside Shakespeare: Second Edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

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Contents

Change and Exchange: Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe 1 Subha Mukherji and Rebecca Tomlin Generic Conversions Some Economic Aspects to Private Prayer in Shakespeare 29 Ceri Sullivan Fake News: The Marketplace of Boccalini’s Parnassian Press and the History of Criticism 51 Vera Keller Emblem Books, Gift-Exchange Practices and Œconomia 69 Valérie Hayaert Affective Changes Vexed and Insatiable: Unfeelable Feelings and the Marketplace of Early Modern Drama 91 Adam Zucker vii

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CONTENTS

Poesies for Prizes: Queen Elizabeth’s Lottery, Providential Rule and “Fair Advantages” in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice 113 Lisa Martinez Lajous ‘Her Tongue Hath Guilded It’: Speaking Economically in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV 133 Rebecca Tomlin “To Look on Your Incestuous Eyes”: Knowledge, Matter, and Desire in Richard Brome’s The Queen’s Exchange and The New Academy, or the New Exchange 159 Bradley D. Ryner Wondrous Exchanges ‘Mirifica commutatio’: The Economy of Salvation in Reformation Theology 183 Torrance Kirby ‘In Vulcano Veritas’: Sir Hugh Platt’s Alchemical Exchanges 207 Ayesha Mukherjee Freedom from Debt: The Economies of The Tempest 239 Paul Yachnin Afterword: Knowledge Production, Reproduction and Shifting Borders in the Literature and Economies of the Early Modern Atlantic World 261 Valerie Forman Index 279

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Subha Mukherji is Reader in Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. She has been leading the ERC-funded interdisciplinary project, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England: The Place of Literature (CRASSH & English), since October 2014. Her research interests and publications span Renaissance law and literature, literary epistemologies, Shakespeare, the poetics of space across cultures, migration studies and contemporary Indian art. She is currently writing a book on Knowing Encounters: Questioning Knowledge in Early Modern Literature. She is Series Editor of the project-dedicated series of volumes: Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England, with Palgrave. Most recently, she has shaped and published a dialogic volume, Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and His World: A Conversation (MIP/De Gruyter, 2019). Dunstan Roberts  is a Praeceptor in English at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He has published on various aspects of library history and the history of the book in the early modern period. He is currently working on a book about the library of Edward, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and on other aspects of reading and book ownership in the Herbert family.

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EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Rebecca Tomlin After completing her Ph.D. at Birkbeck, University of London‚ Rebecca Tomlin was a Research Associate on Crossroads of Knowledge from 2016 to 2018 and an Early Career Fellow of the London Renaissance Seminar 2018/2019. She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Neighbourhood, Charity, and Identity in Late-Sixteenth Century Drama, which examines ideas of neighbourhood in early modern London. Her interests include early modern London, charity, begging, cultural geography, and theatre. She also has a long-standing interest in early double-entry book-keeping. When not researching she works for a livery company in the City of London. George Oppitz-Trotman was a Research Associate on the Crossroads of Knowledge project from January 2018 to September 2019. He is the author of The Origins of English Revenge Tragedy (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Stages of Loss. The English Comedians and Their Reception. He has also published on various aspects of early modern drama, including, in particular, its connections with the German avant-garde.

Contributors Valerie Forman is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She works on theories and practices of labour, trade, slavery and capitalism in, through and around early modern literature and history in the Transatlantic world. She teaches courses on Decolonizing the Age of “Discovery” and Interrogating Modernity, Political Theatre, Border Fictions and Cuban Cinema. Her first book, Tragicomic Redemptions (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), explored the genealogies of “global” trade and capitalist practices by putting them in dialogue with the rise of new theatrical genres. Her current project explores the aesthetics, politics and economics of slavery in the early modern Caribbean in order to better understand the foundations of the institutions of slavery and its ramifications in our contemporary world. Valérie Hayaert is a classicist, historian and humanist researcher of the early modern European tradition. Her particular interest lies in the images of justice, on judicial rites and symbolism as well as its role in

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contemporary courthouse building. She received the EUI Alumni Prize for the best interdisciplinary thesis in 2006. Her book ‘Mens emblematica’ et humanisme juridique was published in 2008. Her subsequent work looked at the aesthetics of justice in courthouses of the early modern period until today. Valérie has taught in Cyprus, Tunisia, England and France and held various positions and fellowships. She is currently a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Rechts als Kultur” at the University of Bonn. Vera Keller  Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon, studies the interaction of science and politics in early modern Europe. In her book, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge, 2015), she argued for the co-production of the reason of state and experimental reasoning. She is also the author of numerous articles and several edited volumes and special issues, most recently, with Anna Marie Roos and Elizabeth Yale, Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives (Brill, 2018). She co-edits, with Markus Friedrich (Hamburg) and Christine von Oertzen (MPI, Berlin), the book series Cultures and Practices of Knowledge in History (de Gruyter). Torrance Kirby is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and sometime Director of the Centre for Research on Religion at McGill University, Montreal. He received a D.Phil. in Modern History from Oxford University in 1988. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and life member of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and McCord Fellow at the Princeton Centre of Theological Inquiry. Recent books include Persuasion and Conversion: Religion, Politics and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2013), The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (2007), and Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (2005). He is also editor of A Companion to Richard Hooker (2008), and co-editor of Paul’s Cross and the Culture of Persuasion, 1520–1640 (2014). His most recent book is an edition of selected Sermons at Paul’s Cross, 1541–1642 (Oxford, 2017). Lisa Martinez Lajous  is an independent scholar whose research focuses on sixteenth and seventeenth century English drama and culture, with a specific interest in early modern gaming and the theological, economic, and cultural implications of risk-taking for profit in general. Her research

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draws from a variety of original texts from an array of fields including early modern theology, economics, political, legal, and popular writings. She received a bachelor’s degree in English, with honorable distinction from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently resides in Dallas, Texas. Ayesha Mukherjee  is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Exeter, who works on early modern literature and culture. She is the author of Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (2015), and the editor of A Cultural History of Famine: Food Security and the Environment in India and Britain (2019). Bradley D. Ryner  is an Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. He is the author of Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing 1600–1642 (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and the co-editor, along with Darlene Farabee and Mark Netzloff, of Early Modern Drama in Performance: Essays in Honor of Lois Potter (University of Delaware Press, 2015). He has published articles in Early Modern Literary Studies, English Studies and Renaissance Drama, as well as in various edited collections. Ceri Sullivan  is a Professor in the School of English at Cardiff University. She is the author of Shakespeare and the Play Scripts of Private Prayer (Oxford, 2020); Literature in the Public Service: Sublime Bureaucracy in John Milton, Anthony Trollope, and David Hare (Basingstoke, 2013), The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan (Oxford, 2008), The Rhetoric of Credit. Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison, 2002), and Dismembered Rhetoric. English Recusant Writing 1580–1603 (Madison, 1995), and the co-editor of Authors at Work: The Creative Environment (Woodbridge, 2009) and Writing and Fantasy (London, 1999). Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill University. From 2013 to 2019, he directed the project, Early Modern Conversions. Among his publications are the books, Stage-Wrights and The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (with Anthony Dawson), editions of Richard II and The Tempest, and edited books such as Making Publics in Early Modern Europe and Forms of Association. His book, Making Publics in Shakespeare’s Playhouse, is forthcoming.

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He is co-editor of the new “Conversions” book series from Edinburgh University Press. For the past seven years, he has been working on higher education practice and policy. He is Director of the TRaCE McGill Project, which will track the career pathways of 5000+ Ph.D. grads from across the university. Adam Zucker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on early modern literature, with a special focus on drama, material culture, and the history of urbanity. He is the author of The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy and the co-editor, most recently, of Historical Affects and the Early Modern Theater. He has published essays in journals, handbooks, and collections on topics ranging from space and spatiality in early modern plays; Ben Jonson and the performance of pedantry in print; gamesters and gambling in Tudor and Stuart London; and the philology of nonsense in Twelfth Night. He is currently the co-editor of the journal English Literary Renaissance.

List of Illustrations

Emblem Books, Gift-Exchange Practices and Œconomia Image 1 Georgette de Montenay, ‘Sapiens mulier aedificat domum’, in Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes (Lyon, 1571), Glasgow University Library, Sp Coll S.M. 771 Image 2 Cesare Ripa, ‘Economia’, in Iconologia (Rome, 1603), Heidelberg University Library, C 5456 A RES

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Vexed and Insatiable: Unfeelable Feelings and the Marketplace of Early Modern Drama Image 1 Francesco Mazzola Parmigianino, Portrait of Galeazzo Sanvitale (1524) 92 Image 2 Francesco Mazzola Parmigianino, Portrait of Galeazzo Sanvitale (1524) (Detail) 93 Image 3 Image taken from Timothy Cogley, Thomas J. Sargent, and Viktor Tsyrennikov, “Market Prices of Risk with Diverse Beliefs, Learning, and Catastrophes,” The American Economic Review, 102:3 (May 2012), 141–46 (p. 142) (July 2012; http://www.tomsargent.com/ research/mpr-cst.pdf [accessed 14 October 2019]) 95 Image 4 Emotional Math by Adam Zucker 102

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Change and Exchange: Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe Subha Mukherji and Rebecca Tomlin

Money, Matter and Metaphor Gold, the shadow protagonist in Shakespeare (and Middleton’s) Timon of Athens, ‘subdues and properties to [Timon’s] love and tendance / All sorts of hearts’, ‘[translating]’ his rivals to slaves (I.i.57–58; 71–72). But Timon also later condemns it as ‘[t]his yellow slave’, the ‘strong thief’ (IV.iii.34, 46). Struggling to adapt to a world where social relationships are no longer determined by feudal hospitality and patronage, but governed instead by the nexus of cash, Timon is troubled by the way in which gold effects change through exchange, resists the very metamorphic power that he had revelled in, and condemns the transferability and malleability that had once made it desirable. Unsure how to define that which is lost, he rejects the change that he cannot

S. Mukherji · R. Tomlin (*)  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_1

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grasp and the disorienting equivalence that money can effect between price and merit‚ the worthless and the value-laden. Timon’s lament for the old bonds of loyalty and friendship which have been displaced and corrupted by the market has a long legacy in modern political economy. Indeed, the field of economic literary criticism may be said to have begun with Karl Marx’s comments on how astutely Shakespeare depicts the real nature of money, ‘the bond of all bonds’, in Timon of Athens (in The Power of Money, 1844).1 Drawing on what he sees as Shakespeare’s intuitive understanding of the transformative property of money, Marx calls it ‘the alienated ability of mankind’, which ‘translates’ our wishes ‘from their […] imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life’, and turns one’s incapacities ‘into their contrary’ (139–40). Marx not only identifies what he calls ‘the creative power’ of economic agency, using Goethe and Shakespeare to make his point, but also delineates what, in recent times, Theodore Leinwand has termed ‘affective economies’.2 It is in this context that the potential of money for negative transformations—its distortive character—is articulated most eloquently, and along with it, its generically amphibian nature. Marx ends his reflections on the universal fungibility of money, somewhat surprisingly, with an analogy with love: If you love without evoking love in return […]; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent—a misfortune. (140)

The asymmetries of owing and owning in our emotional lives, and the epistemic and cognitive implications of debt, trust, mortgaging and forfeiting that pervade the affective ecologies of early modern literature, find their focus, in Marx’s discussion, in the sphere of interpersonal relationships. Like love, money is seen to find its operative principle in a dialectical context, an economy of exchange. But, as literary works suggest, and as the essays in this volume demonstrate, the dialogue between emotion and calculation, whether in relations between human beings, or between man and God, can translate incommensuration in one of two ways: into a profound emptiness, as in Marx’s vision, or into a sublime refusal of the economics of reciprocity and its cancellation of affirmative debt. Although it complicates the Marxian analogy between money and love, and prises apart value and valuation, gift

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and commodity, this duality nonetheless goes to the heart of Marx’s intuition of the wider paradox of money: that it ‘confounds and confuses all things’ and ‘is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace’ (138). Money transforms love into hate and hate into love, and it is exchanged not just for any specific thing or an essential human power, but ‘for the entire objective world of man and nature’ (140). The poetic imagination is drawn to productive paradox, alive not only to the ironies of the fungibility of money, but also its potential for pathos and power, abjection and embarrassment: the drama of bondage in its many senses. The figure of Timon, like the play of Timon as a whole, embodies a paradox that is emblematic of the wealth that determines fortune in the action: they are both profuse and sparse, abundant and economical, liberal and misanthropic, intimating a curious affinity between content and form. Paradox, however, goes beyond the functions of money in the world and its representational purchase: it is inherent to its ontological nature. At once metal and metaphor, tangible and abstract, visible and invisible, stable and fluid, value is a creature of thresholds: located at interfaces at which knowing, knowingness and unknowing dance around one another, where certitudes are radically destabilised, and change fractures exchange.3 Change and Exchange seeks to place literature at the centre of early modern economic knowledge. The ‘literary’, for our purposes, includes both imaginative writing across diverse forms and genres, and literary strategies and devices used by writers across disciplines of knowing: the thread connecting the volumes in ‘Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern England’, the series to which this book belongs. Uniting the affective and the discursive, both in the imaginative content of early modern economics and in our own critical methodologies, this book’s intervention in the history of early modern epistemology is distinct. It seeks to grasp the nature of the ‘economic’, an amorphous body of concepts and practices that cannot be said to have laid claim to a clearly defined disciplinary identity until its emergence as ‘political economy’ in the eighteenth century. Our authors bring the emergent category of the ‘economic’ into dialogue with the pre-modern notion of oeconomia, a concept which originated with the ancient Greeks, and which, in the early modern period, owed much to the Aristotelian and p ­ seudoAristotelian traditions. Oeconomia in the Renaissance (much like the ancient Greek meaning of oikonomia) referred chiefly to the science or art of the regulation (nomos) of the household (oikos): its boundaries,

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resources and occupants; scarcity and excess; ingress and egress. This definition contains the potential for a dispensation that straddles the physical and the metaphysical, the material and the mental, the domestic and the political. The essays in this volume accommodate the full range of meanings and associations that ‘economy’ in the early modern world brought together. The range of socioeconomic changes that took place in early modern England corresponds to the historiographical disagreements over their definition. The more notable movements—sometimes pulling in opposite directions—included a sudden expansion of trade routes and colonial ventures; the formation of joint stock companies; the establishment of currency exchanges; enclosure, land rationalisation and the loss of common rights; urbanisation, driven by an influx of landless rural labourers in search of work; large-scale skilled immigration, especially from the Low Countries; the formation of a wage-economy and cash-nexus; the rise and fall of monopolies; technological innovation leading to capital investment and speculation; the invention of insurance; crises caused by inflation and war; and the persistence and fraught re-configuration of older forms of economic relation, such as social credit and trust. Though shifts such as these present challenges to historical description, it is easy enough to see that procedures of valuation, and the concept of value itself, were drastically altered over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Developments in economic relations were clearly felt, even if they were not formulated or hardened into a normative science. While denotation lagged behind experience, expressive language offered new ways of thinking through, and finding an idiom for, processes of change and exchange that intertwined personal, interpersonal, social and commercial dimensions. The intense pressure placed on language by new modes of experience and emerging ‘economic’ concepts had rich imaginative implications. Indeed, the crisis of terminology may be seen to have triggered a literary questioning of economic processes as epistemological and ethical conundrums. While changes in economic thinking and practice entailed certain epistemic recalibrations, as well as generating new uncertainties, ‘economics’ in this period possessed no systematic epistemology of the kind available, for example, to theology, law or natural philosophy. Even as older practices of property ownership, wealth creation and economic exchange gradually gave way to more recognisably capitalist (‘modern’) forms, ‘economic science’—as it came to be called from

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the nineteenth century onwards—has continued to be what, in our own period, Michel Foucault called an ‘an obscure knowledge’.4 But the early modern shifts which Marx described as the invention and generalisation of exchange value are nonetheless rewritten by Foucault as a new episteme: a transition in the way knowledge itself was produced, communicated, and digested. ‘The signs of exchange’, he tells us, ‘are sustained by the dark, dangerous, and accursed glitter of metal’. The glitter is ‘equivocal’ because it ‘reproduces in the depths of the earth that other glitter that sings at the far end of the night’; it is ‘inverted happiness’.5 For Foucault, there was no such thing as ‘political economy’ before the end of the eighteenth century; there was only ‘wealth analysis’. He identifies a sudden change in s­eventeenth-century wealth analysis: the circulation of wealth produced more money and, through repeated exchange, the perception of the intrinsic worth of precious metals slipped from the centre of this analytic domain. Without endorsing Foucault’s identification of a sudden discontinuity, which can perhaps only succeed when abetted by the lyricism of his prose, we share the intuition that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century change and exchange produced a range of epistemic crises. Monetary exchanges informed the way in which signs were deemed to acquire value from their relation to other signs, with implications for literary methods such as metaphor and allegory.6 Foucault’s argument that transformations of the economic sphere went hand-inhand with transformations of knowledge and symbolic systems remains deeply influential and has survived historicist criticism of his work. The correspondence between ‘the mode of economic exchange and the mode of signifying exchange’, reiterated by JeanJoseph Goux in Symbolic Economies (1990), has been described by David Hawkes as ‘the basic, definitive and perhaps the only assumption shared by all new economic critics’.7 Metaphor, as an exchange of words in the transference of one meaning for another, or what George Puttenham in his The Arte of English Poesie (1589) called ‘an inversion of sence by transport’, can itself be thought of as an economy; conversely, the ‘economic’ often tends towards the ­metaphorical.8 Thus, the economic configuration of experience has a literary kernel, which animates and perturbs imaginative writing. In his essay ‘On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare’ (2003), Douglas Bruster divided the approaches of the so-called New Economic Criticism into ‘the reckoned’ (representing the

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rational, practical, calculated, specific, homo economicus) and ‘the rash’ (standing in for the irrational, thematic, intuited, general, homo ludens).9 In this analysis, ‘reckoned’ criticism posits ‘the economic’ as a series of objective relationships; ‘rash’ criticism treats the ‘economic’ as a metaphor encompassing the affective dimensions of risk, loss, and uncertainty in the face of radical economic change. In the same volume, David Hawkes calls this out as ‘a radically false dichotomy’, and an anachronistic one, because economic terms in this period cannot be defined in a way that isolates them from the context of the human relations which gave meaning and form to debt, trust, risk, profit, loss, surety and indeed to money itself. Perhaps the two positions can meet in Bruster’s intuition that this antinomy is reinforced by disciplinary expectations; perhaps the binary is even partly caused by a slippage between primary experience and critical response across a gulf of time—a function of a subtle discord between contemporary methodologies and the composite nature of early modern economic realities. If so, literary critical approaches, whether applied to traditional literary texts such as plays or to ‘economic’ texts such as the discursive advertisement for A Very Rich Lotterie Generall (1567), or to a hybrid text such as a merchant’s prayer, might offer us tools for beginning to bridge that gap, and to address a crisis of vocabulary. Change and Exchange takes up the challenge of expanding the language we use to grasp the diversity and layeredness of early modern economic ­experience—a task which Bruster proposed at the end of his essay.10 Ever since Jean Christophe Agnew characterised the changing economy of the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth century as a ­‘precarious equilibrium’, and a locus of ‘bewilderment’ and ‘distress’, scholars of literature and culture have begun to consider an increasingly wide range of affective responses to economic change.11 An initial focus on the cultural anxieties provoked by that change has been moderated and complicated as seminal works in social and economic history have been absorbed by literary and cultural studies. For instance, since Craig Muldrew’s field-changing book, The Economy of Obligation, showed how early modern culture was permeated by credit relations determined by dimensions of social experience with indefinite affective properties, literary criticism has found new ways of tapping into early modern meanings of risk and trust, in relation to the experiential dimensions of more calculative categories such as contract and account.12 Venture is no longer separable from adventure, or insurance from ensuring, just as it is no longer possible to unsee what Vera Keller

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unearths in this volume as the shared terrain of early modern critical discourses about science, trade, politics and poetry, united by the metaphor of the marketplace—a perceptual framework that grew directly out of transactional structures that informed all of these spheres and social activities. Attuned to the fluidity and polysemy of nascent discourses, this volume conceives the ‘economic’ broadly, translating economic criticism into a conversation around the themes of change and exchange. These shape the wider focus of the series on epistemic transactions into certain key questions. What was an early modern ‘transaction’ and how was it changing? How did economies of the marketplace come into dialogue with economies of representation? What processes do literary engagements reveal that might elude a conventional history of the period’s economic developments? And, crucially, how was knowledge implicated in these processes? What is the relationship between the distinct knowledges made available by literary and ‘economic’ material? Are aesthetic and economic spheres alternative, or equivalent, or contrapuntal sites for transactions and evaluations? How is meaning constructed through early modern economic thinking? And conversely, how does economic thinking participate in a wider discourse of early modern knowing? The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and the forms of representation.13 In the process, they map out the terrains of vexation, fear, anger, disgust and desire associated with the economic by engaging with the ethical, affective, cognitive and mimetic implications of early modern change and exchange.

Change and Exchange The cover-image to this volume, a portrait variously attributed to Dosso Dossi (1489–1542) and Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480–1557), is widely believed to show the influential Renaissance merchant-banker Jacob Fugger of Augsberg (1459–1525)—a man of extraordinary wealth— testing the veracity of his small change by measuring it against the proper weight.14 The symmetry of his impassive face and the equipoise of his head seem to supplement the imbalance of his delicate scales

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with the promise of equivalence. About the time that the Fuggers were developing their business, a system of keeping accounts by ‘doubleentry’ was being developed in Italy, a system which worked through corresponding entries of debit and credit on equal and opposite pages. Indeed, Jacob is said to have been among its earliest users. The contents of the ­ account-book, with its opposed yet mutually balancing figures, was matched by its physical form: pages with a matching layout and identical dimensions facing each other. It was all about ­precisely balancing one’s accounts—an activity premised on the conviction that every financial transaction has an equal and opposite impact on the two accounts—one debit, one credit.15 It also marked the vital point at which commerce and the new mathematics met, foregrounding measurability as a value, and turning accounting into both a method and a symbol of fiscal transparency and mercantile credit.16 Whether or not the book on the table in front of him is an account-book, the portrait captures the sitter’s status as a trustworthy entrepreneurial financier of the new mercantile world. It also demonstrates how objects could be used to fashion the commercial subject in portraiture, and how legal and economic values were intertwined in the visual rhetoric of that project. The judicial resonance of the iconography of scales—the equal weighing of evidence—reinforces the evocation of the morality of profit and the precision of book-keeping. The entangled rhetoric of accounting and legal reckoning was not confined to merchants’ portraits. It seeped into affective expression and poetic articulations of selfhood: witness the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, who recounts an emotional history to account for his unpaid debts at a courtroom of the soul: summoning the ‘remembrance of things past’ to a ‘sessions of sweet silent thought’ to ‘new pay’ ‘the sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan’ (ll.2, 1, 12, 11); or Anthony Munday’s prose romance, Zelauto—a significant influence on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—which bleeds the diction of fiscal accounting into that of c­haracter-judgment: ‘is he any man of accoumpt; or of such estimation, as to fight in this quarrell taken in hand?’17 Language is, after all, an economy we use, one that both flaunts and fractures its currency of legibility. What intrigues us about the Dossi (or Lotto) portrait, then, is the way in which the assumed equation between commensuration and equity, object and objectivity, and indeed change and exchange, is at once staged and questioned, even as fact is shown to be inextricable from fabrication. The tentative configuration

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of coins, scales and hands, meanwhile, conveys the precarity of measure, balance and equivalence. Just as selfhood is shown to be both performable through, and irreducible to, the material accoutrements of mercantile credit, the pictorial language complicates the economically inflected values that constitute it. For a literary counterpart, think of the characterisation of Iachimo, the Italian(ate) aesthete of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Prowling at night in the sleeping Imogen’s bedchamber, he converts the spectre of ravishment into ravishing description as he peruses the items which he notes ‘t’ enrich [his] inventory’ (II.ii.30). In the process there are yet more tropic exchanges: her lips, ‘[r]ubies unparagon’d’ (17), and the mole on her breast, ‘like the crimson drops / I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip’ (38–39), are translated into the same category of preciousness as the bracelet he slips off her arm. A potential rapist is transformed into an art connoisseur lovingly collecting priceless miniatures, as erotic jouissance is displaced into narrative frisson. It is no accident that Iachimo pops out of a half-open trunk, almost a correlative to the other object suggestively h ­ alf-closed in the scene—Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with ‘[leaf] turned down’ (if we are to believe Iachimo) ‘[w]here Philomele gave up’ (46). The peculiar perversity of the scene derives from, instead of being diverted by, its metamorphic refinements. In a different key, Ariel’s song in The Tempest describes and effects the transformation of Ferdinand’s father’s supposedly drowned body into non-human artefacts, rendering the macabre expensive and artificial—‘rich and strange’; his bones turn into coral, his eyes into pearls (I.ii.397–402). The function of art in transforming death, sorrow and loss into exquisite objects goes back to an early Shakespearean preoccupation: in Venus and Adonis, Venus’ tears are ‘like pearls in glass’ (980), while her final possession of Adonis turns him into ‘love’s flow’r’ (1188)—white and purple as the blood trickling down his fair flank from the fatal goring by a boar. This is the young, virtuosic Shakespeare, channelling Ovid, who writes about horror after horror in elegant, effortless verse; in whom evanescent forms transmute fluently into self-renewing, cyclical or imperishable ones, through self-delighting artistic narration. But there is no change of essence—rather, an ironically tragic continuity erased by cool, crystalline, metamorphic poetry. The dead Phaeton’s grieving sisters are turned into trees, but their ‘gummy tears’ become amber: ‘things of price / To decke the daintie dames of Rome and make them fine and nice’.18 Preciousness elides affective cost—the price of change—in a poetic of exchange.

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Cymbeline brings poetics, economics and law together in a specifically worldly way when Iachimo draws on his book-keeping to recount the scene and account for his claim to Posthumus that he has enjoyed Imogen, his wife. He offers the bracelet in exchange for his ring (both gold and virginity), as it were, to prove his successful seduction of her and thereby to win a wager which the two men had made. His meticulous use of his ledger to persuade his target audience of his credit and credibility works within the dramatic situation, but alerts us to his unreliability, his lack of probity, as a witness. And as the ‘natural notes about [Imogen’s] body’ (II.ii.28) become, through Iachimo’s ­note-taking, ‘meaner moveables’ (29) that travel seamlessly out of the intimate sanctity of the bedchamber, first into an informal courtroom and then to the testimonial scene in the king’s court, we feel the cost of commodification: things of true price are estranged from their natural value to become substitutable objects that can be measured against equivalent quantities.19 Bradley Ryner’s essay in this volume taps precisely into the ambiguity of such interchanges. The plays by Richard Brome that he discusses are shown to prise apart desire and its material anchors, as well as to question the absolute fungibility of the commodity form on which the comic resolution is premised. The genesis of speculation, the distinct mode of comprehension and valuation in these plays, is traced directly back to newly available networks of commercial transactions. Ryner’s reading posits a certain unknowing as a condition for comedy, but also shows it being proffered with a self-awareness that laces indistinction and transformability with epistemological and ontological doubt. Thus, his argument goes to the heart of the ethical and representational dubiousness of equivalence: the alienating change that the comfort of exchange conceals. Exchange has the paradox of metamorphosis written into its structure in more ways than one. As George Herbert intuits in his sonnet on ‘Avarice’ (1633), written as an address to money itself: ‘Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich; / And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch’.20 Montaigne tunes into the irony of this contradiction in ‘An Apology for Raimond Sebond’: And the Christian beseecheth God, that his will may be done, least he should fall into that inconvenience, which Poets faine of King Midas: who requested of the Gods, that whatsoever he toucht, might be converted into gold: his praiers were heard, his wine was gold, his bread gold, the

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feathers of his bed, his shirt, and his garments were turned into gold, so that he found himselfe overwhelmed in the injoying of his desire, and being enrich’t with an intollerable commoditie, he must now unpray his prayers.21

Montaigne here adapts Ovid’s account of King Midas’ choice of gift to collapse a myth of material conversion into an allegory of knowledge. Transformation—both fantasy and reality—becomes a parable of méconnaissance: the intellect misrecognising its own freedom as the means of obtaining satisfaction. ‘To crave honours and charges of them’, Montaigne continues, ‘is to request them to cast you in some battle, or play at hazard, or some such thing, whereof the event is unknown to you, and the fruit uncertain’; just as he finds the prestigious Ordre de St Michel—coveted and obtained—‘abased’ in acquisition, ‘depressed […] even unto my shoulders and under’.22 Happiness, Montaigne suggests, is achieved not by striving for the means to make those changes and exchanges that seem most likely to yield it, but by surrendering to the experiences given to us. Midas had received his reward from Dionysus for his hospitality to the god’s follower Silenus (or Silenos). In an alternative version of the story, the king, glutted with wealth but restless in his quest for knowledge, captured a drunk Silenus to interrogate him about the meaning of life, as Silenus was supposed to possess secret and prophetic wisdom when intoxicated.23 Transposing that moment, Montaigne synthesises the desire for knowledge and the acquisition of wealth to address emergent sixteenth-century rationalism: ‘The weaknesse of our judgement, helpes us more than our strength’.24 Midas realised his mistake when he tried, and found himself unable, to eat food. Aristotle observes by hypallage—a figure of syntactic exchange—the way in which Midas’ literal insatiability could be interpreted back into his ‘insatiable prayer’ which ‘turned everything that was set before him into gold’.25 Montaigne’s reading follows suit, suggesting that it was the prayer or wish itself, rooted in the presumption that human reason could satisfy human ends, that expressed the fundamental inability of Midas to nourish himself. The golden touch thus becomes an allegory not only for avarice but for the way we misconceive the relation between our agency and the transformations we want and seem to effect. As Ryner reflects, in relation to Brome’s dramatic exploration of the commercial geography of London, ‘what appears to be the fulfillment of desire through exchange might instead be an illusion that could be dispelled by greater knowledge’. Thus, Montaigne asserts that ‘it is for our Christian faith, not for [man’s] Stoicke vertue to pretend or aspire to [the] divine

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Metamorphosis, or miraculous transmutation’, for truth and order can only be sensed, never perfectly known.26 But ‘wondrous exchange’, as Torrance Kirby shows, has more to it, in Reformation culture, than getting cause and effect wrong. Kirby’s essay unearths the deep roots of the contractual model of exchange for devotional practice in the Judæo-Christian tradition, and traces its entwinement with the theology of conversion—a crucial discursive context for the early modern understanding of change. This intersection illuminates the particular dynamic between change and exchange in the economy of salvation, and the specific temporal relation that defines the epistemic nature of repentance as an inward turn—man’s re-turn to God in response to God’s turn to man, in which passive cognition becomes a prior condition for habitual virtue. This reversal of the Aristotelian ethical order‚ most strikingly formulated in the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli‚ has subversive implications for the Renaissance mercantile logic—and valuation—of measure and proportion. For it is asymmetry that makes the sacramental transaction a sublime trade-off. The defiance of the economics of reciprocity in ‘angelic commerce’ is premised precisely on the inequality of the exchange. Our debt to God is infinite and so only God can repay it, by taking on our nature. Going back to St. Anselm, this opposition of grace to desert receives ­paradigm-shifting articulations in this period, resulting in radically alternative economies: witness the early reformer William Tyndale’s formulations of our superfluities, most notably in The Parable of the Wicked Mammon.27 But there is also a relational idea implicit in Kirby’s argument: when, for instance, he evokes Richard Hooker’s intuition of God’s need for man for the realisation of His own power and glory. At our end, the yield of hierarchical distance is the absolute freedom of gift. Yet one also recalls the anguished cry of Herbert’s devotee: ‘O rack me not to such a vast extent; / Those distances belong to thee’ (‘Temper 1’).28 The divine economy is, as Kirby suggests, entangled with moral ontology; but it also has affective implications that play out in the poetry of the period.29 Ending where Kirby begins, with a glimmer of a spiritual oeconomia, Paul Yachnin’s essay finds and explores, mainly in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a meditation on human freedom which is crucially bound up with debt, even premised on it; an ecology of liberty that is inalienably interpersonal and communitarian, anticipating Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the inextricability of freedom from public life. Yachnin’s unpacking of this philosophical ideal is moored in delicate and minutely attentive

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readings—such as his analysis of the mutuality of ‘piercing’ in the theology and poetics of prayer, whether in Prospero’s epilogue or Herbert’s ‘Prayer 1’. Attuned to the affective scope of transaction in ways that recall Kirby’s analysis of the dialectic of devotional exchange, the essay also compasses the paradox of inadequation at the heart of Kirby’s subject in its own perception of a freeing—because unrepayable—debt. But Yachnin takes his argument in a different direction, provocatively placing The Tempest at the threshold between two modernities, and reading the cultural meaning of this location in the light of the alternative, intersecting economies that the play-world begets. These internal economies—trade in material goods and traffic in human beings, alongside the troublingly legitimising exchange of violent power relations with the language of debt and credit—are shown, in turn, to enter into barter with larger economic phenomena in the world outside, most notably in the marketplace of art and intellect. These economies are ‘strange’ in so much as they estrange the familiar notion of policy-based economics into imaginative dispensations. In this they chime with the ‘strange commodities’ that change hands to initiate a range of conversions (sexual, religious and social) in Adam Zucker’s reading of Massinger. In Yachnin, the economies themselves are mobile, looking outward and forward to the transhistorical and transcultural exchange of the play as a whole, which will find its freedom as well as its dues not only in one ‘common public space’ (Arendt) but across many such spaces. The ‘gallant ship’ (5.1.237), ‘bare island’ (Epilogue, 8) and playhouse expand and extend into globalised worlds of change and exchange that teem in the mind. This final move of the argument, echoing the final move of The Tempest, comes to rest, restlessly, on the duality of literary debt itself: its human position between ‘sails’ and ‘bands’ (9, 11), release and confinement; between lightness and weight, underwriting and undermining, conversion and transaction. If the economies Yachnin brings to light are ‘strange’, the one Ayesha Mukherjee explores is demystified and re-located in its emphatically familiar early modern interdiscursive context: the science of alchemy. Conversional traffic gains a curious perspective in her focus on Hugh Platt (1552–1608), a collector and dispenser of alchemical knowledge and an iconic spokesman for the art of ‘changing one Element into another’. In unpacking the inherently paradoxical nature of alchemical language, Mukherjee unpicks the semantic exchanges that were inherent in it, and teases out the oppositional character of alchemical

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process. Duality is shown to have both constituted and destabilised the foundation of alchemy, which used the mechanics of metaphor to tap into the productive ambivalence of the metamorphic imagination itself. Crucially for this volume’s collaborative attempt to grasp the cultural remit and scope of change and exchange at this time, this essay shows how alchemical knowledge intersected with a variety of other domains of knowledge—theology, natural philosophy, gardening, husbandry, domestic economy and commerce. What Mukherjee compellingly brings to light is the structural affinity between poetic and alchemical thought, and how that conjunction facilitated Platt’s generative engagement with the fault lines of late-humanist knowledge economies. Rather than breeding what Katherine Eggert calls ‘disknowledge’, these active, determined and productive negotiations added depth to the texture of contemporary knowledge-making.30 Contrary to a still-persistent critical orthodoxy, however, Platt’s discursive and practical strategies are shown to have been far from arcane. Through a network of commercial, textual and epistemic exchanges, Platt’s world of alchemical changes was continuous with the quotidian world of household management, medicine and trade, tapping into local communities and wider socioeconomic cross-currents. While alchemy was reshaping the esoteric for new markets and publics, such merchandising was seen as dangerous to prayer, as Ceri Sullivan establishes in her essay. Although, like Platt’s works, private prayers newly modelled spiritual opportunities and risks in trade by using everyday reality as their frame of reference, the application of the mercantile register to spiritual subjects, especially on the matter of ‘prevalence’— the assurance of efficacy increasingly premised on a contractual notion of prayer—was often felt to be dubious and uncomfortable. While most of the essays in this collection find a striking porosity between matter and metaphor in the discursive economies that they discuss, Sullivan’s texts are anxious to preserve the boundary: the affective mutuality of early modern prayer in Yachnin’s account is rendered safely metaphorical in merchants’ prayers, as God can only seem—‘as it were’—to be moved. Exchange ought only to be virtual, since the capacity for prayer itself is meant to be God’s gift, or rather, God’s ‘ordinary means’ of giving. To bargain with God would be to set him measurable, temporal targets which are inimical to the nature of divinity: the necessary gulf between God and man in the salvific economy of which Kirby reminds us proves equally crucial for the legitimacy of merchants’

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prayers, albeit in a distinct paradigm. The logic of evidence inherent in ‘prevalent’ prayers was equally problematic at this intersection of the godly and the worldly. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, Measure for Measure and Henry V provide Sullivan with her case studies for the intervention of the theatre in the ensuing debate over the rights and wrongs of trading in prayer and the temptations and pitfalls of doing deals with God. They are also shown to stage the cultural context for the new genre of advice on the composition of lay private prayers—seen as a type of skilled occupation—which is located in a conflicted experience of the shift from the uncertainties of grace to the certitude of reckoning. The emergence of new forms as a means of grasping at q ­uasieconomic objects of knowledge, or reacting to changes in oeconomic thinking in a wider sense, features also in Vera Keller’s and Valerie Hayaert’s essays. At first glance, the satire of the Parnassian press explored by Keller, which was directed at worldly authority and its abuses, seems opposed in attitude to the sincerity of the prayer manuals discussed by Sullivan. However, we are shown how this novel genre was similarly concerned with the ethical effect of the dominance of the marketplace, even as it won commercial success within it. Keller’s essay moves between the enormous literary market in which Trajano Boccalini’s Advertisements from Parnassus was implicated, and the market as it features in the works themselves. The fictional Parnassus emerges as ‘an interactive scribal and print locus of social, political and aesthetic criticism’ that often operates in ‘a carnivalesque mode’, adopting or reflecting the ritual violence of the marketplace of early modern Europe. The affective language of the genre is shown to work in tandem—and in tension—with the increasingly influential forces of financial exchange. In a methodologically corrective move, Keller reunites exchanged objects with s­eventeenth-century ideas of exchange, warning against the recent trend, in the history of science, of turning to commercial history to the exclusion of the rich history of metaphorical marketplaces. Keller’s analysis of the borrowing and embellishment of market motifs within Parnassian texts suggests how this economically determined genre in turn generates an economy of related cultural productions—not unlike the performance of prayer on stage. The genre Hayaert throws light on is the emblem book, a form that has been traditionally as wary of the excesses of economic exchange as prayer manuals. Hayaert delineates how resistance to the market played a part in the way judicial emblem books positioned themselves

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in a gift economy. But here too, conflict is complicated by complicities. An emblem, when turned into a trademark, could be a ‘valuable asset’ to a printer. Meanwhile, the mobile object that the legal emblem book is in this period makes it reliably polysemous, and resistant to straightforward identification either as an economic good or a simple gift. Indeed, as explicated by Hayaert, such books seem to exemplify the dialectic between the economic and the semiotic that Foucault and Goux delineate. The emblematists’ aesthetic representations of oeconomia transmit moral arguments concerning the use and abuse of wealth, the social value of private virtues, and the proper stewardship of a nation’s resources; the cultural surplus produced by economic exchange is represented visually for the careful viewer and reader, and the relation between mercantile profit and practical use is continually negotiated. Ultimately, Hayaert alerts us to the centrality of judicial emblems in the development of an early modern theory of symbolic capital, which brought together law, early economics and visual imagination, and which tells us a great deal about humanist valuations of the ‘knowledge economy’. Rebecca Tomlin addresses the use of economic metaphor both to express excess and to allow for an unspoken lack. In the absence of an existing discourse, she argues, the difficulty of capturing what may be felt as experience—of unsatisfied desire for material possessions, for instance, or of unease at changing social relationships—drove speculations and innovations in literary expression, and in turn intensified the complexity of poetic language. She analyses the literary texture of Thomas Heywood’s play, Edward IV, to show how it captures at once the surplus and the absence of economic change. Metaphor emerges as a valuable yet deceptive resource for expressing affect and experience, here involving anxieties about exchange, fungibility and commodification of people. The play, in Tomlin’s reading, becomes an invitation to the audience to interrogate economic shifts as an ethical challenge, locating the theatre in the same public sphere as the Royal Exchange and the marketplace, since it is entwined with these in effecting, as well as debating, change and exchange. Affect is difficult to comprehend when it is difficult to express. Adam Zucker explores how economic experience shaped structures of feeling, and asks how we might approach the eloquent inaccessibilities of a new sensibility, as it was provocatively staged by early modern ‘marketplace drama’. In a bold, methodologically urgent, attempt to bring ‘the

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affective turn’ into dialogue with economic criticism and the historicist imagination, Zucker works with the productive blind spots that confront us in these texts from the past. Focusing on the contact zone between art and the economy, he puts the unknowable and the unfeelable, together with the elusive affect of knowingness, under the spotlight as functional components of an alternative episteme. A capacity for dwelling in ‘vexedness’ becomes a key element of the interpretative strategy called for by such texts, anticipating, as it were, Keats’s formulation of ‘negative capability’.31 Zucker relates this to a diachronic intuition about the mystery of how economic choices unfold in time, an awareness he sees as written into the drama’s treatment of economic affect and agency. The chronological dimension of Zucker’s arguments resonates with Lisa Lajous’s excavation of the prehistory of mathematical probability in early modern England’s economically inflected understanding of randomness. Antecedents to later disciplinary formulations, as Lajous shows, can be gleaned from a variety of discursive practices, but literature again has a key part to play in giving form to the emergence of certain epistemological categories that are otherwise hard to pin down; indeed, even finding a local habitation and a name for placeless and unnameable cognitive affects. Lajous reflects on the ways in which the drama explores the contradictions inherent in profitable risk to engage with new cognitive approaches to the world. From providential lots to secular lotteries, an epistemological shift is shown to inflect the cultural and imaginative life of early modern England. But it is through a revisionist reading of the uses of chance in Shakespeare’s Belmont in The Merchant of Venice that Lajous uncovers the complex semiotics of lottery devices in the wider dramatic and discursive context, and traces the secularising function of the emergent culture of hazard and chance. In the process, her reading complicates any easy equivalence presupposed—whether rhetorically or by a logic of economic redistribution—in an exchange of material stakes for greater material gain. Here it dovetails with Bradley Ryner’s perception of the irreducible ironies of ‘the boundless exchanges promised by the commodity form’. Lajous’s analysis also speaks to Sullivan’s reading of prayers as ‘a marine insurance policy’, offering insights into the relation between economic insurance and emotional surety, or the fantasy of such surety. Unpredictability and uncertainty form a thread through our volume, one which Valerie Forman picks up on in her Afterword. As Zucker puts it, ‘the moment of choice for any economic agent is not likely to

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be well-informed […]. Human beings cannot properly or proleptically feel our future feelings’. Sullivan pauses on the significant energies spent on learning to pray in such a way as to confront that uncertainty. Thus Montaigne, at the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation, can be heard strangely echoing in the prayers of Protestant England, as religion attempted en bloc to resist the emergent rationalism which was purporting to explain and clarify the business of everyday gains and losses. That questions around foresight and planning were becoming the central concerns of early modern practical reason may have been a result of the more complex economic and social networks which were developing internationally. As Norbert Elias wrote in The Civilizing Process, the expansion of Western economic systems and networks produced a corresponding ‘attunement of human conduct over wider areas and foresight over longer chains of actions than ever before’. There was also a corresponding emphasis on ‘the strength of self-control and the permanence of compulsion, affect-inhibition and drive-control, which life at the centres of this network imposes’.32 This almost imperceptibly growing fusion of the human agent’s moral virtue with their ability to marshal material with future ends in mind often transacted with conservative, and much older, ideas pertaining to oeconomic management. Hayaert observes that oeconomia expressed ‘a mindset, a forma mentis which, through careful measurements and rigorous comparative judgements, came to acquire habits not only apt for the management of the household, but as well for affairs of much wider concerns’. In a recent study of early modern women’s economic agency, Alexandra Shepard relates a legal case from York in 1602 in which witnesses were invited to comment on whether a woman called Jane Paite had ‘carefullie & with great paines governed her house & that by her great diligence & foresight the same hath bene mainteyned & the goods encereased’.33 Little wonder then, that so much anxiety seems to orbit what Zucker calls the ‘unknowable materials’ of early modern drama. This makes Forman’s provocation all the more compelling: asking how this volume’s collective excavation of the past calls upon us to imagine the economies, and indeed the oeconomia, of the future. The essays are organised in three sections. The first section—‘Generic Conversions’—attends to the ways in which new social forms and economic processes engender new genres. In her Tragicomic Redemptions, Valerie Forman showed the ‘dialectical’ relationship which exists between a particular genre and specific economic theories and practices.34 The logic of a

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genre can, as she demonstrated there, be a ‘historical response’ to emerging practices of overseas trade and new theories of value: the early seventeenthcentury theatre both staged and tested the relation between the shaping idea of redemption inherent to tragicomedy and the productive rematerialisation of loss at the core of contemporary theories of investment. The essays in the first section of our book explore the dynamic between literary forms and the economic formations of change and exchange. The second section—‘Affective Changes’—draws together essays exploring how an established form, drama, engaged freshly urgent but still dynamically expanding concepts: verbalising, embodying and performing them. But what ties the essays together at a deeper, thematic level is their intuition of the ways in which new economic relations made available certain structures of feeling and modes of knowing, and how the period wrestled to give these expressive form. These essays amount, in effect, to a segment of a history of mentalities. The final section—‘Wondrous Exchanges’—brings together essays especially interested in early modern economies of transformation across distinct but cognate domains of knowing. But these categories are largely practical, partly artificial and inevitably limiting. Sullivan’s exposition of private prayers as a craft of the mind, for instance, or Hayaert’s analysis of mental operations in a culture of gift-giving, could just as easily belong with Ryner’s and Zucker’s, which suggest distinct modes of comprehension or conditions of knowing that are intimately bound up with economic experience. Kirby, Hayaert, Mukherjee and Sullivan could well have been part of the same group, in that they go beyond the interrelation of economic life and literary work to address the interdisciplinary penumbra that surrounds it. They bring back into sight the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and theology, law and natural philosophy on the other, that imaginative practice bridges and illuminates. In the process, they widen the framework against which economic knowledge can be understood as an ‘object’ that is part of a shared traffic as well as differentiated according to domain and method. The boundaries between the sections of this volume, accordingly, are crossed, and spoken across, in keeping with the larger aim of the Crossroads of Knowledge series. Acknowledgements   Subha Mukherji would like to thank Dunstan Roberts, Jason Scott-Warren and Adam Zucker for commenting on the draft of the Introduction.

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Notes

1. Karl Marx, ‘The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society’, in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), pp. 135–40 (p. 138). 2. Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Introduction, pp. 1–12. 3. For an acute discussion of money as an object vacillating between intrinsic and extrinsic value, see Stephen Deng, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 182. 5. Ibid., p. 188. 6. Ibid., pp. 180–95 and passim. 7. David Hawkes, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015), p. 70. Hawkes offers an expansive discussion of the resonance of early modern economic concepts beyond their financial significances, and of the chiastic movements between economics and literature in critical and historical writing; see especially Chapter 5 (pp. 67–88). For an influential early discussion of the figurative remit of the term ‘economy’, see Kurt Heinzelman, The Economies of the Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). Also relevant here is Deirdre McCloskey, Economics as Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 8. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), sig. S2v (p. 128). 9.  Douglas Bruster, ‘On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare’, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in the New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 67–77. 10. Bruster, ‘On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare’, pp. 75–76. For a seminal early gathering of essays on the relationship between economic value on the one hand, and discursive, social, political and intellectual values on the other, collectively reconfiguring ‘capital’ as both a discursive artefact and a historical phenomenon, see Henry S. Turner, The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). 11. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 8. 12. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998).

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13.  For a provocative—and newly timely—exploration of a cognate interdiscipline, see Jonathan Gil Harris’s unpacking of the somatic language of transnational trade: Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 14. The famous Fugger family of merchants held a near monopoly over the copper market in Europe and minted coins for circulation as currency. 15.  On the history and legacy of the double-entry book, see Jane ­Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). See also Katherine Hunt and Rebecca Tomlin, ed., Numbers in Early Modern Writing: Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 6 (2014), on the numerical culture of the Renaissance, and literary explorations of the cultural and imaginative implications of measurement and equivalence, among other related concepts. On mercantile accuracy, book-keeping and credit, see Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially Chapter 2, ‘Accommodating Merchants: Double-Entry Bookkeeping, Mercantile Expertise, and the Effect of Accuracy’. 16.  See James Aho, Confession and Book-Keeping: The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); see especially Chapter 7, ‘The Rhetoric of ­Double-Entry Book-Keeping’, pp. 63–79, on the truth claims of this variety of accounting, and for an influential exposition of their rhetoricity. See also Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of Nations (London: Allen Lane, 2014), pp. 19–28; and Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), pp. 23–43. 17. Anthony Munday, Zelauto: The Fountaine of Fame Erected in an Orcharde of Amorous Adventures (London: John Charlewood, 1580), sig. K3v (p. 78). 18. Ovid, Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1576, ed. John Frederick Nimes (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000), II, ll. 457–58 (p. 43). 19. For an acute, anthropologically informed, analysis of three staged properties in Cymbeline that are associated with women’s body-parts, and the changes of their value as they are subjected to social exchange and commodification, see Valerie Wayne, ‘The Woman’s Parts of Cymbeline’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 288–315. For the anthropological theory underlying Wayne’s reading, see Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University

22  S. MUKHERJI AND R. TOMLIN







Press, 1986). For a reading of circulating rings (as tokens) in a range of Shakespearean plays, including Cymbeline, in terms of the passage of objects from one domain to another, and their attendant transvaluations, see Subha Mukherji, ‘Of Rings, and Things, and Fine Array’ (Chapter 1), in Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 17–54, esp. pp. 37–45: ‘There’s more depends on it than the value’. For a study of the change in identity effected by the exchange of legally significant tokens in All’s Well That Ends Well, see Subha Mukherji, ‘“Lawfull Deede”: Consummation, Custom and Law in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well’, Shakespeare Survey, 49 (1996): 181–200; reprinted in Catherine Alexander and Stanley Wells, ed., Shakespeare and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 116–45; reprinted again in Catherine Alexander, ed., The Cambridge Shakespeare Library, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Volume 1: Shakespeare’s Times, Texts and Stages, pp. 270–87. 20.  George Herbert, ‘Avarice’, in The Temple. Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel, 1633), sig. C11r (p. 69). 21.  Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (London: Edward Blount, 1613), sig. 2F1r (p. 325). Cf. Michel de Montaigne, Essais de Montaigne, 4 vols (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1907–09), II, pp. 368–70; Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), II, pp. 126–29 [XI.85–133]. Thanks to George Oppitz-Trotman for contributing his thoughts on the Midas myth, Montaigne’s treatment of it, and its suggestiveness for our subject. 22. Montaigne, Essays, sigs 2F1r–v (pp. 325–26). 23.  See Lynn E. Roller, ‘The Legend of Midas’, Classical Antiquity, 2:2 (1983): 299–313 (esp. pp. 303–8). 24. Montaigne, Essays, sig. 2B2r (p. 279). 25. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), II, pp. 1986–2129 [§1257b.13–16]. 26. Montaigne, Essays, sig. 2G3r (p. 341). 27. William Tyndale, A Treatyse of the Justificacyon by Faith Only, Otherwise Called the Parable of the Wyked Mammon (Southwark: James Nicolson, 1536; first published 1528). 28. George Herbert, ‘The Temper’, in The Temple, sig. B12r (p. 47). 29. On the imaginative provenance of the idea of metamorphosis in vernacular and elite epistemologies from the Reformation to the seventeenth century, see Susan Wiseman, Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).



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30. Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 31. John Keats’s letter to his brothers, George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817: see The Letters of John Keats, ed. H.E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), I, pp. 193–94. 32. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 379. 33.  Cited in Alexandra Shepard, ‘Crediting Women in the Early Modern English Economy’, History Workshop Journal, 79:1 (2015): 1–24 (p. 17). 34. Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 17.

Bibliography Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University ­ Press, 2009). Aho, James, Confession and Book-Keeping: The Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006; first published 2005). Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), II, pp. 1986–2129. Bruster, Douglas, ‘On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare’, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in the New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 67–77. Deng, Stephen, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Eggert, Katherine, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Forman, Valerie, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2009). Gleeson-White, Jane, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

24  S. MUKHERJI AND R. TOMLIN Harris, Jonathan Gil, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Hawkes, David, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015). Heinzelman, Kurt, The Economies of the Imagination (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). Herbert, George, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge: Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel, 1633). Hunt, Katherine, and Rebecca Tomlin, eds., Numbers in Early Modern Writing: Journal of the Northern Renaissance, 6 (2014). https://www.northernrenaissance.org/editorial-numbers-in-early-modern-writing/. Keats, John, The Letters of John Keats, ed. H.E. Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). Leinwand, Theodore B., Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Marx, Karl, ‘The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society’, in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), pp. 135–40. McCloskey, Deirdre, Economics as Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). Montaigne, Michel de, Essays, trans. John Florio (London: Edward Blount, 1613). ———, Essais de Montaigne, 4 vols (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot et Cie, 1907–09). Mukherji, Subha, ‘“Lawfull Deede”: Consummation, Custom and Law in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well’, Shakespeare Survey, 49 (1996): 181–200. ———, Law and Representation in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Muldrew, Craig, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Munday, Anthony, Zelauto: The Fountaine of Fame Erected in an Orcharde of Amorous Adventures (London: John Charkwood, 1580). Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G.P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). ———, Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, 1576, ed. John Frederick Nimes (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000). Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589). Roller, Lynn E., ‘The Legend of Midas’, Classical Antiquity, 2:2 (1983): 299–313.

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Shepard, Alexandra, ‘Crediting Women in the Early Modern English Economy’, History Workshop Journal, 79:1 (2015): 1–24. Soll, Jacob, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Making and Breaking of Nations (London: Allen Lane, 2014). Sullivan, Ceri, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). Turner, Henry, The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). Wayne, Valerie, ‘The Woman’s Parts of Cymbeline’, in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 288–315. Wiseman, Susan, Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Generic Conversions

Some Economic Aspects to Private Prayer in Shakespeare Ceri Sullivan

A new subgenre developed around the end of the sixteenth century: advice on composing private prayer. Such prayers were expected to explore concrete events in daily life, such as the spiritual opportunities or risks of trade. Less laudably, an economic register was used in the hope that such prayer would prevail with God (referred to as ‘prevalency’ in the period’s devotional texts). This chapter first explores contrasting positions about bargaining in or through the medium of private prayer, and then sees how these are taken up by Shakespeare in Henry VIII, Measure for Measure, and Henry V.

The Art of Private Prayer The second wave of the Reformation in England moved from attempting to change Church structures to attempting to change Church members. The long-standing debate over the forms of public prayer rumbled on. However, increasing energy went into developing skills in private prayer.

C. Sullivan (*)  Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_2

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Collections of model prayers, as well as advice books for those intent on composing their own prayers, quadrupled in number between 1580 and 1620, the decades of Shakespeare’s working life. Such books celebrated private prayer as a vital force that freed social energies, and was prophetic of what should be and could be. Whether in ‘best-sellers’ or one-off pieces, across doctrinal positions, regardless of the rank or vocation of intended readers, there was uncharacteristic unanimity: for the first time, all lay people were expected to compose their own prayers about pressing issues of family, work and state. Advice was aimed at everyone, not just religious professionals. In his True Watch, Containing the Perfect Rule and Summe of Prayer, the schoolmaster John Brinsley was brisk about how ‘the weakest Christian, taking but the least paines, may in a very short space, learne to pray of himselfe’. His dedicatory epistle says his work is ‘penned in a most plaine and familiar stile; not to delight the curious with an houres reading, (which I leave to others) but to helpe the honest heart’.1 Writing lengthy prayers, or just following them with attention, took training. Children were introduced to the theory and practice of prayer at home and school, perhaps even learning to read by following the written words of a prayer already known by heart. These were not necessarily set prayers; from the 1580s school statutes often left the matter and form of some of these prayers to the imagination of the schoolmaster.2 Adults continued to hone their skills in this area, for it was one of the hallmarks of a complete Christian to be able to ‘conceive’ his own prayer.3 Official encouragement to do so came in five of the 75 lections of the final version of the Book of Homilies of 1571.4 But since this gave little practical help on the mechanics of composition, devotional authors quickly set about filling the gap. Given that in 1595 the bookseller Andrew Maunsell catalogued over a hundred printed books on private prayer, such books were evidently perceived at the time to constitute a distinct and substantial subgenre.5 The composition of prayer was to be approached as a skilled occupation. The Bishop of Winchester, Lancelot Andrewes, called it ‘an Arte no less profitable then the building of houses, or making or armour’,6 and Elnathan Parr, Rector of Palgrave, in Suffolk, suggested that since ‘seven yeere is holden but a convenient terme, to learne […] earthly manuall trades’,7 then twice as long should be allocated to learning how to pray. The starting point is being fully in the present when addressing the Almighty, arousing zeal by cutting out distraction. It is not merely

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bootless, it is positively dangerous to pray without such attention; the Dean of St. Paul’s, Alexander Nowell, warned in a popular catechism that ‘God doth worthily abhore and detest their prayers that fainedly and unadvisedly utter with their tong that which they conceive not with their hart and thought’.8 Thus the first effect of the prayer comes in the activity of making it, as the pray-er learns techniques for managing attention. Protestantism gave capitalism its impetus, argued Max Weber, by encouraging the godly to employ their time well, as a sign of the grace that inspired their actions.9 David Marno thinks the notion of attention as being a distinct mental faculty emerged in the late sixteenth century as a modification of devotional attention,10 and, looking at economic and educational pamphlets, and through corpora analysis, Alexis Litvine agrees that discourses about industriousness were in play long before the corresponding economic behaviour.11 The craft of private prayer, as an expression of this spirit, developed skills in conscious application. Just as a concern to ‘convert’ time produced an industrious revolution, a concern to produce correct prayer might be said to have produced an attentive revolution in habits of mind. Prayer collections typically recommended that the prayer starts by asking for grace to pray well; the Puritan preacher Edward Dering’s lengthy ‘Prayer for constant perseverance in praying, when we are dull to prayer’ even ends by requesting for grace to pray for grace to pray.12 When the Dean of St. Paul’s, John Donne, dealt at length with prayer in sermons from the early 1620s, he dwelt on the difficulty of concentrating. ‘I lock my doore to my selfe, and I throw my selfe down in the presence of my God, I devest my selfe of all worldly thoughts, and I bend all my powers, and faculties upon God, as I think, and suddenly I finde my selfe scattered, melted, fallen into vaine thoughts’, he muses, and ‘sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell’. Donne’s self-analysis is particularly helpful because he is honest about the triviality of his problems in prayer, going into details about the movement in consciousness. He locks the door and throws himself on his knees before Almighty God, in a thoroughly business-like fashion, but at some point drifts off. He suddenly finds his mind is elsewhere, tries again, but fails again (and again, and again, until the very form of internal quality assurance which keeps his mind on the prayer becomes the occasion for distraction). He figures this as being possessed by the devils of sloth, distraction, and error, and as a form of acting in prayer: ‘I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a

32  C. SULLIVAN

doore; I talke on, in the same posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I prayed to God’.13 One answer is to find the right external ‘directions’ or ‘resolutions’ or ‘rules’ to act as scaffolding for a devotionally-productive environment. Richard Rogers, preacher at Wethersfield, in Essex, describes a fascinating group experiment in mind management. He expands on the role of experience in the godly life: experimentall knowledge in all trades and sciences, what a difference there is betwixt it, and bare and naked skill in the same without experience. So […] in matters which are heavenly and spirituall, in respect of the bare knowledge, that men have by rule or instruction onely. He that hath been trained up in an occupation, it may be, hee hath got knowledge and skill in his science or trade: but he is not able to use it to the best advantage and his owne greatest profit, neither how, where, and when, to buy and to sell […] [A]ll for want of experience […] Even so it is in the spirituall trade.14

Thus, using what today’s performance managers would recognise as specific, measurable, assignable and realistic targets, Rogers laid out a daily and particular regime of spiritual and secular activities to hold a ‘good and well ordered course’ in praying and living; showing ‘how to keepe company, how to be solitarie, how to be occupied in their labours, how to cease from them, how to rise and how to lye down […] not discouraged at night though they did not all duties, (which in one day cannot be) but quiet and chearfull, seeing they did those which by good direction they saw most necessary’.15 His parishioners, when he told them about the plan, were either confused, incredulous or irritated, though most did see that it might free their ‘hearts and minds’ from ‘incumberances’, allowing them to live more ‘chearfully’. The worry that some had, that such ‘tying’ was going in the direction of the rituals of Rome, was dismissed by Rogers, who pointed out that all his directions came from Scripture. The group agreed to give his directions a month’s trial (later extended to three months), and to note ‘faithfully, how they felt it to helpe them forward in well passing the day, more then when they walked without it in the world’, but also where it proved hard and where it failed. Each participant in the trial was to follow its plan privately, then to discuss the results with the ministry team.16

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It was a resounding success. The godly concluded that ‘they were able with chearfulnes and without tediousness to passe the day in their calling, and in the performance of other necessarie duties either at home or abroad as occasion was offered, which they could never do before, for any long time together’. The result was that ‘they were not usually so toward when they went to prayer […] they now could find matter to joy in, and make their songs of’.17 The experiment is significant for showing how rationally cheerful—not despairing nor ecstatic—much godly life could be, with its sensible, practical, concrete direction of the attention.

Trading in Prayer Ian Green finds much common ground in prayer collections from across the denominations and within the Church; polemic is kept separate from devotion. The principal difference occurs between those prayers composed by lay people and those by clerical authors. Lay folk tend to spend less time on praise of God’s attributes and confession, and more time on thanks and requests (particularly for corporal goods). Their prayers are less buttressed with scriptural references and doctrinal explication— in short, less ‘professional’—and often outsold those by the clergy.18 The collections fall into four main groups: variations on the six petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, devotional practices or spiritual situations facing everyone (e.g. before communion, against temptation), secular ­activities common to all (e.g. waking, rising, dressing), and difficulties in a particular vocation in life (e.g. as midwife, traveller, merchant), about which lay authors were as expert as clerical ones. By the turn of the century, the last group of prayers had gained considerably over the former three groups in variety and specificity, as well as in length and number. On economic issues there were prayers, familiar from the bible, about how to possess wealth in a godly way. These speak in general terms suitable to anyone working in any vocation. For instance, a ‘Prayer to use wealth as we ought’ in The Sinner’s Sacrifice asks for a charitable heart; as thou hast blessed my store, and increased my wealth, in so much as I have not onely that which may suffice mine one necessary want, but have also sufficient to releeve others in neede: drive from my hart any naturall desire of more, and give mee a will to distribute the same, according to the aboundance of my wealth.19

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Dering’s Prayer ‘against the secret venim and great danger of prosperity’ covers the danger of forgetting that one’s wealth comes from God. My prosperitie leadeth mee, as by the hand, from one delight to another, and from one pleasure to another […] But alas, O Lord, I finde by experience that prosperitie (such is our infirmitie) carrieth us too too farre away […] [I]t ingendereth also secretly such peace and confidence in these things, which are but as a reede to leane upon […] But the day of adversitie […] it provoketh many praiers for releefe.20

The anonymous I.C.’s ‘Prayer to be said, before any worke wee goe about’ brings together the topics of depending on God and using wealth well: In vaine, O Lord, rise wee earely, and sit up late, eating the bread of carefulnesse, turmoyling and tormenting our selves with great labour and wearisomnesse unlesse thou, O Lord, give a blessing […] In vaine endangereth himselfe the Marchant, furrowing and turning up the waters, unlesse thou prosper and guide his Ship […] Grant that wee may prosper and have, giving of our abundance to those poore brethren that want it, rather then to bee driven to aske it […] Give me, O Lord, a true feeling of my selfe, that I may rather respect goodnesse, then gaine; and aime rather to live honestly, then richly; affecting a mediocritie, not aboundance.21

There are a greater number of prayers about the process of becoming rich than what to do with riches once acquired, and these deal with concrete acts rather than in the metaphors of godly riches. The Book of Homilies advises that ‘when we have sufficiently prayed for things belonging to the soul, then may we lawfully, and with safe conscience, pray also for our bodily necessities, as […] good luck in our daily affairs, and so forth, according as we shall have need’.22 The books model prayers for workers in a range of jobs, each of which had their own spiritual risks and opportunities. The playwright Thomas Dekker’s ‘Prayer for a prentice going to his labour’ names his four main temptations (pretending to work, working grudgingly, working unjustly, and working disobediently), then asks that he be put to work within his capacity (at least, if it is helped along by God), and ends with four further temptations (lying, swearing, sloth, and reluctance). It hints that his master is a man capable of trading illegally or immorally, and of being unjust to those who work for him. Nonetheless, there can be no exemptions in obeying this God-given ‘Ruler’:

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Let me not (O God) goe about my busines with eye-service; but sithence thou hast ordained that (like poore Joseph) I must enter into the state of a servant, so humble my mind, that I may perform with a cheereful willingnes whatsoever my master commands mee, and that all his commandements may be agreeable to the serving of thee. Bestow upon me thy grace that I may deale uprightly with all men, and that I may shew my selfe to him, who is set over mee (a Ruler) as I another day would desire to have others behave themselves to mee. Take away from him (that is, my master) all thoughts of crueltie, that like the children of Israel under the subjection of Pharaohs servants, I may not be set to a taske above my strength: of if I be; stretch thou out my sinewes (O God) that I may with un-wearied limbs accomplish it. […] Give mee courage to beginne: patience to goe forward: and abilitie to finish them. Cleanse my heart (O thou that art the fountaine of purity) from all falsehood, from all swearing, from all abuse of thy sacred Name, from all foule, loose and unreverend languages. Let my thoughts when I am alone bee of thee: let my mirth in company bee to sing Psalmes, and the arguments of my talke onely touching the works of thy hand. Take sloth from my fingers, and drowsinesse from the lids of mine eye; whether I rise early, or lie downe late, so gladly let me doe it, as if my prentiship were to bee consumed in thy service.23

In the scale of commercial importance, next comes the petty trader. In Dekker’s ‘Prayer for him that buyes and sels’, this is a man who is tempted to use false weights or clip goods for small gains, and who is liable to be envious (or at least cast down) at the sight of others getting on quicker than him: Let me not be one of those buyers and sellers, whom thy Sonne Jesus thrust out of the Temple: But rather one of those Merchants that sell all to follow thee. […] [L]et not mine eye look upon false waights, nor my hand be held out to take up an uneven balance. Hee loseth a piece of his soule, (every time) that robbeth his chapman of his measure: & he that unjustly gaineth but thirtie pence, selleth (like Judas) even his master Christ. […] [P]ull out of my heart the stings of envy, and let me rejoyce to see others prosper in the world, & not to murmure if I my selfe wither like trees in Autumne, though I lose the golden leaves of wealth.24

Moving further up the scale of operations to the merchant, engaged in the risky import—export business, prayer comes to resemble a marine insurance policy. In I.C.’s ‘Prayer to be said by a Merchant, for the safe returne of his goods’, the goods themselves rejoice when his prayer is proved prevalent:

36  C. SULLIVAN with thy Word thou calmest the raging waters, and with a beck layest the furie of the winde. Grant, of thy accustomed clemencie and goodnes, such seasonable and temperate weather, that they may safely arrive at the appointed Port. Bee unto them, O Lord, their Pylote, lest the hidden Rocks, or unknowne Sands devoure them. Be their defence and safegard, lest their enemies make prey on them: that relying on thy favour, above the vertue of their Load-stone, they may joyfully and merrily touch the desired Land.25

But when such prayer fails, the merchant loses both money and credit, as in the ‘Prayer, in respect of some losse received, as of honour, or goods’, by the Vicar of Modbury, in Devon, Samuel Hieron: Is it not thou (O Lord) which hast laid these things upon me? art not thou he who both givest & takest at thy will? […] Let this abridgement be a schoole master unto mee, that I may learne by it to draw mine affections from these fading and transitorie commodities. O Lord, what is honour? Is it not a blast, or as smoke which quickely vanisheth? What is wealth? Is it not lighter then vanitie it selfe? […] Let mee affect the true honour which standes in the faythfull service of my savior. Let me labor for that enduring and durable riches, which consistes in the knowledge of thee.26

Mercantile texts of the period return the favour in making their account books prayerful. The accounting primer by Hugh Oldcastle and John Mellis, for instance, starts by ‘praying meekly that this mine intent may be to the laude of God and increase of virtue, as also for the wealth and profite of the readers and learners of the same’.27 Richard Dafforne often ends explanations about accounting issues with a prayer, such as: ‘of these last foure books [ledgers] I intend to treat, and to explaine their proper offices, as much as the All-Comprizer shall please to impart to my present memories apprehension. For, “On thee I God, I doe depend / Ever mee with thy Shield defend”’.28

Prevalence in Prayer Although, under a solafidian paradigm, to prevail in prayer is not a matter in which one’s own efforts count, it is hard to avoid the feeling that because one is praying, God will act. A contractual register creeps in, partly because prayer often deals with quotidian actions of trade, but also because its petitions are made in such a concrete, detailed way. The pray-er sets targets for a response by the Almighty that are specific, measurable, agreed, realistic, and time-based.

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The economic language used about the central issue of ‘prevalency’ still crops up today in brightly sceptical questions about effectiveness (‘Oh, does it work?’) and dourly sceptical questions about efficiency (‘But doesn’t God already know?’). The God of such prayer, Weber said, is approached as ‘a mighty terrestrial potentate, whose freely disposed favor can be obtained by entreaty, gifts, service, tributes, cajolery, and bribes’, arranged in a ‘purely business-like, rationalised form that sets forth the achievements of the supplicant in behalf of the god and then claims adequate recompense’.29 Nearly every advice text on private prayer had to walk a delicate line between establishing the need for prayer and forbidding the pray-er from bargaining with God’s own property, the grace to pray. The Homily on prayer starts by dismissing the idea that prayer is an exchange between the pray-er and God. God requires prayer ‘not because he either will not or cannot not give without asking, but because he hath appointed prayer as an ordinary means’ to give, so that the pray-er acknowledges the giver. God will give according to his will, as he has promised (for instance, in John 16:23), though it will be unconditionally in the case of spiritual good, and conditionally in the case of earthly requests. However, the image of God being moved by requests is to be taken solely as a metaphor. Hence the description of prayer by William Ames, an influential English writer and professor of theology at Franeker University in Freisland, was full of caveats: prayer ‘may as it were affect or move God; whence it is that the faithfull are said by their prayers as it were mightily to prevaile with God […] And as it were to strike’.30 The pray-er should be both humble about not deserving any response, and thankful if one is received.31 Part of the preparation for prayer was to develop a sense of neediness, like a ‘little hungrie dog’, in the phrase of the Portuguese Dominican writer popular in England, Luis de Granada,32 or, in that of Jean Calvin, with the ‘person and disposition of a beggar’, who can neither give nor expect anything.33 As to when prayers will be answered, Thomas Playfere, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, described how God may impose a delay, as a merchant, beeing about to put money into a bagge, and perceiving the bagge will scarce hold all the money, first stretches out the bagge, before he put in the money: after the same sort, in this case, dealeth God with us. God knowing that those blessings, wherewith upon our praiers he purposes to enrich us, are so great, that our hearts as yet are not capable of

38  C. SULLIVAN them, staies a while, till afterward when our hearts are more inlarged, and stretched out like a wide bagge, we may then receive them, when we are fitter for them.34

Yet, having swept aside the bare notion of exchange, authors needed to show that prayer is not only commanded but effective. Lists of when it had been prevalent often accompanied the warning that it is still only a request to God, as in Andrewes’s instances of the three types of upheaval caused by God’s response to prayer, such as how ‘Judith overcame Holofernes’, ‘Jonas escaped the Whale’, and ‘the Theife obtayned Paradice’.35 In response to prayer, a change of heart (a ‘resolution’) in the prayer might be as hard to achieve as a concrete result, but was less liable to be disputed, as only the beneficiary was in a position to verify that it had happened. A heart sanctified by prayer would eventually turn away from the things of the world. Admittedly, a good proxy measure of prevalent prayer might be the way that a heart glowed. For the Rector of Treswell, in Nottingham, Henry Langley, the prayer’s very face would look ‘like one, that hath had converse with God’.36 Third-party evidence—the kickable sort—was rarer, so more triumphantly cited. The Homily celebrates the biblical strongmen of prayer, such as Moses, whose exhausted arms were propped up in a gesture of prayer in order to overcome the Amalekites (Exodus 17:12), or whose prayers turned away God’s wrath after the Israelites worshipped their golden calf (Exodus 32:7–14).37 Famed biblical commentators such as Andrew Willet and Gervase Babington, respectively, Rector of Barley, in Hertfordshire, and Bishop of Worcester, concluded that the Lord was not bargained down in these incidents. He was contented to act as Moses wished because ‘in his secret will he had ordained that Moses should pray for them, and that hee would bee entreated by his prayer’.38 Case studies of more recent prevalent prayers were popular, especially prayers at tipping points. For instance, in 1603 a divinity student, John Swan, reported success in freeing a young woman called Mary Glover from the devil. A team of ministers took only an hour for preparation the day before the exorcism, covering the practical arrangements only. The exorcism ran from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., during which time the ministers took turns at leading in a continuous series of prayers, most of which were inspired rather than set (in part because Glover interposed her own inspired prayers whenever a minister started his). The ministers

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are highly praised by Swan for the variety of matter and phrase in their prayer, which proved that the spirit was in them. Given their success, the group later regretted that they had forgotten to bring pens and paper, so had not been able to jot down the more prevalent prayers as they had been poured out. Situation reports from a deathbed (real or fictional) also showed what prayer could do. The bestseller in this genre was Thomas Becon’s Sicke Mans Salve, with nearly 300 pages assessing effective appeals to God. The sick man goes from health to death in two days flat, attended at each stage by the prayers of his three friends. The text is in the form of a dialogue, where the four men pray individually or together, and then pause to observe what effect each prayer has had on the sick man’s soul. Some of these prayers are improvised, some taken from Scripture (such as that by Manasseh, King of Judah, when prisoner in Babylon), and some are taken from private prayer books: ‘Give me hither the booke of the flowr of godly prayers. I will rehearse the thanksgiving unto God, for the departure of the faithfull, out of this wicked world’, says one friend, referring to Becon’s own collection, the Flour of Godlie Praiers.39 The group are amiably uninterested in hearing about the sick man’s pains, or in cheering him with speculation on his chances of recovery. Their enquiries are mostly technical ones about what the prayer has done to his spiritual state. When, just occasionally, a prayer does not seem to have had an immediate effect, his friends assure him that it is only a matter of time. Prevalent private prayer might be used to confirm political positions. John Foxe commented tartly on the useless prayers of Catholic subjects for a male son to be born to Mary I, and on her government’s fears about the efficacy of Protestant prayers for Mary’s conversion (a practice forbidden in a 1555 Act of Parliament).40 In 1594 the ‘messiah’ William Hacket and his supporters, Edmund Coppinger and Henry Arthington, proposed a prayer duel with Archbishop John Whitgift. Any one of them would match him in prayer before the queen, each side calling down vengeance on the other—the last man standing to be the victor.41 On the third voyage to the Virginia Company in 1586, Thomas Hariot reported that native Americans attended the expedition’s prayer meetings. When one of them fell ill, he asked for the group’s prayers, and recovered. When crops began to wither, others also asked for Christian prayers. Events seemed to be heading towards a satisfyingly high conversion rate, until the inhabitants of rival towns became sick after the English had left. The native Americans complimented the

40  C. SULLIVAN

English on the strength of their prayers against their enemies, but the English demurred, ‘affirming that our God would not subject himselfe to any such prayers’, and that they would rather pray for their enemies to live, so they could be converted.42 Stephen Greenblatt reads the story as Hariot raising the issue of how religion is used to subdue resistance overseas and in his own country.43 It is possible, though, that Hariot sees the incident as a contribution to the literature against tempting God, by measuring prevalency without reference to God’s will.

Shakespeare on Bargaining with or in Prayer Shakespeare’s plays explore the range of bargaining in prayer. Sometimes, praying for some else acts as a rather old-fashioned form of exchange, where a client repays his or her patron by praying for them, thus re-establishing some degree of equality.44 In Henry VIII (1613), for ­ instance, prayers are the most common form of exchange at court. They are demanded as a form of service to the king. Before Elizabeth’s birth, Boleyn asks for the prayers of the King. He immediately devolves the task to Suffolk (with ‘in thy pray’rs remember / Th’ estate of my poor queen’), who obediently promises to ‘Remember [her in] prayers’ in the future (5.1.73–74, 78). Prayers are also seen as an appropriate form of thanks for aid from the king, where the obligation is (by courtesy) deemed to be too great to be repayable in any tangible way. Wolsey tells the king that                         For your great graces Heap’d upon me, poor undeserver, I Can nothing render but allegiant thanks, My pray’rs to heaven for you. (3.2.174–77)

When Boleyn is made Marchioness of Pembroke, but she offers the same: More than my all is nothing: nor my prayers Are not words duly hallowed […]                            yet prayers and wishes Are all I can return. (2.3.67–70)

Conversely, where the expectation of reciprocal care between patron and client is not fulfilled, prayer can also provide a remedy. The Queen

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argues that Wolsey’s unjust taxation has caused the people’s ‘curses now / [to] Live where their prayers did […] / There is no primer baseness’ (1.2.62–63, 67), punning on the primers of ill-will that replace the King’s Primer. Such prayers are not out-and-out curses, but they are passively aggressive. Prayer, which Calvin described as alms-giving to those the prayer may or may not know, is, declared William Covell, Vicar of Sittingbourne in Kent, a gift which none may refuse.45 Thus, at the moment Katherine recognises her subjection to Henry’s legal proceedings against her, she threatens further prayer for him: ‘Pray do my service to his Majesty; / He has my heart yet and shall have my prayers / While I shall have my life (3.1.179–81). Before execution, Buckingham similarly takes the high moral ground. He forgives his enemy with the words of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘I as free forgive you / As I would be forgiven’ (2.1.82–83). He appeals widely to ‘All good people, / [to] Pray for me’ (131–32). He asks his friends to ‘Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice, / And lift my soul to heaven’ (77–78). They will be in a position to tell the king that they met Buckingham ‘half in heaven. My vows and prayers / Yet are the King’s; and, till my soul forsake, / Shall cry for blessings on him’ (88–90). Traitors habitually blessed the monarch before execution, in the hope of improving the fortunes of their heirs; the prayers by Katherine and Buckingham go further by loading favours on Henry which he cannot refuse. The only character who will not bargain in prayer is the incorruptible Cromwell. When Wolsey, in disgrace, urges him to ‘Seek the King! / That sun, I pray, may never set’ (3.2.414–15), Cromwell courageously refuses the exchange: ‘The King shall have my service; but my pray’rs / For ever and for ever shall be yours’ (426–27). Given whom one prays for is treated as a loyalty test by other courtiers, then‚ however courteous a refusal, however stout the offer of other services, to refuse to pray for the king when invited to do so is to run the risk of being seen as a traitor. Given that it is a spiritual duty to pray for him, Cromwell here is making a very strong protest against Henry’s activities. By contrast, in Measure for Measure (1604–5), Isabella is scandalously willing to trade. She openly calculates what luxury-grade prayer is needed to get Angelo’s agreement to save her brother: Isabella: Hark how I’ll bribe you. Good my lord, turn back. Angelo: How? bribe me? Isabella: Ay, with such gifts that heaven shall share with you.

42  C. SULLIVAN […] Not with fond sicles of the tested gold,                         […] but with true prayers, That shall be up at heaven, and enter there Ere sun-rise, prayers from preserved souls, From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate To nothing temporal. (2.2.145–47, 149, 151–55)

Though she emphasises that her bargaining chips come from a spiritual treasury, not a physical one, this does not make it any less an exchange. The next time the two meet, she offers double value; now‚ Angelo will gain prayers for himself, and lose any guilt arising from the exchange: That I do beg his life, if it be sin, Heaven let me bear it! You granting of my suit, If that be sin, I’ll make it my morn-prayer To have it added to the faults of mine, And nothing of your answer. (2.4.69–73)

Isabella overtly uses prayers as tokens of her power, with value in themselves, and not as requests in a conversation with God. The action of Henry V (1599) starts with, hinges on, is judged by, and ends in prayer for signs that Henry is legitimate. He never asserts that his successes (nor even his actions) are his own, but attributes them to God: Shakespeare’s first solifidian anti-action hero. For this reason, Henry’s prayer before Agincourt (4.1.289–305) is often played as a ‘gabbled, terrified act of bribery’, as Irving Wardle said of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1984 production.46 The prayer starts with a two-part request. First,                     steel my soldiers’ hearts, Possess them not with fear! Take from them now The sense of reck’ning, if th’ opposed numbers Pluck their hearts from them. (289–92)

The fact that Henry prays before battle is not unusual, but what he asks for is: for steeling hearts, not weapons; for less counting, not greater numbers. Even God is urged to forget to count a tit for a tat: Henry’s second request is that God should ‘think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown’ (293–94). Henry requests this on behalf

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of his father, not himself, having been clear throughout the play that guilt cannot be transferred. He tells both Williams and himself, ten times over, that ‘Every subject’s duty is the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own’ (176–77), so it is unsurprising that he sets his face against exchange here. However, the next section of the passage introduces a sharply contrasting register of calculation, beginning with a review of the numbers of set prayers offered since Henry came to the throne. First, ‘I Richard’s body have interred new, / And on it have bestowed more contrite tears, / Than from it issued forced drops of blood’ (295–97). The ‘more’ in the second line, which might at first seem to refer to the depth of contrition, is clarified in the third line as a calculation about the number of tears. The next clause in the contract he is offering is the ‘Five hundred poor I have in yearly pay, / Who twice a day their wither’d hands hold up / Toward heaven, to pardon blood’ (298–300). Henry is buying a thousand prayer sessions a day (and the Folio shows some inflation from the mere ‘a hundred men’ promised in the First Quarto, in terms both of numbers and of neediness). Finally, initiated by the telling salesman’s ‘and’, comes Henry’s reminder: ‘and I have built / Two chauntries, where the sad and solemn priests / Sing still for Richard’s soul’ (300–2). Q1’s slip, of ‘chanceries’ for ‘chantries’, is understandable, given the passage’s stress on recording obligations. The register of the passage would be quadruply offensive to its late sixteenth-century listeners. It stresses that his proxies recite set prayers; it stresses that they are sponsored to do so; it stresses that the prayers are for souls of the dead; it stresses his calculation about how many prayers can seal the deal. The third section of the passage provides a textual crux, over which editors agonise. The Folio version is:                                   More will I do, Though all that I can do is nothing worth, Since that my penitence comes after all, Imploring pardon.

This differs substantively from Q1’s ‘more wil I do: / Tho all that I can do, is all too litle’. The rephrasing of the second clause becomes precisely solifidian, as Henry’s deeds are devalued from being worth ‘little’ to being worth ‘nothing’. Moreover, a new clause about penitential prayer appears.

44  C. SULLIVAN

Editors gaze anxiously at the lines’ second ‘all’. Gary Taylor, the Oxford editor, lays out the different interpretations: ‘all’ that Henry has done or can do is worthless (shown by the fact he keeps f­eeling penitent), or ‘all’ the sins that his father has done cannot be atoned for, or ‘all’ refers to the crown which Henry himself still holds.47 The Arden editor, T.W. Craik, is less specific: ‘more probably all is correct and the vagueness is intentional’, the king is ‘distressed’ about what his father has done but not prepared to say that pardon is impos­ sible. Henry’s prayer is, he concludes, deliberately ‘not clear-cut enough to run into theological difficulty’.48 However, advice on prayer suggests that the stress is on ‘Since that’. The initial section of the prayer is a request for a corporal good (the protection of the army), and will be answered conditionally, that is, if God has already willed a victory. Then Henry reviews the invalid prayers he and his proxies have already offered, and concludes these are not worth little, they are worth n ­ othing at all. Keeping the Folio’s semi-colon after ‘worth’ emphasises that a new prayer dialogue begins in the two lines added to the end by the Folio. Only ‘since that’ time in which he and his proxies made insufficient prayers—since then—has he realised that even to attempt an exchange in prayer was wrong. As Martin Buber warned, there is always a temptation to make a prayer a set of instructions from ‘I’ to ‘It’, rather than a conversation between ‘I’ and ‘Thou’. William Fitzgerald argues that while a human audience is a fictional projection by any speaker which addresses it, in prayer the speaker is addressing an audience member who is real beyond the speaker’s imagining. But since prayer is voiced only by one side it must repeatedly apostrophize the other side, God, to keep him in the conversation. As a consequence, the object of address is ever in danger of being objectified as a discursive prop, in a figurative scene of address.49 At the turn of the sixteenth century, the discourse about prevalent prayer acknowledges the temptation of an instrumentalist approach to what should be a loving colloquy, and tries to correct a misconception arising from the way lay people petition God for help in their daily work.

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Notes





1. John Brinsley, The Second Part of the True Watch, Containing the Perfect Rule and Summe of Prayer (London: Samuel Macham, 1607), title page, sig. A4v. 2. Foster Watson, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), pp. 38–49. 3. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 266. 4. The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches, ed. John Griffiths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859), pp. 320–51. 5. Andrew Maunsell, The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Books […] of Divinity (London: Andrew Maunsell, 1595), pp. 83–87. 6. Lancelot Andrewes, Scala Coeli: Nineteen Sermons Concerning Prayer (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1611), fol. 66r. 7. Elnathan Parr, Abba Father: Or a […] Direction Concerning Private Prayer (London: Samuel Man, 1618), p. 57. 8. Alexander Nowell, A Catechism, trans. Thomas Norton (London: John Day, 1570), fol. 56v. 9. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Chapter 5. 10. David Marno, ‘Easy Attention: Ignatius of Loyola and Robert Boyle’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 44:1 (2014): 135–61. 11.  Alexis D. Litvine, ‘The Industrious Revolution, the Industriousness Discourse and the Development of Modern Economies’, The Historical Journal, 57 (2014): 531–70. 12. Edward Dering, Godly Private Prayers for Christian Families (London: Isaac Jaggard, 1624), pp. 240–44. 13. John Donne, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G.R. Potter and E.M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62): v, p. 249; vii, p. 264; x, p. 56. 14. Richard Rogers, Seven Treatises, Containing Such Direction as Is Gathered Out of the Holie Scriptures (London: Thomas Man and Robert Dexter, 1603), p. 279. 15. Ibid., pp. 338–39. 16. Ibid., pp. 340–41. 17. Ibid. 18. Ian Green, ‘New for Old? Clerical and Lay Attitudes to Domestic Prayer in Early Modern England’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 10:2 (2008): 195–222 (pp. 199–206). See also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Chapter 5. 19.  The Sinner’s Sacrifice (London: Thomas Pavier, 1601), sigs M3r–M4r.





46  C. SULLIVAN 20. Dering, Godly Private Prayers for Christian Families, pp. 431–34. 21. I.C., The Ever-Burning Lamps of Pietie (London: Richard Hawkins, 1619), pp. 180–81. 22.  The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches, p. 333. 23. Thomas Dekker, Foure Birds of Noahs Arke (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1609), pp. 8–11. 24. Ibid., pp. 12–16. 25. I.C., The Ever-Burning Lamps of Pietie, pp. 117–18. 26. Samuel Hieron, A Helpe unto Devotion (London: Samuel Macham, 1608), pp. 88–94. 27. Hugh Oldcastle, rev. John Mellis, A Briefe Instruction and Maner How to Keepe Bookes of Accompts (London: Hugh Singleton, 1588), sig. A3r. See also Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), Chapter 2. 28. Richard Dafforne, The Merchants Mirrour, or Directions for the Perfect Ordering and Booking of His Accounts (London: Nicholas Bourne, 1635), p. 5. 29. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (London: Methuen, 1965), pp. 25, 26. 30. William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, trans. anon (London: Henry Overton, 1642), pp. 279–80. 31. Martin Chemnitz, A Substantial and Godly Exposition of […] the Lords Praier, trans. anon (Cambridge: John Legate, 1598), pp. 2–5; Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, p. 279. 32. Luis de Granada, An Excellent Treatise of Consideration and Prayer, trans. Richard Hopkins (London: W. Wood, 1601), p. 79. 33. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeill, trans. F.L. Battles, 2 vols (London: S.C.M. Press, 1961), II, p. 859. 34. Thomas Playfere, The Power of Praier (Cambridge: John Legate, 1603), pp. 4–5. 35. Lancelot Andrewes, Institutiones piae, or Directions to Pray (London: Henry Seile, 1630), pp. 7–8. See also William Narne, The Pearle of Prayer Most Precious and Powerful (Edinburgh: John Wreittoun, 1630), Chapters 10, 17. 36. Henry Langley, The Chariot and Horsemen of Israel (London: Edmund Weaver, 1616), p. 36. This passage refers to Exodus 34:35. 37.  The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches, p. 322; Andrewes, Institutiones piae, pp. 6–8. 38. Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Exodum (London: Thomas Man, 1608), p. 740. See also Gervase Babington, Comfortable Notes upon the Bookes of Exodus and Leviticus (London: Thomas Chard, 1604), pp. 445ff.

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47

39. Thomas Becon, The Sicke Mans Salve (Edinburgh: Andrew Hart, 1613; first published 1561), p. 284. 40. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (London: John Day, 1583), pp. 1504–6. For an online edition, see https://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe/ (accessed 14 October). 41. Alexandra Walsham, ‘“Frantick Hacket”: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, The Historical Journal, 41:1 (1998): 27–66. 42. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols (Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1904), viii, pp. 379–82. 43. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Chapter 2. 44. Virginia Reinburg, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 149–54; Claire S. Schen, Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), Chapter 5. 45. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II, pp. 901–2; Covell, William, A Modest and Reasonable Examination, of Some Things in Use in the Church of England (London: Clement Knight, 1604), p. 176. 46. William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.1.286n. 47. William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), pp. 295–301. 48. William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. T.W. Craik, Arden Third Series (London: Routledge, 1995), 4.2.299–302n. 49. William Fitzgerald, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), Chapter 2.

References Ames, William, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity, trans. anon (London: Henry Overton, 1642). Andrewes, Lancelot, Scala Coeli: Nineteen Sermons Concerning Prayer (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1611). ———, Institutiones piae, or Directions to Pray (London: Henry Seile, 1630). Babington, Gervase, Comfortable Notes upon the Bookes of Exodus and Leviticus (London: Thomas Chard, 1604). Becon, Thomas, The Sicke Mans Salve (Edinburgh: Andrew Hart, 1613; first published 1561).

48  C. SULLIVAN Brinsley, John, The Second Part of the True Watch, Containing the Perfect Rule and Summe of Prayer (London: Samuel Macham, 1607). C., I., The Ever-Burning Lamps of Pietie (London: Richard Hawkins, 1619). Calvin, John, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J.T. McNeill, trans. F.L. Battles, 2 vols (London: S.C.M. Press, 1961). Chemnitz, Martin, A Substantial and Godly Exposition of […] the Lords Praier, trans. anon (Cambridge: John Legate, 1598). Collinson, Patrick, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Covell, William, A Modest and Reasonable Examination, of Some Things in Use in the Church of England (London: Clement Knight, 1604). Dafforne, Richard, The Merchants Mirrour, or Directions for the Perfect Ordering and Booking of His Accounts (London: Nicholas Bourne, 1635). de Granada, Luis, An Excellent Treatise of Consideration and Prayer, trans. Richard Hopkins (London: W. Wood, 1601). Dekker, Thomas, Foure Birds of Noahs Arke (London: Nathaniel Butter, 1609). Dering, Edward, Godly Private Prayers for Christian Families (London: Isaac Jaggard, 1624). Donne, John, The Sermons of John Donne, ed. G.R. Potter and E.M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62). Fitzgerald, William, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Performance (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). Foxe, John, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, 1583 edition, https://www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe/. Green, Ian, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). ———, ‘New for Old? Clerical and Lay Attitudes to Domestic Prayer in Early Modern England’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 10:2 (2008): 195–222. Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Hakluyt, Richard, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols (Glasgow: J. MacLehose, 1904). Hieron, Samuel, A Helpe unto Devotion (London: Samuel Macham, 1608). Homilies, The Two Books of Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches, ed. John Griffiths (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1859). Langley, Henry, The Chariot and Horsemen of Israel (London: Edmund Weaver, 1616). Litvine, Alexis D., ‘The Industrious Revolution, the Industriousness Discourse and the Development of Modern Economies’, The Historical Journal, 57 (2014): 531–70.

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Marno, David, ‘Easy Attention: Ignatius of Loyola and Robert Boyle’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 44:1 (2014): 135–61. Maunsell, Andrew, The First Part of the Catalogue of English Printed Books […] of Divinity (London: Andrew Maunsell, 1595). Narne, William, The Pearle of Prayer Most Precious and Powerful (Edinburgh: John Wreittoun, 1630). Nowell, Alexander, A Catechism, trans. Thomas Norton (London: John Day, 1570). Oldcastle, Hugh, rev. John Mellis, A Briefe Instruction and Maner How to Keepe Bookes of Accompts (London: Hugh Singleton, 1588). Parr, Elnathan, Abba Father: Or a […] Direction Concerning Private Prayer (London: Samuel Man, 1618). Playfere, Thomas, The Power of Praier (Cambridge: John Legate, 1603). Reinburg, Virginia, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400– 1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Rogers, Richard, Seven Treatises, Containing Such Direction as Is Gathered Out of the Holie Scriptures (London: Thomas Man and Robert Dexter, 1603). Schen, Claire S., Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Shakespeare, William, Sinner’s Sacrifice, The (London: Thomas Pavier, 1601). ———, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). ———, Henry V, ed. T.W. Craik, Arden Third Series (London: Routledge, 1995). ———, Henry V, ed. Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Sullivan, Ceri, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). Walsham, Alexandra, ‘“Frantick Hacket”: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’, The Historical Journal, 41:1 (1998): 27–66. Watson, Foster, The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908). Weber, Max, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (London: Methuen, 1965). ———, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Stephen Kalberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Willet, Andrew, Hexapla in Exodum (London: Thomas Man, 1608).

Fake News: The Marketplace of Boccalini’s Parnassian Press and the History of Criticism Vera Keller

Introduction: The Meaning of Anonymity in the Parnassian Press Trajano Boccalini (1556–1613) greatly contributed to the l­iterary exploration of fictional marketplaces in his enormously successful Advertisements from Parnassus, composed between 1595 and 1605 and published in Venice from 1612.1 Drawing on the newsletters or avvisi that, despite governmental opposition, were by the late sixteenth century well established in Venice and Rome, Boccalini created a world of fake news reporting by the gazetteer Menante from a dystopian state ruled by Apollo on Parnassus.2 Cesare Caporali, in his “Gli avisi di Parnaso” (first published anonymously in 1582), had previously deployed fake news from Parnassus to offer critical analyses of poetic worth. This too enjoyed international success and uptake by the likes of Cervantes.3 What made Boccalini’s work still more influential was the way he translated a blend of real political events and characters and a mythological setting to V. Keller (*)  Department of History, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_3

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create a generalized framework for particular criticism of all kinds, from the literary to the political. Boccalini spent decades enmeshed in Roman politics; although originally from the Loreto, he is identified as a Roman on his publications. Boccalini transformed period forms of analytical and skeptical political writing, most notably commentaries on the ancient historian Tacitus and the contemporary “reason of state,” into an engaging and ingenious exposé of human behavior. A market of politicians offering wares for dissimulation and manipulation offered the opening scene of Boccalini’s Advertisements. While Menante also reported from palaces, temples, academies, prisons, libraries, and the Senate, he returned to the open piazza and shops (fondaci and botteghe) repeatedly.4 These mercantile settings reinforced the skeptical viewpoint of the Advertisements. Boccalini set intersocial relationships within a zone of simulation and dissimulation where everything was for sale and everyone sought their own advantage. As the princes of the world declared in one advertisement, the whole world was one enormous shop.5 Boccalini’s reception, and its implications for the history of ­criticism, were immense and international. Between 1612 and 1715, 120 editions of Boccalini’s Advertisements were printed, including 66 in Italian, 19 in German, 17 in Dutch, 10 in English, 3 in French, 2 in Spanish, and 3 in Latin. Between 1613 and 1837, over 219 imitations of the Advertisements, including satires, plays, and pamphlets, sprang up.6 In these works, the Parnassian marketplace came to symbolize a participatory zone of critical publication, in which the name Boccalini functioned, more often than not, as a pseudonym or mask for others. As Marcy North reminds us, anonymous and pseudonymous authors, who account for a very large percentage of works in the period, were both expected and meaningful to early modern readers.7 Modern editors have heroically uncovered and assigned authorship to anonymously published works; we must now do the opposite to recover and interpret the previous significance of anonymity and pseudonymity, which runs counter to the values we now place on intellectual property and authorship. This chapter endeavors to recover Boccalini’s Parnassus as an anonymous and pseudonymous realm of participatory critical publication. In this vein, it will focus more on the publications around Boccalini than on the works of the historical Boccalini himself.8 Boccalini published his 1612 Advertisements under his own name and at a named press. However, Boccalini’s works quickly began appearing

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with no imprints or with fictive ones. Parnassus itself also soon became a popular imprint for responses to the Advertisements (see Appendix). The name Boccalini was used by other authors, sometimes as a ­character within their works and sometimes as an authorial pseudonym. In this respect, the name came to function like the figure of Pasquillus, a fictional satirical author whose identity was linked to a statue which had been unearthed in Rome in the fifteenth century. Over time, it became customary for people to attach anonymous lampoons against the Church and other institutions and for it to be pretended that Pasquillus had written them. These ventriloquistic “pasquils” or squibs were ­ sometimes collected together and printed, meaning that texts which had initially been tied to a single physical location could be circulated around Europe. The first of these collections appeared in 1544 and bore the fictional imprint of “Eleutheropolis,” meaning the city of freedom. Other contentious and unauthorized works were published in similar fictive locales such as “Utopia” or “Cosmopolis.” Contemporary readers had few means of ascertaining which, of the many Boccalinis that soon proliferated, was the historical author. Boccalini himself published 200 Advertisements in his lifetime (all in Venice in 1612 or 1613), but the complete posthumous 1619 collection of 399 Advertisements included many we would today consider spurious. Many German speakers first encountered Boccalini’s work anonymously in a German translation of one advertisement (the “General Reformation”) in 1614, to which the Rosicrucian Fama fraternitatis was attached; it would be hard to imagine a setting that emphasized anonymity and secretive identities more.9 Others continued to assume the name Boccalini, or to translate the Advertisements very freely into further vernaculars, complete with updated references, through the eighteenth century. This liberal impersonating of Boccalini can easily confuse a modern editor. For instance, the editor of Notices from Parnassus, a collaborative manuscript composed in defense of Sarra Copia Sulam, a Jewish Venetian poet, mistakenly believed that Boccalini participated in the collaboration, as he was one of the figures named in the work. Notices from Parnassus, however, is dated thirteen years after Boccalini’s death.10 As a voice from the Parnassian realm of acerbic criticism, Boccalini lived on long after the historical author’s death. Although the historical Boccalini did not publish his Advertisements from Parnassus pseudonymously, the Advertisements soon were cloaked within masked authorships. For instance, selections from Boccalini were

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published in three parts by the Newfoundland settler, William Vaughan (1575–1641), under the title The New-Found Politicke, a title Vaughan chose both due to Vaughan’s affection for “The New-Found Land” as well as “for the newnesse” of Boccalini’s “stile and matter.”11 Vaughan specified that John Florio (1553–1625) had translated the first part, and that he himself had translated the third, but he would not name the translator of the second part. Today this translator is understood to be Thomas Scott (c. 1580–1626), who had already published his translation anonymously as Newes from Pernassus […] printed at Helicon in 1622. Scott’s postscript, “The Poste of Parnassus to the Reader,” appeared in both New-Found Politicke and Newes from Pernassus. There he describes the papers as accidentally coming into his hands, his difficulty in perceiving their full meanings, and his fear at what might happen to him should he communicate them further.12 Scott, who had also written Vox Populi or Newes from Spayne, a consummate imitation corranto, thus allows us to imagine the quandaries faced by a Parnassian functionary attempting to mediate communication in a realm of such veiled and dangerous messages.13 By emphasizing his need to keep Scott’s identity hidden, Vaughan further flagged the alluringly subversive nature of Parnassian papers, which radiated into a quickly expanding fictional universe of pseudonymously printed free speech.

The Temporality of Marketplace News: Precursors and Successors to Boccalini Boccalini appears to have drawn his opening scene of a marketplace of political charlatans from the 1593 Satyre Menippée, a pamphlet from the French wars of religion. The Satyre Menippé began with a scene of political quacksalvers foisting their wares upon the public in the marketplace. According to the 1595 English translation, two “craftie Juglers or Apothecaries,” one of Spain and one of Lorraine, performed upon a scaffold, surrounded by a crowd that would see them “vaunt their drugges” and “play their juggling trickes,” like “many of those that a man may see at Venice in the place of S. Marke.” These figures referred to the rise of new, itinerant performative professionals, including permanent acting troupes and licensed medical charlatans.14 While medical metaphors had long offered a means for anatomizing the political body, the charlatans, with their bold claims, dangerous cures, and alluring theatrics, were deployed widely to represent the new regime of political

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thinking concerning simulation and dissimulation.15 In the Satyre Menippée, the quacksalvers hawk a false universal cure, the Catholicon, a satire upon attempts by the members of the Catholic League to assure the succession of their leader, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine. The pamphlet helped the public accept his rival, the new convert, Henry IV.16 The Satyre Menippée was couched in an elaborate fiction of its p ­ assage into print. This framing fiction, elaborately developing a pseudonymous authorial persona and a twisted chain of retro-translation, sets the locus of political perception in an imaginary polity of free speakers. According to a letter from the printer, it began its journey as the report of a Florentine agent to the Medici in a saddlebag that went astray. With difficulty, it was translated from Italian into French, “& so from hand to hand the translation of it came even unto me, which I hav caused to be printed, as well to relieve from paine such as are curious to behold all newes or novelties, as to provoke them that yet languishe under the yoke of that tyrannie…”.17 This fiction is, however, undermined by an epilogue, “The French Printers discourse,” wherein the printer claims that he and “sundry learned men” “did very easily judge, by the stile and language of the booke,” that the author couldn’t be Italian, for he would never have so “absolute knowledge of all the affairs, and of the very natural disposition of all the most famous men of Fraunce.” The printer concluded that the author must be French, and the Florentine had translated it from French into Italian, from which it had been translated back into French. The printer labored long to discover the identity of the author, and at last received a report from a man he ran into on the street, extensively glossed in the margin of the English translation, that the author was one Lord Agnosse (“Unknowne”), not from Italy, but from Alethie (“Truth”), born in a little town, Eleuthere (“Libertie”), inhabited by the Parresiens (“Free Speakers”), who was always at war with the Argytophiles & Timomanes (“Lovers of money” and “Desirers of honor”). The use of the printer’s voice here deployed the reality of anonymous printing of the period, in which works escaped the authors’ control and their final form often depended upon the printer. It performed a practice of detection and perception to uncover a “real author,” the Lord Agnosse, that is, another fiction. Those same detective practices were also required to read the work as a whole, as witnessed by the extensive marginal glossing throughout the 1595 English translation. The two

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discourses from the printer also extended the fictive temporality of the Satyre Menippée, the final discourse purportedly having been added to the text following an imperfect, incomplete first run of the pamphlet. The sense of an unfolding temporality, and the framing of the work as a snapshot of an ongoing, lively news cycle, began to be developed in the very first item in the Satyre Menippée. The Spanish charlatan, selling his wonderful drug, the Higuero (the etymology and meaning of which is parsed at length by the printer in his epilogue), vaunted a list of its fifty powers. Only nineteen of those were described in the Satyre Menippée, however, as “time shall cause you see the residue.” After a solipsistic description of the elixir sold by the charlatan of Lorraine, a different item followed, “A Short Summe of the Estates of Paris, called together the tenth of Februarie 1593. and drawne out of the notes and remembrances of the Ladie of la Lande […] and out of the secret talkings and speeches that passed betweene her and the father Commelaid.” Despite the fact that the scene of the charlatans vaunting their cures provided the title for the whole work, the scene was never returned to, and the other powers of the drug were left to the imagination. The Satyre Menippée not only evoked the atmosphere of an ongoing, periodical communication, but also mimicked the uneven, faulty reportage of contemporary newsletters. The Parnassian press existed within this unevenly punctuated temporality, reinforcing the Boccalinian view of society as a realm of marketplace performances designed to keep the public wanting more. Thus, for example, the first Aviso of Matías de los Reyes’s 1624 Court of Parnassus replaces Boccalini’s opening scene of the marketplace with a courtly proclamation, dated from Parnassus on January 1, 1623, that such a market would be held.18 The reader had to wait until the fifth Aviso, dated May, 1623, for the market of politicians itself to take place.19

The Anonymous Parnassus and the Named Utopia Some of the first authors to publish their works from Parnassus were Rosicrucian pamphleteers, including Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654) (see Appendix). Of the many Rosicrucian pamphleteers, Andreae deployed pseudonymity and fictive imprints most methodically. Andreae’s Boccalini-inspired criticisms of contemporary market society appeared anonymously, published from Parnassus, Utopia, and Cosmopolis. Ironically, the opposite is true of Andreae’s better known

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Utopian and Christian tracts. They were published under his own name and stated (correctly) that they had been printed in Strasbourg. The normative works that Andreae published under his own name often referred back to Andreae’s anonymously published Boccalinian satires, thus setting up a dialogue between Andreae’s normative and critical works. For instance, Andreae published his Errors travelling in the Land (Peregrini in Patria Errores) in Utopia in 1618, but his 1619 response to it, Civis Christianus, sive Peregrini quondam errantis restitutiones, under his own name from Strasbourg. He published his Turbo pseudonymously as “Andreas de Valentia” from “Helicon in Parnassus” in 1616, 1621, and 1641, and his Menippus anonymously in 1617 from “Helicon in Parnassus” and in 1618 from “Cosmopolis,” but his Liberty of True Christianity and Solid Philosophy Opposed to the World of Servitude (1618) and Christian Mythology (1619) under his own name from Strasbourg. He published the German translation of Boccalini and the Rosicrucian Fama anonymously in 1614, but his normative Description of a Christianopolitan Republic (henceforth, Christianopolis) under his own name from Strasbourg in 1619. Andreae’s masked identities were not necessarily intended to be impenetrable; “Andreas de Valentia” is hardly difficult to decipher. By juxtaposing his anonymous and pseudonymous satirical works on the one hand (including the Rosicrucian pamphlets and the Boccalini translation) with his attributed works of Christian piety and social reform on the other, Andreae set up a dichotomy. He opposed what he portrayed as a market society, a chaotic realm of simulated identities where only the pursuit of profit remained constant, to the ordered, anti-commercial Christian community. When it came to translating his normative vision of Christianopolis into a realistic plan in his Image of a Christian Society (1620), however, Andreae was forced to engage in the Parnassian marketplace he had intended to exclude from his ideal Christian society. Like other Utopian writers, Andreae had minimized commerce within Christianopolis. While Sir Thomas More did include a marketplace in Utopia, its purpose was unclear, since nothing was for sale.20 In Campanella’s City of the Sun (written in 1602, and published in 1623), based on celestial architecture as the ultimate natural order, there was no marketplace at all, even though over half of the urban fabric consisted of roads and open space between eight concentric walls imitating the planetary circuits.21 Dürer included a well-defined marketplace in his Etliche Unterricht, but

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that work, while sometimes considered among Utopian works due its prescriptive nature, was in fact a handbook for artisans and builders. Dürer’s work informed Andreae’s Christianopolis, however, which makes the minimal role of the marketplace in Andreae’s text still more striking. According to Andreae, in the real world, the “republic” was “a market place where vices may be bought and sold” and the academy “a labyrinth in which it is a game and an art to wander about.”22 In Christianopolis, by contrast, Andreae suppressed the market to order and clarify society. While a single large forum (referred to at times as a “marketplace”) occupied the center of Christianopolis, this served as the conjoined home of religion, justice, and learning, whose co-operation, Andreae argued, could serve to dispel the chaos engendered by the separation of the Church, the courts and the universities in the real world. There was no use for commerce or money in his society. Although the island state of Christianopolis afforded great opportunities for commerce, “the inhabitants of the place, individually, have nothing to do with it.” The only benefit of trade was to bring objects from around the world to one place. A single figure, Achitob, the oeconomist, could managed that. The oeconomist oversaw all trade and the stores of Christianopolis, distributing goods as needed to each citizen. While the treasury contained great wealth, it lay unused by the citizens. The printshop also saw little use, other than for Bibles and a few didactic works. Andreae saw the press as a net ill, criticizing the “vast volumes of nothingness” amassed in the biannual book fairs, due only to authors’ desires to see their names in print. They vainly think that “unless someone has placed their name in the public market catalogue, it is all up with literature and religion.”23 Andreae stressed the practice of arts and crafts, especially painting, as the foundation for the formation of judgment, yet he saw little need for textual communication or literary connoisseurship; taking a page from Plato, Andreae outlawed secular poetry and music in Christianopolis.24 In contrast to this near total absence of the marketplace in his normative society, Andreae’s critical, Boccalinian works included many market scenes depicting the folly, deception, and avarice of humankind.25 Yet, when Andreae hoped to intervene in reality and offer a model that might make his normative society a reality, he had to concede to the power of the marketplace. Andreae attempted to transfer his model society to the real world in a text he published in 1620, the Image of a Christian Society. This plan was far more realistic about the role of

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money, publicity, marketing, and trade than was Christianopolis. Andreae tried to transfer the officials of Christianopolis to the real world by assigning eight individuals to different professions within society (divine, politician, naturalist, historian, mathematician, philosopher, oeconomist, and philologist), each of which had a number of assistants. The signal differences between these figures and the corresponding officials in Christianopolis illustrates the differences between Andreae’s Utopian and pragmatic plans. In particular, the “Oeconomist” of Christianopolis has been transformed. While Andreae made an allusion to the classical sense of oikonomia as household management, and it remained the Oeconomist’s duty to manage the funds of the society, yet, as is apparent from his assistants (Printers, Spies, and Messengers), the Oeconomist’s main function was much broader. He supported a commerce of letters, reputation, and appearances on behalf of the society. The Philologist’s assistants also included Logicians, Rhetoricians, and Poets. Andreae even offered a grudging defense of money, as long as it was “spent upon Christ.”26 When Andreae attempted to reform reality according to his ideal, he made space both for markets and even marketing.

Conclusion: The Parnassian Press and Criticism In many vernaculars across Europe, Parnassus emerged as an interactive scribal and print locus of social, political, and aesthetic criticism. The scene of a marketplace of political charlatans that opened Boccalini’s Advertisements set an important mercantile metaphor. The market represented a chaotic zone of illusion and opinion seen as a new sociopolitical reality. The view of society as a market in satirical pamphlet literature simultaneously heightened social skepticism and proposed a way forward through practices of assessing the cacophony of opposing views making up an emergent theatre of public opinion. If Stephen Toulmin has dubbed the faltering dream that the social order could and should match a divine natural order, “Cosmopolis,” then Parnassus represented the reverse.27 Boccalini’s posthumous Political Touchstone (Pietra del Paragone Politico, tratta dal Monte Parnaso, 1615) was published in “Cosmopolis,” but in this context Cosmopolis represented the very obverse of Toulmin’s vision of unified certainty and clarity. These zones of fictive imprints were not clarified by divine order, but by human agents, well versed in the practices,

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meanings, and aesthetics of pseudonymity, who would use skills honed in the marketplace to adjudicate within the shop of the world. Boccalini’s fictive marketplace was all Carnival with no countervailing Lent. As Wolfgang Asholt has argued, the Bakhtinian carnivalesque of Rabelais momentarily overturned social hierarchies, but the pamphlets and satires of the French wars of religion, which were influential precursors to Boccalini, did the opposite.28 From the 1565 “Book of Merchants” to the 1593 Satyre Menippée (the “queen of the genre,” according to Asholt), pamphlet literature instrumentalized the carnivalesque in order to engage public opinion.29 The sense that old virtues such as fidelity and honor had not been temporarily abandoned, but permanently replaced by new market mores, occasioned an outpouring of media concerning secrecy, dissimulation, and social skepticism.30 Many Utopian designs, including Andreae’s, adhered to a Cosmopolitan ideal, in Toulmin’s sense, which abjured the human realm of the market. The profoundly human metaphoric zone of the ­market, a realm of change and exchange, was at odds with Utopia’s orderly permanence and frequently celestial architecture. The Cosmopolis of the Parnassian market was far different—a contentious, violent zone of fake news and pseudonymous authorship that showcased all of reality as inherently theatrical. In the constant Carnival of Parnassus, political and epistemic hierarchies were permanently overturned. As Brendan Dooley has noted, Boccalini was “among the first to suspect that deception was a condition of politics and not an optional strategy, as Machiavelli and his disciples had maintained.”31 Boccalini’s fake news offered a forum for the realistic portrayal of human nature that assumed human avarice and dissimulation as a new norm rather than a temporary lapse.32 It is thus ironic that this anonymous and pseudonymous zone should have provided an enduring framework for debating literary value and for canonizing authors. Boccalini’s contributions to the history of criticism have been long and well known.33 Herbert Jaumann considered it difficult to exaggerate the importance of Boccalini’s Advertisements for the history of literary criticism in early modernity.34 Boccalini has often been seen as the inspiration for John Suckling’s poem, “A Session of the Poets,” which in turn founded a genre for dissecting the relative merits of writers, which was deployed by later critics such as Congreve.35 Some later versions of Boccalini’s advertisements explicitly staged a judgment of the relative merits of English authors from Chaucer to Dryden as an updated avviso.36 In Fenelon’s mock-epic attack of modern authors

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upon the ancients, the “Italian Criticks” chose Boccalini as their leader.37 As late as the opening of the 1776 season at Covent Garden, Arthur Murphy staged Boccalini himself as “a queer old sort of a good kind of critic” in Murphy’s News from Parnassus.38 While Boccalini’s Parnassian marketplace thus indubitably informed practices of literary criticism, studies that trace those contributions threaten to artificially separate the origins of literary criticism in particular from the miscellaneous, over-arching critical purview of the Advertisements.39 Michael Gavin has argued that the tradition of a satirical judgment of writers in Parnassus that emerged over the seventeenth century “comprised a unique subculture associated with writing poetry and criticism,” and that long before “the term ‘literary criticism’ coalesced into its modern form, writers saw themselves as combatants in a shared terrain.”40 That terrain, however, encompassed criticism of everything, from new institutions of state formation and political manipulation to rival forms of scientific reasoning.41 In a world where everything was marketed for sale, the critical eye surveyed and judged all of society, often linking aesthetic, social, and political criticisms in ways which have since been sundered.

Notes





1. Luigi Firpo, I ‘Ragguagli di Parnaso’ di Traiano Boccalini. Bibliografia delle edizioni italiene (Florence: Sansoni, 1955); Harald Hendrix, Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e polemica. Ricerche sulla fortuna e bibliografia critica (Florence: Olschki, 1995); and Bettine ­Bosold-DasGupta, Traiano Boccalini und der Anti-Parnass: Frühjournalistische Kommunikation als Metadiskurs (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). 2. Mario Infelise, ‘Roman avvisi: Information and Politics in the Seventeenth Century’, in Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700, ed. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 212–28; Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3. Robert Williams, Boccalini in Spain: Study of His Influence on Prose Fiction of the Seventeenth Century (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Columbia University, 1946), pp. 28–29. 4. See, for example, Traiano Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnaso di Traiano Boccalini Romano Centuria Prima (Venice: Pietro Farri, 1612), advertisements 1, “Universita de’ Politici apre un Fondaco in Parnaso,” 10, “Il Menante entra nel fondaco de’ Politici, e dalle merci,” 31, “Per le

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feste di Carnevale i Virtuosi corrono in Parnaso i Palii,” 50, for the “pubblica bottega” opened by Scipione Ammirato, and 100, for a literato who attempts to sell his criticisms of poetry on the “pubblica piazza.” 5. Ibid., advertisement 67, for the view that “il Mondo tutto è una pubblica, e gran bottega.” 6. Hendrix, Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e polemica, pp. 345–48. 7. Marcy L. North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Marcy North, ‘Early Modern Anonymity’, in Oxford Handbooks Online, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford University Press, 2015), http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/ oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-12 (accessed 14 October 2019). 8. I have discussed the historical Boccalini in Vera Keller, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 63–68. 9. Leigh T.I. Penman, ‘“Sophistical Fancies and Mear Chimeras”? Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso and the Rosicrucian Enigma’, Bruniana & Campanelliana, 15:1 (2009): 101–20. 10. Sarra Copia Sulam, Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Works of Sarra Copia Sulam in Verse and Prose, Along with Writings of Her Contemporaries in Her Praise, Condemnation, or Defense, ed. and trans. Don Harrán (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 11. Traiano Boccalini, The New-Found Politicke, trans. William Vaughan (London: Williams, 1626), Dedicatory Epistle (sig. ¶2v). 12. Ibid., p. 160. 13. North, ‘Early Modern Anonymity’. 14. David Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Rosalind Kerr, The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). 15. Sabine Kalff, Politische Medizin der Frühen Neuzeit: Die Figure des Arztes in Italien und England im Frühen 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014). 16. Martial Martin, ‘Satyre Menippee de la Vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne et de la tenue des Estats de Paris. Édition critique’, L’information littéraire, 54 (2002/3): 3–6. 17. Anonymous, A pleasant satyre or poesie: wherein is discovered the Catholicon of Spayne, and the chiefe leaders of the League. Finelie fetcht over, and laide open in their colours. Newly turned out of French into English (London: Thomas Man, 1595), p. 5. 18. Matías de los Reyes, El Curial del Parnaso (Madrid: Delgado, 1624), p. 8. 19. Carroll Johnson, Matías de Los Reyes and the Craft of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 109.

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20. Tessa Morrison, Unbuilt Utopian Cities, 1460–1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 2. 21. Ibid., p. 62. 22. Felix Emil Held, Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Illinois, 1914), p. 136. 23. Ibid., p. 195. 24. Ibid., p. 88. 25. Vera Keller, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 26. Johann Valentin Andreae, A Model of a Christian Society, trans. John Hall, ed. Samuel Hartlib (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1647). 27. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 28. Wolfgang Asholt, ‘Nationales Programm und Satirenliteratur im Umkreis der “Politiques”’, in Nation und Literatur im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Garber (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989), pp. 404–28 (p. 405). 29. Ibid. 30. Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Brendan Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Jon Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); James H. Johnson, Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Timothy McCall, Sean Roberts, and Giancarlo Fiorenza, ed., Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2013); and Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Tamar Herzig, ed. Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 31. Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism, p. 125. 32.  Alexandra Gajda, ‘Tacitus and Political Thought in Early Modern Europe, c. 1530–c. 1640’, in Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, ed. A.J. Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 253–68 (p. 264). 33. Giovanni Mestica, Traiano Boccalini e la letteratura critica e politica del Seicento (Florence: Barber̀a, 1878); J.E. Spingarn, ‘Jacobean and Caroline Criticism’, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume VII: Cavalier and Puritan, ed. A.W. Ward and A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 259–75.

64  V. KELLER 34.  Herbert Jaumann, ‘Zur Rhetorik Der Literaturkritik in Der Frühen Neuzeit’, Colloquia Germanica, 28:3/4 (1995): 191–202 (p. 199). 35. Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill, 1998), p. 176. 36. N.N., ‘Several Candidates Stand for the Place of Poet Laureat of England, Who They Were, and Why They Were Put By’, in Advertisements from Parnassus. Written Originally in Italian. By the Famous Trajano Boccalini. Newly Done into English, and Adapted to the Present Times, 3 vols (London: Richard Smith, 1704), I, p. 225. 37. François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Characters and Criticisms upon the Ancient and Modern Orators, Poets, Painters, Musicians, Statuaries, and Other Arts & Sciences (London: John Nutt, 1705), p. 41. 38. Arthur Murphy, ‘News from Parnassus’, in The Works, Volume IV (London: Thomas Cadell, 1786), pp. 391–424 (p. 392). 39.  See Stephanie Jed, Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition and Republican Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 40. Michael Gavin, The Invention of English Criticism: 1650–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 51. 41. See, for example, Juan Bautista Corachán, Avisos de Parnaso (Valencia: Mayans y Siscar, 1747).

Appendix Selected examples of works published from the Parnassian Press, or other fictive imprints relating to Parnassus in German-speaking lands: Spanische Sturmglock und Teutsches Warnglöcklein (Printed on the Parnassian Press, 1616); Grick, Friedrich, Komētoprostasiekdikētēs Oder Cometenbutzers Schützer/Das ist/Eine glaubwürdige Copey articulierter, rechtmessiger Exceptionum, probationum, & iunctis refutationibus in eventum conclusionum deß guten/Unschuldigen Cometen/welcher in verwichenen 1618. Jahr erschienen: wider/unnd gegen N.N. den 13. Augusti noch lauffenden 1619. Jahrs dem Gott Apollini im Parnasso durch ermeltes Cometen Syndicum, und Verweser Johanne Procopio übergeben (Parnassian Book-Press, 1619); Johannes Faulhaber, Expolitio Famae Sidereae Novae Faulhaberianae (Parnassian Press, 1619); Continuation der Newen Zeitung (Printed on the Parnassian Press, 1620 and 1621); Colloquium montis Parnassi (Printed on the Parnassian Press, 1622); Avisi Parnassiaci (Printed on the Parnassian Press, 1623); Alamannus Boccalinus, trans., Das Wunderseltzame Leben (Printed on the Parnassian

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Press, in the Year of Consumption and Confusion [anno consumptionis et confusionis], 1624); Nagelnewe, warme Zeittung auss Levante (Printed on the Parnassian Press, 1624); Discursus de statu publico ex Parnasso (Printed on the Parnassian Press, 1625); Newe und zuvor unerhörte Pracherey und Bettlers-Armee (Printed on the New Parnassian Press, 1642); Stan. Minckius [J.J. Winckelmann], Relatio novissima ex Parnasso (Parnassus, 1648); Parnassi trutina (Parnassapolis, 1656); Collegium occasione tumultuantis Verasii in Parnasso (Irenopolis, 1669); Relatio Trajani Boccalini ex Parnasso de fato Wenceslai ducis Saganensis (Gratianapolis, 1675); Deß Apollinis neuer Probier-ofen […] Aus dem Parnasso hervorgegeben durch Trajanum Bocalini (1678); [Chr. Gryphius], Apollinis Discurs [Printed at the Springs of Parnassus, 1683); Trajano Boccalini [J.A. Fabricius], Judicium ex Parnasso de Triga scriptorum recentium (Cosmopolis, 1689); Relatio ex Parnaso de fatis praesentium temporum (Cosmopolis, 1689).

Bibliography Andreae, Johann Valentin, A Model of a Christian Society, trans. John Hall, ed. Samuel Hartlib (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1647). Anonymous, Pasquillorum Tomi Duo (Eleutheropoli: s.n., 1544). ———, A pleasant satyre or poesie: wherein is discovered the Catholicon of Spayne, and the chiefe leaders of the League. Finelie fetcht over, and laide open in their colours. Newly turned out of French into English (London: Thomas Man, 1595). Asholt, Wolfgang, ‘Nationales Programm und Satirenliteratur im Umkreis der “Politiques”’, in Nation und Literatur im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Garber (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989), pp. 404–28. Boccalini, Traiano, Ragguagli di Parnasso di Traiano Boccalini Romano Centuria Prima (Venice: Pietro Farri, 1612). ———, The New-Found Politicke. Disclosing the Secret Natures and Dispositions as Well of Private Persons as of Statesmen and Courtiers; Wherein the Governments, Greatnesse, and Power of the Most Notable Kingdomes and Common-Wealths of the World Are Discovered and Censured, trans. William Vaughan (London: Francis Williams, 1626). Bosold-DasGupta, Bettine, Traiano Boccalini und der Anti-Parnass: Frühjournalistische Kommunikation als Metadiskurs (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005). Burke, Peter, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism, and Reason of State’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 479–98.

66  V. KELLER Caporali, Cesare, ‘Gli Avisi di Parnaso’, in Rime piaceuoli di M. Cesare Caporali da Perugia (Parma: Viotti, 1592), pp. 75–90. Corachán, Juan Bautista, Avisos de Parnaso (Valencia: Mayans y Siscar, 1747). de la Mothe-Fénelon, François de Salignac, Characters and Criticisms upon the Ancient and Modern Orators, Poets, Painters, Musicians, Statuaries, and Other Arts & Sciences (London: John Nutt, 1705). de los Reyes, Matías, El Curial del Parnaso (Madrid: Delgado, 1624). de Vivo, Filippo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Dooley, Brendan, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, and Tamar Herzig, eds., Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Firpo, Luigi, I ‘Ragguagli di Parnaso’ di Traiano Boccalini. Bibliografia delle edizioni italiene (Florence: Sansoni, 1955). Gajda, Alexandra, ‘Tacitus and Political Thought in Early Modern Europe, c. 1530–c. 1640’, in Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, ed. A.J. Woodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 253–68. Gavin, Michael, The Invention of English Criticism: 1650–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Gentilcore, David, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Goldgar, Anne, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Held, Felix Emil, Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, University of Illinois, 1914). Hendrix, Harald, Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e polemica. Ricerche sulla fortuna e bibliografia critica (Florence: Olschki, 1995). Infelise, Mario, ‘Roman avvisi: Information and Politics in the Seventeenth Century’, in Court and Politics in Papal Rome, 1492–1700, ed. Gianvittorio Signorotto and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 212–28. Jaumann, Herbert, ‘Zur Rhetorik Der Literaturkritik in Der Frühen Neuzeit’, Colloquia Germanica, 28:3/4 (1995): 191–202. Jed, Stephanie, Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition and Republican Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Johnson, Carroll, Matías de Los Reyes and the Craft of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Johnson, James H., Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Kalff, Sabine, Politische Medizin der Frühen Neuzeit: Die Figure des Arztes in Italien und England im Frühen 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014).

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Keller, Vera, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Kerr, Rosalind, The Rise of the Diva on the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). Martin, Martial, ‘Satyre Menippee de la Vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne et de la tenue des Estats de Paris. Édition critique’, L’information littéraire, 54 (2002/3): 3–6. McCall, Timothy, Sean Roberts, and Giancarlo Fiorenza, eds., Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2013). Mestica, Giovanni, Traiano Boccalini e la letteratura critica e politica del Seicento (Florence: Barber̀a, 1878). Morrison, Tessa, Unbuilt Utopian Cities, 1460–1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). Murphy, Arthur, ‘News from Parnassus’, in The Works, Volume IV (London: Thomas Cadell, 1786), pp. 391–424. N.N., ‘Several Candidates Stand for the Place of Poet Laureat of England, Who They Were, and Why They Were Put By’, in Advertisements from Parnassus: Written Originally in Italian: By the famous Trajano Boccalini: Newly done into English, and Adapted to the Present Times, 3 vols (London: Richard Smith, 1704). North, Marcy L., The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in ­Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). ———, ‘Early Modern Anonymity’, in Oxford Handbooks Online, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford University Press, 2015). http://www.oxfordhandbooks. com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935338-e-12 (accessed 14 October 2019). Penman, Leigh T.I., ‘“Sophistical Fancies and Mear Chimeras”? Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso and the Rosicrucian Enigma’, Bruniana & Campanelliana, 15:1 (2009): 101–20. Ross, Trevor, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill, 1998). Snyder, Jon, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Spingarn, J.E., ‘Jacobean and Caroline Criticism’, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume VII: Cavalier and Puritan, ed. A.W. Ward and A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), pp. 259–75. Sulam, Sarra Copia, Jewish Poet and Intellectual in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Works of Sarra Copia Sulam in Verse and Prose, Along with Writings of Her Contemporaries in Her Praise, Condemnation, or Defense, ed. and trans. Don Harrán (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Toulmin, Stephen, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

68  V. KELLER Williams, Robert, Boccalini in Spain: Study of His Influence on Prose Fiction of the Seventeenth Century (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Columbia University, 1946). Zagorin, Perez, Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

Emblem Books, Gift-Exchange Practices and Œconomia Valérie Hayaert

Au contraire representez vous un monde aultre, on quel un chascun preste, un chascun doibve, tous soient debteurs, tous soient presteurs. O quelle harmonie sera parmy les reguliers mouvements des cieulx. […] Car nature n’a créé l’homme que pour prester & emprunter.

François Rabelais, Tiers livre des faictz et dictz héroïques du noble Pantagruel. A Paris, Par Chrestien Wechel, en la rue sainct Jacques a l’escu de Basle: et en la rue sainct jehan de Beauvoys au Cheval volant. M.D.XLVI. Avec privilege du Roy, pour six ans.

Thousands of emblem books were produced and disseminated across the early modern period. Their hybrid form has been understood as the symptom of a much larger phenomenon.1 Collections of emblems by authors such as the Milanese lawyer Andrea Alciato (1492–1550), the jurist Guillaume La Perrière, a native of Toulouse (ca. 1503–ca. 1555) V. Hayaert (*)  University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_4

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or the Parisian lawyer Pierre Coustau (ca. 1520–† after 1567) have no predefinite structural organization. These assemblages of witty pieces were conceived as the otium literatum of legal practice. But these books are rooted in a context. These collections of emblemata (pieces of mosaics) celebrate the inchoate process of poetic detachable fragments and as such, they come into interplay with exchange practices of a gift-giving society. The idea of the emblem emerges when Alciato brings together legal and literary sources. In classical texts, the term refers to detachable ornaments, the applied decorations onto vases or anything that is grafted upon an object to make it more precious through the addition of an ornament. Figuratively speaking, emblemata are also a type of commonplace, particularly in use in judicial eloquence. When the earliest extant edition (1531) of Alciato’s emblems is produced by the Augsburg printer, Henrich Steyner, Alciato’s collection of epigrams receives a supplementary ornament: a series of wooden engravings, i.e. printed images. Editions of Alciato’s illustrated emblems will soon become best-sellers. Alciato’s emblems were particularly praised by orators and educators, but, in the same way as La Fontaine’s fables were famously used as teaching material without recognizing its potential derisive content (think of Rousseau forbidding Émile to be taught lessons derived from fables such as ‘La cigale et la fourmi’), Alciato’s inventions cannot be reduced to a moralizing and didactic intent. Recent developments in emblem studies have shown that emblematic montages are always hints towards a noncanonical, nonstandard way to produce a new symbolic agency. The emblematic image, as Daniel Russell has convincingly argued, is always a fragment detached from an earlier cultural corpus: All early modern emblems were parerga in some sense, that is, either physical ornaments to be used by craftsmen or rhetorical ornaments of the truths they framed or carried or highlighted while remaining peripheral and unessential to the expression of those truths.2

In the context of legal practice and judicial eloquence,3 an emblem is a detachable rhetoric ornament, which is always meant to carry a single meaning when adapted to one particular moment of the speech. The talent of the orator may be appreciated in connection to the unexpected use of his emblemata. Some of these ornaments, says Quintilian, are so worn out or pasted and copied from a clumsy memory that they are called, in a derisive and ironic way, emblemata. Young lawyers were trained to adorn their pleas with emblemata, and sometimes the result

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was appalling. These ill-related pieces were the antique equivalent of our modern and alas too common ‘copié-collé’. Montaigne mentions his ‘emblèmes supernuméraires’, which always need ‘une petite subtilité ambitieuse’ to make a lasting impression.4 In Roman Law and judicial eloquence, interpolations (emblemata Triboniani) occur when two different corpora collide. When, at the age of the writing of the Pandects, Tribonian, Justinian’s chancellor, was asked to select the useful and practical parts of the existing Roman Law, he and his ministers cut and abridged the ancient and native wisdom of Roman sages in order to build a new Code. The rediscovery, by Renaissance legal humanists of the Jurisprudentia ante-Justinianea is, throughout the early modern period, a recurrent bone of contention. On one hand, the passionate charges of Lorenzo Valla and later in the century the vehement attacks by François Hotman epitomize the ­anti-tribonian current. On the other hand, conservationist lawyers try to justify the editing choices of the byzantine chancellor. During the early modern age, legal humanists strive to hunt these emblemata Triboniani, understood as shameful crimes against the integrity of the ancient wisdom of the Jurisprudentes. Their aim is to restore the then sacralized corpus of antejustinian laws. Tribonian is harshly criticized as the impudent chancellor who dared to touch to ancient statutes. Sometimes around 1567, François Hotman, in his pamphlet Antitribonien,5 stages a ferocious caricature of the chief of the Byzantine chancellery, who is believed to have sold the sacred laws to obtain money for himself. Here emblemata Triboniani are understood as suspicious interpolations, as they considerably shift the meaning of the mens legislatoris (the spirit of the laws when drafted by the legislator). The interpolations of Tribonian are tracked as symptoms of a vicious practice: the pretence of uniformity, the overabundant presence of antinomies (contradictions of the Code and the Pandects) will exercise the wits of most contemporary jurists for a long time. Antinomies are often called emblemata, that is to say, in this context, an ironic name for forgeries.

An Ancient Gift-Giving Œconomia These two corpora (emblems and emblemata Triboniani) are both symptoms of an ancient gift-giving economy. Emblems are then a species of xenia; they are customary gifts which imply a guest-host relationship between two individuals. Of all ancient literary genres, epigrams have been identified as a peculiar form of epigraphy linked to its material medium. The first Greek epigrams were inscribed onto stone or

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ceramic objects. Of all the variegated nature of ecphrastic genres, ancient epigrams are the only examples of practices which were effectively crafted by painters or bronze sculptors. Theodor Mommsen has underlined the groundbreaking nature of Alciato’s interest into epigraphic material: he even established that his early works founded epigraphy as a science. Alciato translated an important number of Greek epigrams. He was also deeply influenced by Martial’s xenia and apophoreta. In his emblem In dies meliora (which first appears in the 1546 edition of his Emblema XLV) Alciato explicitly refers to such a practice (the term xenia appears in the second verse) to recall that one of his friends brought him the head of a bristly boar as a New Year’s gift. Alciato adds to this gift a symbolic commentary where the pig’s head becomes an ironic figure for wishful thinking, a human tendency to think that the future will bring better things. The last word of the epigram ‘ulterius’ (ever onward) is a sarcastic echo of the optimistic motto of Charles V. By juxtaposing the image of the pig, bearing over its back the word ‘ulterius’, with the two columns and motto ‘plus oltre’ standing in the background as an evident allusion to the Emperor’s motto, the picture of the 1546 edition makes the criticism blatant. As Alciato mentions, the writing of his emblems on the occasion of the festive Saturnalia, these allusive aspects of the gift-giving exchanges should not be overlooked. When Alciato bestows a gift to the ‘noble Ambrogio Visconti’, the dedicatee of the first edition of his book of emblems, it is not a mere altruistic act: he expects in return to set an example of behaviour and to please his powerful friend with a witty collection of epigrams, following here the elegant practice of Martial, Pausanias and others. Friendship, the laws of Amity, conceal at times that gifts are always conditional upon reciprocation, even, says David Konstan, when the agents conceal this from themselves (what Marcel Mauss called ‘méconnaissance’).6 In the humanist circle of French occupied Milan, some sort of loyalty is required of peers. The address to the ‘noble’ Ambrogio Visconti takes us to the heart of a chilvaric ethical code, where Alciato bestows upon an aristocrat an emblem he designs especially for him. In such a context, where Ciceronian texts about amicitia where printed relentlessly, the theme change and exchange anchors several questions. Is it possible to bestow a gift, in the sense of an altruistic act, without demand or expectation of return (by which a gift becomes an economic exchange)? Is gratitude a promissory note, the commitment to repay a gift when the opportunity arises? By reviving classical Greek

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and Roman texts, Alciato’s emblems present a broad collection of codes of behaviour. As Denis L. Drysdall has shown, Alciato reveals at times his own personal inclination, ‘believing with Jerome that marriage is a mistake and, significantly, stating his liking for a certain Greek epigram that warns against the likelihood of cuckoldry’.7 This chapter argues for the relevance of the classical view of gift-economy practices to considerations of humanist life in the early modern period and beyond.

Emblems as Personalized Gifts Since the Milanese lawyer Andrea Alciato (1492–1550) ‘invented’—or stumbled upon by chance—the emblem form in the 1520s,8 emblem books have grown steadily, and the impact of these symbolic forms remains fairly effective until the late eighteenth century, not only in the sphere of the book trade but also in all applied arts, where emblematic structures have been used in such diverse contexts as Jesuit ­apologetics and monarchical European court cultures. In a letter to the Roman bookseller Francesco Calvo, dated 9 January 1523, Alciato associates the making of emblems with several artistic practices flourishing then. In the same way that humanist printers adopt a visual icon, usually accompanied by a motto to define their humanist ambitions, Alciato invents erudite epigrams to convey his own ethos, as a lawyer and legal jurist: These past Saturnalia, in order to gratify the noble Ambrogio Visconti, I put together a little book of epigrams to which I gave the title Emblems, for in each epigram I describe something which is taken from history or from nature and can mean something refined (aliquid elegans), and from which artists, goldsmiths, metalworkers, can fashion the kind of objects which we call badges and which we attach to our hats or use as ­trademarks, like Aldus’ anchor, Froben’s dove or Calvo’s elephant which is in labour so long and gives birth to nothing.9

Over the last three decades, emblem studies have longed shown that emblem books provided patterns for the crafting of personalized ­ jewellery, armoury pieces, hatpins, coat of arms, tapestries, precious tableware or iconographical programmes. The domain of applied emblematics quickly arose as a much wider phenomenon, even at the risk of becoming trivial and ill-related to its aristocratic origins.

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Gift-Giving as a Social Strategy The gift-giving economy of mutual exchanges is then the common paradigm of sixteenth-century humanist circles. Natalie Zemon-Davis has shown persuasively how a gift-giving economy shaped family life, economic relations, politics and religion in sixteenth-century France.10 Anthropological history sheds a new light on bestowal practices. The context is well defined by Panurge’s Praise of Debts. The comic portrait of disrupted gift system is both a mundus inversus and a Utopia where gift-giving practices innerve almost every exchange, from the influxes of blood inside the body to the scale of celestial exchanges across the Universe. Panurge is the Pan-iourgos, the trickster who knows all sorts of languages. According to Rabelais’ famous character, a world without lending will be no better than a dog-kennel. Symbolic gifts are also part of a gift-giving system. Alciato is well aware of the value of his inventions. If coined especially for an aristocrat, the emblem gift is part of an expectation of a return. Soon after the time of writing this piece to Ambrogio Visconti, Alciato was seeking for the position of count palatine, which was awarded to him by Pope Leo X in February 1522. In the legal tradition, coining an heraldic shield for a noble person equates to the juristic act of naming. On 20 August 1533, Alciato wrote from Bourges to the Duke of Milan thanking him for the professorship at Pavia. Alciato had left Bourges for Pavia sometime in 1534, just after Christian Wechel, the Parisian printer, had convinced him to issue a more correct and better ornamented edition of his emblems than Steyner’s Augsbourg editio princeps of 1531.11 Alciato was then recalled by his sovereign, Francisco Sforza, Duke of Milan, who bestowed senatorial rank on his now famed subject and commanded him to teach law in Pavia. In his letter to Wechel, the wording of his comment is telling: emblematum edendorum curam arbitror tibi excidisse, que ratio fecit ut ea de re interpellandum te non putem (I believe that the task of having to sell the Emblems has been withdrawn from you, which means to me that you should not be consulted on this issue).

In this context, emblems as gifts have become valuable economic goods: they have entered the competitive print market. In his correspondence with printers, Alciato always seeks for the best workshops. As a

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meticulous humanist, as Alciato is known to have been, his commendation or initiatives at all stages of the book making is crucial. Publishing emblem books is a demanding venture and authors’ complaints sometimes lead to the point where an entire edition is withdrawn. The expectation for high publishing standards, where all typographical errors are corrected in order to meet the author’s approval, explains some of the pitfalls or downsides of the business. One of the strategies invented by emblem printers was to cater for different audiences: by reusing the same stock of images, they could work on differents formats or translations so that the message could be addressed at different levels. The plasticity of the woodcuts was able to unfold different meanings to different groups. This expert manipulation of the rhetorical value of the emblem is for instance evidenced by the double edition (in French and in Latin) of the Picta Poesis (Imagination Poétique), an emblem book authored by the French scholar and university regent Barthélémy Aneau (Lyons, 1552). Alison Saunders has shown how the strategy of the bifocal emblem book, catering for two distinct audiences, was implemented by Lyons printer Macé Bonhomme with the active collaboration of Barthélémy Aneau.12 In this case, nearly half of the emblems are reusing woodblocks originally designed to illustrate Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Aneau pulled off the tour de force of reinventing his own epigrams, undertaking his literary challenge of poetic imagination as a demiurgic creation of a new life for these old woodblocks.

Printers’ Devices and the Book Trade An emblem, if used as a trademark, becomes a valuable asset. In a letter to Wechel, the address on the verso reads ‘Domino Christiano Wechel negotiatori librario Parisijs. ad signum scuti basiliensis’.13 It might be translated as ‘at the sign of a shield from Basel’.14 This would have been Wechel’s address during his residence in Basel. An emblem serves primarily to locate a printer: it is an topographical indication of where his workshop is established. A printer’s emblem also conveys his ‘savoirfaire’ as a landmark and his reputation across the respublica letteraria. That is why in his 10 December 1520 letter to Francesco Calvo, Alciato worries that his missing manuscript containing an attack to monasticism as an institution might be used against him. He even threatens Francesco Calvo of a legal suit against him:

76  V. HAYAERT Luther, Picard, Hussite and all the other names of heretics will not be as infamous as my name will be if this is what happens. Do you not know, or do you pretend not to know, these hooded factiones, their power, their pulpit pronouncements, their public imprecations, their maledictions, and endless wickedness of that sort which (May the gods avert such a plague!) are going to fall on my head? I may bring a suit, against you chiefly as the standard-bearer, then Erasmus, then Froben. I shall call on gods and men, I shall turn every stone to clear myself and make you all guilty of the damage. Is this what your trust is worth? to take things written in the greatest confidence from my boxes, things which, even if worthless and vain—whatever might have come into my head, as friend to friend—I entrusted there to secrecy. And, as if this were not enough, to show them to the learned and unlearned alike, then to leave them in Germany with one who thinks of nothing but publishing them, of avenging himself as it were on his enemies with someone else’s weapons.15

Not only can an emblem can serve as an identification mark, it can also bears all the ambivalence of a flag or a banner. Here, Alciato’s letter is a fierce warning against the foolishness of a careless printer who is about to make public a pamphlet, without anonymising it beforehand. Alciato’s name and reputation are at stake. If the printer were to persist in his error, Alciato would sue him as the standard-bearer of a publicly waged war, and would proceed with attacking Erasmus and Froben themselves. Small fry first, then a wider offensive action. In a chapter of his Parergon Juris, Alciato discussed the personal insignia of Roman emperors.16 They began, he claims, as military symbols, such as the eagle carried on a pole in front of a legion. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, ‘emblemata’ could mean ‘insignia’, often translated by device in its widest sense. Aldus Manutius’ printer device, which evokes the motto festina lente (haste slowly) through the combination of a dolphin and an anchor, was a humanist invention. Like Aldus’s anchor, Froben’s dove or Calvo’s elephant, emblemata could be used as printers’ devices. Aldus Manutius’s device was soon copied and internalized by several other printers expecting to build on Manutius’ humanist reputation. For instance, the Parisian printer Nicolas Le Riche (Nicolaus Dives), active between 1540 and 1549, employed the motto ‘Non satis una tenet ceratas anchora puppes (A single anchor is not capable of sufficiently holding the tarred ship in place)’, which he took from Ovid’s Remedia Amoris (line 447), and situated himself ‘sub insigni geminæ Anchoræ’ or ‘ad insigne Aldi’. Le Riche also copied Aldus’ famous

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italic and linked letters. As he explains in the preface to his 1547 edition of the Psalms, he has transfered the elegance of Aldine typography to presses of France. His imitation of Aldus’ prestigious device and his emulation of one his fonts are part of a deliberate strategy to enhance the reputation of his own printing house, since the Aldine presses embodied the utmost quality in typography and in trustworthiness of textual transmission. The justification of a translatio typographorum, modelled on the pattern of the translatio studii, is the good side of a common practice among booksellers. The reverse is also true, as several other printers copied and used Aldus’ mark fraudulently. Angelo Nuovo stresses that ‘the value of the device of the Anchor and Dolphin was quantifiable, given that in 1568 his heir Paolo Manuzio conceded its use to Domenico Basa for a monthly fee of twenty gold scudi’.17 As legal historians have pointed out, printers’ marks were visible tokens of pertainship to the Respublica Typographorum. Similar to coats of arms, they could be transmitted by inheritance. The disposition and devolution of signs of a partnership (signum societatis) was and still is a common issue in the business of printers. The visual aspect of a printer’s mark was often modified or given away when the partnership was dissolved. The economical side of the design of printers’ marks should not hide the humanist ethos of these devices. Printers’ insignia, though highly malleable, always emerge from a firm line of conduct. The various marks used by the Lyons printer Macé Bonhomme suggests a continuous line of conduct around the same ideal of life. According to Baudrier, Bonhomme used eight different marks during his lifetime. His first four marks (the first one appears in 1541, when he establishes himself in the French city of Vienne) were drawn by Georges Reverdy and bear the motto ‘du labeur la vie’ (given also in Greek as ‘ἐκ πόνου ὁ βίος’). The first version of his mark is framed by two verses already containing the overall meaning developped later in his emblem: ‘Sic ars chalcographi saxea montra domat: Sic labor alatum te super astra feret’ (Just as the art of engraving tames the stone monsters, your work takes you, winged, to the stars). The visual icon of the mark shows a victorious Perseus, holding the decapitated hed of Medusa. The invention of his iconic device is later expounded by his friend Barthélemy Aneau, as a preface of his own emblem book, Picta Poesis, Imagination Poétique (1552), for which ‘l’amy Bon-homme’ has provided infinite care. In a context where laws of amity govern the gift-exchange practices, a printers’ mark containing the motto ‘ἐκ πόνου ὁ κλέος’ becomes the basis for an 18-verse epigram which concludes with a French version of

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the original motto: ‘Du Labeur la Gloire’. His goal is to transform πόνος (heavy burden) into κλέος (military glory). The humanist printer shows his heraldic capacity for inventing a coat of arms designed for himself and for his circle. The Ovidian narrative serves as a vehicle to convey the ethos of an armorial of letters. The myth of Perseus taming Medusa serves here as a heroic tale on the achievements of printing. Moreover, the image of the victorious Perseus signals to every reader or viewer the achievement he wishes to proclaim: it says ‘this is what I am’ but also ‘this is what I believe in’. The symbolic function of this mark has to do with the courtly ideal of chilvarous ethics. It acts much as fi ­fteenth-century imprese: it embodies a purpose, a risky undertaking or an ideal. Printers’ insignia compete with a concurrent chilvaric and warrior ethos: their impetus is the belief in the advancement of humanist renovation of ­letters. Loyalty, constancy and hard work are the virtues desirable for a Bon-homme (the ancestor of the ‘honnête homme’) as much as they are desirable for the progress of humanism, which, according to its most promiment figures, is itself a battle that needs to be fought. Bibliographical researches about printers’ devices in the sixteenth century show that their use was optional, that they were highly malleable forms, that, according to the original sense of the word emblema, were ‘detachable ornaments’ and that they could be used as self-fashioning tools. On this premise, it has been argued that their functional development was ‘decorative rather than regulatory’.18 Instead of seeing in them any firm legal principle, we should see these devices primarily as self-fashioning tools. But we should also see them as tools for collective fashioning. The Compagnie des Libraires wore ‘ad insigni Sagittarii’ is an example of a mark used by a collective body. The brothers Senneton use a trademark for their brotherhood partnership. When one of the three brothers turns himself towards Geneva, their alliance is broken and this is the reason why the ambitious edition of the Sennetoniana (1548–1550) has failed completely. Instead of classifying these marks into too rigid a taxonomy, the examples developed here demonstrate the everchanging nature of the emblematic process. Dictionaries of printers’ marks often present this material in a positivist way which appears to freeze social dynamics and economic practices into a totalizing grammar. Yet the very selectivity and seriality of these images undermine any attempt at a unitary reading. As I will suggest here, there are many other ways of using emblems in a gift-oriented economy.

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Emblems in the Context of a Gift-Exchange Economy As early as 1522, some of his epigrams had circulated among friends. As a literary otium, he had started his collection of ecphrastic epigrams during his first stay in Milan after his first professorship in Avignon. His collection of epigrams had circulated in the humanist circle flourishing then in the orbit of the French controlled senate of Milan. Emblem books have a rich and polysemic link with the notion of œconomia. Alciato’s choice of the term emblemata is revealing: these ornaments could be transferred to many elaborately decorated objects, in the interest of domestic economy. This is precisely what Georgette de Montenay recommends to her readership in the preface of her Emblèmes et Devises Chrétiennes (1567). Emblems could be used as poems, epigrams, but also as embroidery patterns, badges or ornaments reusable in any given decoration (pottery, metalware, furniture, glass and windows, domestic, devotional or political objects). In the case of Montenay’s emblem book, the Calvinist female author suggests that the first Christian collection of emblems should be used as patterns to adorn furniture for the purpose of remembering:                quelque passage Du saint escrit bien propre à leur vsage, Dont le Seigneur sera glorifié, Et cependant quelcum edifié.19                     (some passage From Holy Scripture very proper for their use, By which the Lord will be glorified, And meanwhile someone edified.)20

The use of emblem books as pattern collections is an ongoing tradition for emblem writers in this period. This is because an emblem is first and foremost considered as a peculiar type of ecphrastic epigram. Attached to a material context, the emblematic piece adapts its form, function and intent to another setting. The essence of the emblem as piece to be reinserted in a new context gains special attention when it shifts to another audience. Montenay was a noblewoman (perhaps a ­lady-in-waiting to Queen Jeanne d’Albret), but her intention in creating her own emblems was to address a female audience and to offer new insights to applied emblematics in a domestic context. What is striking

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in her case is the combination between the strong Calvinist voice shaped by these political emblems and the intention to use them as a humble pastime for embroidery patterns in the ambit of elite courtliness. These creations, mediating a fierce religious controversy, seem nevertheless to be confined to the private realm of domestic activities. In this sense, emblem creation may invade the economy of domestic space, that is to say the oikos nomos (the management of the household) but this meaning may also overlap with a more modern conceptualization of economic practices. Montenay’s first emblem (‘Sapiens mulier aedificat domum’ [The wise woman builds her temple]) shows the Queen of Navarra erecting a temple (Image 1); Albret’s initials are added in the icon. Note that the geometrical tools—a compass and ruler—are displayed in front of the column of Faith. This symbolic representation of a newly erected temple restores the variegated meaning of the Greek oikos. Emblems are thresholds where shifting definitions of oikonomia conceptualize the extension of the domestic sphere towards courtly politics and Protestant activism. As it is well known, the category of oikonomia is an important conceptual model throughout the early modern period and its various lexical applications have served as a platform for further investigation to the entire framework of economic thought. ‘Oikonomia’ suggested a mindset, a forma mentis which, through careful measurements and rigorous comparative judgements, came to acquire habits not only apt for the management of the household, but as well for affairs of much wider concerns. Oikonomia was a way to ensure satisfactory management, through guidance, consensus and measure. In the 1603 illustrated edition of his Iconologia, Cesare Ripa ­provided an allegorical image to personify this abstract notion (Image 2). His dictionary of iconografic forms had a strong influence as it was a proscriptive treatise models for artists to follow, with a detailed outline of the meanings and conventions of each symbolic attribute. ‘Economia’ is depicted as a matron of venerable appearance, crowned with olive leaves, holding in her left hand a compass and in her right hand a wand, with a rudder at her side. The traditional attributes of glory and reward (laurel crown), geometry (compass), prudence and moderation (rudder) and imperium (wand or sceptre) are combined in an innovative way to suggest, according to Ripa’s commentary, that the visual representation of oikonomia should convey the idea that the authority of the householder over his servants is an image of the care a father must exercise over his children and also of the authority that a ruler must exercise

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Image 1  Georgette de Montenay, ‘Sapiens mulier aedificat domum’, in Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes (Lyon, 1571), Glasgow University Library, Sp Coll S.M. 771

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Image 2  Cesare Ripa, ‘Economia’, in Iconologia (Rome, 1603), Heidelberg University Library, C 5456 A RES

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over his subjects. This visual invention recalls the ethical character of a recommended way of behaving: it glorifies a way of life intended to perpetuate careful family governance at various scales. Beyond its conservative content, the icon combines several symbols in a relatively complex fashion so as to point out that the Greek word had a wide array of moral implications. If we compare this early iconological depiction with the one provided by Gravelot and Cochin about three centuries later, ‘Économie’ has changed significantly: defined as the ‘wise use of goods of fortune’, the later allegory ‘must be depicted as an older woman, as this quality is not ordinary among young people. She holds hidden behind her clothes a cornucopia filled with gold and silver, so as to signify she should only spare what is necessary’. This iconological shift indicates that the earlier concept of oikonomia, a complex binding network which allowed many applications, has been drastically restricted to the modern acception of ‘parsimony’. The interaction between oikos (household) and polis (community, polity) appears to be dismembered. Modern economy has become the science of acquiring wealth and keeping it. Its opposite is, unsurprisingly, ‘Prodigalité’, a vice to be condemned, visually presented as a blindfolded women, with a spilleddown cornucopia. Iconological treatises, as an example of a visual and cognitive method, offer a new angle from which to consider the origins of economic thought.

Emblematic Exchanges Versus Monetary Transactions Emblem books have constantly warned against the excesses of economic exchanges. Some things (res) are not for sale: babies, bodies. Emblematic pieces are witty inventions, they are designed to prove one’s membership of a humanist community. Humanists designing or receiving emblems are well networked: their distinction, in the Bourdieusian sense of the word, is a social capital. Moreover, emblems, as gestures towards the building of a common civic symbolism, need to be enacted, performed by active readers. This is why their exchange is distinct from pure capital. Emblems build a genuine link between amicable people; it is not a direct cash transaction. Most emblem books will thus warn their readers against the excesses of cupiditas. One of them, published by Christophe Plantin in Antwerp in 1575, is dedicated to the topic of ‘rightful use and misuse of temporary possessions’: it focusses especially on the use and abuse of

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riches.21 The famed Dutch humanist Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert (1522– 1590) wrote the Emblemata moralia et oeconomica de rerum usu et abusu (1609). Since Coornhert had been banished from the Netherlands for his controversial religious beliefs, the book was issued under the name of the Frisian humanist Bernard Furmerius (1542–1616), thanks to the supervision of Plantin and the engraver Philip Galle. This emblem book builds on the polemical attacks against usurary practices, led in particular by Reformation lawyers who would reassert the biblical injunction against usures in Chapter 29 of Ecclesiasticus. The sophisticated prints were executed over a long period of time, due to Coornhert’s exile and to other difficulties. To a certain extent, the stylish print of an emblem book achieved under the presses of Christophe Plantin was a posthumous gift won over time and exile. The author advocates for the character of the righteous merchant by having all the emblems present people engaged in rich and sumptuous scenes of dinner and festive parties, money transactions and scenes of luxurious life. They all bear a biblical motto and a four-line Latin verse beneath the image (subscriptio). This emblem book is an utmost example of biblical wisdom and resistance over financial constraints and life’s hazards. Emblems reveal several aspects of the early modern concept of œconomia, from the sense of ‘dispositio, arrangement’ to ‘proper management of household affairs’, to the meaning of ‘judicious use of resources, frugality’ and to the later sense of ‘wealth and resources of a country’. Following Giorgio Agamben’s assumption of more or less subterranean connections that might link the economics of the m ­ odern to the paradigm of the theological oikonomia, emblem books are a way to explore this genealogical inquiry. As it has been argued here, these books help us to reflect about other ways of thinking gift-giving practices. Their multiple shapes and forms evidence that this phenomenon is pivotal in many ways. Not only does the emblem define and delimit ancient g ­ ift-giving practices, but it can also initiate a dialogue between several ways of reflecting on market exchanges. The diversity of emblem practices provides new tools and models for analysing emblematic devices used as valuable assets. In this last sense, emblems are less marginal than they first seem to be. This field is crucial to study the cultural nexus we are trying to describe, between mercantile profit and practical usefulness. As many compilers have claimed, collecting, gathering and selecting material from earlier sources through emblem creation is always some kind of peculium.

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Instead of depicting money-lenders or the daily performance of ­ rofit-oriented acts, emblems persistently remind us of the necessity for p any polity to share judicial values: among many examples, we find the insistence upon bona fides (good faith) between two contractants, the virtues expected from a virgin (chastity, as a guarantee of patrilinearity), the loyalty of oath-giving between two warriors. If we believe that legal systems are more the outcome of practice than logic, then the various symbolic acts depicted in emblem books are likely to pinpoint the binding forces and the emotive foundations of the law as a socially embedded practice. The authors of juristic emblems frequently engaged in criticizing the unquenchable thirst for economic growth per se. Long ago, as Bruno Latour reminds us, Fernand Braudel showed that any marketplace offers occasions (multiplied by the use of financial tools) for some enterprising go-between to treat friends and family as utter strangers and faraway strangers as close buddies. Capitalism, in that sense, feeds on, parasitizes and distorts marketplaces. Many humanists circles, on the contrary, dreamt of themselves as companions linked together by the laws of amity. Clearly inimical to the economic realities with which publishers had to grapple, humanists often shared a public disgust at mercantilism: their ambitions were to become humanist scholar-publishers not so as to ensure some commercial profit but rather to live up to their ideals of pursuing the truth. The metaphors which depicted the production of humanist books were informed by the culture of the free-gift and the contents of these books were infused with ideals and symbols of erudition as noble achievements to pursue. To study their motivations in coining a new legal symbolism is illuminating on multiple counts. The Respublica jurisconsultorum was then a polity, where friends, commensals and allies could strenghen their bonds by using a shared armentarium of civic values. Theories of symbolic capital can tell us about how humanists valued the knowledge economy.

Notes

1. Daniel Russell, Emblematic Structures in Renaissance French Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 2. Daniel Russell, ‘Emblems, Frames and Other Marginalia: Defining the Emblematic’, Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, 17 (2009): 1–40.

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3. Peter Goodrich, Legal Emblems and the Art of Law: obiter depicta as the Vision of Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 4. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and Verdun L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), p. 964. 5. Valérie Hayaert, Mens emblematica et humanisme juridique: Le cas du Pegma cum narrationibus philosophicis de Pierre Coustau (Geneva: Droz, 2008), pp. 112ff. 6. I am grateful to David Konstan for this idea. 7. Andrea Alciato, Contra vitam monasticam epistula / Andrea Alciato’s Letter against Monastic Life, ed. and trans. Denis L. Drysdall (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014), pp. 14–15. See also Denis L. Drysdall, Hieroglyphs, Speaking Pictures, and the Law: The Context of Alciato’s Emblems, Glasgow Emblem Studies 16 (Glasgow: Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Word/Image Culture, 2013). 8. Alciato’s biography is detailed by Roberto Abbondanza, ‘Alciato Andrea’, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, ed. A.M. Ghisalberti et al., 2 vols (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960), II, pp. 69–77. For a pioneering study of the text history of Alciato’s original work, see Henry Green, Andrea Alciati and His Book of Emblems (London: Burt Frankin, 1872). For a modern edition of his emblems, see Andreas Alciatus, ed. Peter Daly and Virginia Woods Callahan, assisted by Simon Cutler, Index emblematicus, 2 vols (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), and Andrea Alciato, Les Emblèmes. Fac-similé de L’édition Lyonnaise ­Macé-Bonhomme de 1551 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997). 9. Translation from Denis L. Drysdall, ‘Andrea Alciato, Pater et Princeps’, in Companion to Emblem Studies, ed. Peter M. Daly (New York: AMS Press, 2008), pp. 79–97 (pp. 79–80). 10. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 11. Andrea Alciato, Le lettere, ed. and trans. Gian Luigi Barni (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1953), no. 85. 12.  Alison Saunders, ‘The Bifocal Emblem Book: Or How to Make One Work Cater for Two Distinct Audiences’, in Emblems in Glasgow: A Collection of Essays Drawing on the Stirling Maxwell Collection in Glasgow University Library (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992), pp. 113–33. 13.  When preparing his edition of the correspondence of Alciato, Gian Luigi Barni was unable to provide the text of his only letter to Wechel (‘Avignone, 1529 gennaio 30’) and had to content himself with supplying a summary. This letter was acquired by the Pierpont Morgan Library (Former C. Fairfax Murray Collection of Autographs, MA. 1346–3). Curt F. Bühl, Bibliographical Notes, 201–2.

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14. In Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXè siècle, 17 vols (Paris: Administrateur du grand Dictionnaire universel, 1865–90), it is stated that ‘il a pris pour marque l’écusson de Bâle’. No such printer’s mark is recorded in Louis C. Silvestre, Marques typographiques, 9 parts (Paris: Pierre Jannet, 1853–67) or in Philippe Renouard, Les marques typographiques parisiennes des XVè et XVIè siècles, 2 parts (Paris: Champion, 1926–28). Larousse has confused the printer’s residence ‘at the sign of the shield of Basel’, says Curt F. Bühl. 15. Alciato, Contra vitam monasticam epistula, p. 21. 16.  See Denis L. Drysdall, ‘Devices as “Emblems” before 1531’, Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, 16 (2008): 253–69. 17. Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 150. 18. Frank I. Schlechter, The Historical Foundations of the Law Relating to Trade-Marks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 64. 19. Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes, ou devises Chrestiennes (Lyon: Jean Marcorelle, 1571), sig. A4r (unpaginated). 20.  Translation from Martine van Elk, ‘Courtliness, Piety, and Politics: Emblem Books by Georgette de Montenay, Anna Roemers Vischer, and Esther Inglis’, in Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, ed. Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 183–210 (pp. 188–89). 21. Bernardus Ferminius, De Rerum Usu et Abusu (Antwerp, Christophe Plantin, 1575).

Select Bibliography Adams, Alison, Stephen Rawles, and Alison Saunders, A Bibliography of French Emblem Books of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols, Travaux d’Humanisme et de Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1999–2002). Agamben, Giorgio, The Use of Bodies: Homo sacer IV, 2, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). Alciato, Andrea, Contra vitam monasticam epistula / Andrea Alciato’s Letter against Monastic Life, ed. and trans. Denis L. Drysdall (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014). de Montaigne, Michel, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and Verdun L. Saulnier (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965). Drysdall, Denis L., ‘Devices as “Emblems” before 1531’, Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, 16 (2008): 253–69. ———, ‘Andrea Alciato, Pater et Princeps’, in Companion to Emblem Studies, ed. Peter M. Daly (New York: AMS Press, 2008), pp. 79–97.

88  V. HAYAERT ———, Hieroglyphs, Speaking Pictures, and the Law: The Context of Alciato’s Emblems, Glasgow Emblem Studies 16 (Glasgow: Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Word/Image Culture, 2013). Gehl, Paul F., ‘Trademarks Good or Bad?’, in Humanism for Sale: Making and Marketing Schoolbooks in Italy, 1450–1650 (Chicago: Newberry Library, 2008). https://www.humanismforsale.org/text/archives/377 (accessed 14 October 2019). Goodrich, Peter, Legal Emblems and the Art of Law: obiter depicta as the Vision of Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Hayaert, Valérie, Mens emblematica et humanisme juridique (Droz: Geneva, 2008). ———, ‘The Legal Significance and Humanist Ethos of Printer’s Insignia’, in Typographorum Emblemata: The Printer’s Mark in the Context of Early Modern Culture, ed. Anja Wolkenhauer and Bernhard F. Scholz, Schriftmedien – Kommunikations- und buchwissenschaftliche Perspektiven/Written Media— Perspectives in Communications and Book Studies 4 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018), pp. 295–311. Konstan, David, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Nuovo, Angela, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2013). ———, and Francesco Ammannati, ‘Investigating Book Prices in Early Modern Europe: Questions and Sources’, JLIS.it: Italian Journal of Library and Information Science / Rivista italian di biblioteconomia, archivistica e scienza dell’informazione, 8:3 (2017): 1–25. ———, ‘Aldus Manutius and the World of Venetian Publishing’, in Andreas Vesalius and the Fabrica in the Age of Printing: Art, Anatomy and Printing in the Italian Renaissance, ed. Rinaldo Fernando Canalis and Massimo Ciavolella (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). Russell, Daniel, Emblematic Structures in Renaissance French Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). ———, ‘Emblems, Frames and Other Marginalia: Defining the Emblematic’, Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, 17 (2009): 1–40. Schlechter, Frank I., The Historical Foundations of the Law Relating to ­Trade-Marks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925; reprinted Union, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2005). Vuilleumier-Laurens‚ Florence‚ L’université, la robe et la librairie à Paris, Claude Mignault et le Syntagma De Symbolis (1571–1602) (Geneva: Droz, 2017). Zemon-Davis, Natalie, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Affective Changes

Vexed and Insatiable: Unfeelable Feelings and the Marketplace of Early Modern Drama Adam Zucker

Smudged Offerings It is nearly impossible to look past the magnificent beard on the 1524 Parmigianino portrait of the Parmesan condottiero Gian Galeazzo Sanvitale (Image 1), but I’m going to begin by asking you to do just that.1 Like many gallery portraits in the period, this one features a series of props that establish a symbolic mis en scène for the main subject of the painting. In addition to the ceremonial mace and armor in the background, we might notice the militarily inclined Galeazzo’s worked sword hilt; his rich, slashed velvet sleeves; his ring, perhaps onyx; his glove; his absolutely splendid nails. The object that interests me the most, however, is the coin or medallion Galeazzo holds in his right hand (Image 2). On their own, coins are not surprising objects in portraits like

A. Zucker (*)  University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_5

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Image 1  Francesco Mazzola Parmigianino, Portrait of Galeazzo Sanvitale (1524)

this—Parmigianino himself scattered them on tables in front of other subjects, and it’s not uncommon to see coins in well-known pictures like the familiar series of variants on “The Misers” (Followers of Marinus van Raymerswaele, 1548–51) or “The Money-changer and His Wife” (van Raymerswaele, 1514). In thematic or topic-based paintings, there is very little mystery surrounding the presence of coins: paintings about accumulation, exchange, and the physical money economy encourage a particular kind of knowing judgment about that economy, and they deploy piles of coins (among other things) to do that work.

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Image 2  Francesco Mazzola Parmigianino, Portrait of Galeazzo Sanvitale (1524) (Detail)

The portrait of Galeazzo, though, operates a bit differently. The coin in this painting cannot be just a coin. It’s on display, yes, but not really in the same way as a miser’s hoard. We are certainly meant to notice it: the tendrils of the beard‚ the three-pointed frame of spheres marked off by arm-rests and sword pommel, and the basic gesture itself the subject is caught in all direct our attention its way. It’s almost as if Galeazzo has been painted in the act of giving us this coin. What are we supposed to give back to him in exchange? This cannot be a coin meant for ordinary commerce. It’s more likely to be a decorative or symbolic medallion of some sort. But of what sort? The short answer to the question is: nobody knows. Art historians have their share of guesses. Some think the symbols on it refer to alchemy, or cabbalistic practices. Some think it’s meant to suggest the marriage of Galeazzo to his wife. Some think it just says “72.” But no one really knows the precise value of this indistinct, smudged offering.2 Though this is not exactly a monumental mystery, it is significant as an iteration of a pattern repeated many times over in early modern aesthetic texts—not just in visual art, but also in literature and in the main subject of this essay, drama. That pattern has to do with the representation or framing of mysterious quantities in economic contexts, and I mean this very broadly. Galeazzo’s coin points us towards the presence

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of the unknown or unknowable as a contact point linking art and the economy. If art and imaginative literature can teach us something unique about the development of economic life, something we cannot get elsewhere in a market archive, a customs book, or a set of civic laws, it might be here, in the contouring of the unknowable’s place in our mundane exchanges. To be fair, I am far from being the only person to posit a place for the inexplicable in economic life. Economists in our own day often try to locate the force of difficult, objectively unknowable components in their predictive models of decision making. Their attempts to do so have recently shifted the field away from older ideas about marketplace mechanisms. For most of its history, economic theory was not all that interested in the epistemological blank spots posed by ordinary human mysteries. They were eliminated, most famously, in neoclassical models by the fictional figure of a maximally rational agent whose interest in a putatively abstract version of individual happiness sits as the presumed and often uncritically centered subject of predictive reasoning.3 More recently, the field of economics has been open to the idea that if its models are going to explain or predict the material conditions of existence and exchange, they should also be open to the possibility that the less-than-knowable aspects of human life and culture influence the more practical aspects of social mechanics. Rather than writing them out of the picture, prominent economists such as Amos Tversky, Richard Thaler, and their famous collaborator, Daniel Kahneman (whose work on behavioral economics was rewarded with the Nobel Prize in 2002) have begun to deal with them mathematically.4 Without going into too much detail (see Image 3 for the detail I am not going into), Kahneman and others adapted work by social scientists meant to analyze subjects’ predictions about how current decisions will affect their levels of happiness in the future. These fields are called things like “affective forecasting” and “hedonic psychology.” They helped Kahneman and his co-authors critique longstanding ideas about rational utility by demonstrating that the moment of choice for any economic agent is not likely to be well-informed or free of emotional bias. It turns out that people—even hypothetically rational economic agents—are fairly bad at accurately predicting their affective states in the future. To put it another way, human beings cannot properly or proleptically feel our future feelings. Error, poor analysis, and mysterious

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Image 3  Image taken from Timothy Cogley, Thomas J. Sargent, and Viktor Tsyrennikov, “Market Prices of Risk with Diverse Beliefs, Learning, and Catastrophes,” The American Economic Review, 102:3 (May 2012), 141–46 (p. 142) (July 2012; http://www.tomsargent.com/research/mpr-cst.pdf [accessed 14 October 2019])

signification in social practice always shape the affective arc of human economy.5 While theories of predictive, forward-looking emotional reasoning might not seem like the most obvious place to look for ways to better understand our relationship to the past, I’d argue that a growing number of literary scholars and cultural historians working on affect and emotion have something in common with the hypothesized forecasters at the center of recent economic thought. The last 20 years has seen a surge of scholarship on the history of feeling that charts out the phenomenology of dramatic performance in order to work through mysteries of audience reception, and to identify or illuminate different forms of legal, cultural, or political affiliation through time.6 Insofar as an emotional or affective charge remains a commonsense feature of theatrical events, one that the performed texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are still capable of generating, it makes perfect sense to view them as potential reservoirs of historical emotion. And yet, just as we cannot properly predict or feel our future feelings, I’d suggest that it is nearly impossible to accurately isolate the feelings of past subjects. We are always retroactively predicting these emotions, always using the network of our contemporary understandings of affective stimulus and response as a matrix for the psychodramas of the past. In other words, our analysis of past affect and emotion might be seen a mode of affective forecasting in reverse, a ­backwards-looking projection into the past emotional states and sympathies of long-dead subjects on stage and in playhouse audiences.

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This is not to say that all scholarship on early modern dramatic emotion relies entirely on the predictive sympathies of its practitioners. Much of the best work on the subject is explicit about its necessary historicism. Benedict Robinson, to name one example, uses a digital text archive to trace out the emergence in time of networked vocabularies of emotion. Like other students of affective signaling or historians of theories of emotion (and their appearance or effect on literature), Robinson doesn’t make a claim to understand the feeling of seventeenth-century disgust or panic (to name some of the passions he’s working on); rather, he shows us the emergence of a linguistic web that encapsulates or frames an affect. This kind of work preserves the unknowable feeling of identification in affective systems even as it illustrates their structuring elements.7 The same might be said for critics who explicitly take up phenomenological analysis to access what Jennifer Waldron calls the “bodily and sensory disruptions of the theater.”8 It is, in other words, more than possible to identify shared vocabularies, shared logics, shared physiologies, and shared expressions of interior experience in the textual records of past eras.9 But we should always avoid assuming that we can sympathize or co-feel emotions in an accurately historical fashion, or that our understanding of the causal logic of affective states—the “why” of emotion— can help us reproduce a performance of feeling as already understood. Our affective forecasts for the early modern past are probably going to be entirely wrong. This set of problems does not need to be (and, in fact, should not be) undone for it to help us better understand drama’s ability to situate or enact the mystery of emotion in economic life. In what follows, I will draw attention to the “unfeelablility” of certain staged affective scenarios in an attempt to situate the early modern theater’s relation to and emplacement within economic history. We can, I think, see signal points in Tudor and Stuart marketplace drama, through event and dialogue, through performance and language, where expression pertaining to or meant to deal with difficult affect is clearly marked off. And I’d like to use that phrase in particular as we move forward: “difficult affect.” Emotion is always and affect is everywhere. I have it now. You have it now. But difficult affect becomes visible in a different, often s­ tage-worthy way. We might see it in situations that demand words like “outburst” or “eruption” or “drowning in” or “overcome by.” We might see it in actions marked off by stage directions in the family of “he rageth” or “she strikes him.” And in economic contexts, we might see it in moments of

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desire when a character’s cravings become incomprehensibly powerful or paradoxical. These kinds of moments will be my main subject in what follows. I’ll use them, first, to show how interested early modern English drama was in the links between mysterious desires and economic practice, and second to explore how hard it is to retroactively forecast the kinds of emotions that particular market scenarios generate. What is the theatrical relationship between difficult affect, economic history, and the occluded place of emotion in our own work on early modern marketplace drama? Can it help us understand what Galeazzo’s coin is meant to pay for?

Framing Unfeelable Feelings It’s not hard to detect a relationship between the marketplace of early modern English drama and affect. In fact, in some ways, the market for drama in print and in performance relied on the marketing of affect. We don’t have to look much past the titles of plays to see as much: there’s the “liking” of As You Like It; the “willing” of “What You Will”; the “Ado” in Much Ado About Nothing; and the merriness of two wives who live in Windsor—and that’s just Shakespeare. We might be tempted by (or alongside) an Insatiate Countess, a Grateful Servant, a Scornful Lady, a Bashful Lover, a Humorous Lieutenant; to say nothing of what we might do with An Humorous Day’s Mirth, Every Man who might be In or Out of His Humour, and A Jovial Crew. We might meet The Woman Hater; we can witness The Miseries of Enforced Marriage; and we can shake our heads disapprovingly because ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. There is a gendered component to many of these appeals that is worth keeping track of as we move forward: emotions attributed to or organized by women in particular seem to dominate here. With that in mind, I’ll add two lost Admiral’s Men plays to the mix: A Toy to Please Chaste Ladies and A Woman Hard to Please. It seems clear, even obvious, that the introductory appeal to the ­consumers of early modern plays, the audience, was in many ways an appeal to emotional response—critics going back to Aristotle have noticed as much. But for all this descriptive, inviting, familiar language, the truth of the matter is that we feel those eponymous feelings in the manner of our time. How could it be otherwise? Yes, we are all humans, and we have all been insatiate at one time or another, but we have not all been countesses. And for that matter, we have not all lived under a political structure or an emotional regime that depends, in part, on the presence of countesses and the extended logic of dominance built into

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the idea of aristocratic rank. The tenor of submission in an early modern manor house; the precise sting of embarrassment or loss; the architecture of desire or political ambition; even the dull blanket of obvious boredom that may have accompanied an affective matrix containing a countess: all these are lost to us, or, at least, tuned to a different key. And this is just one of the essential, unbridgeable ideological and material distances that separate us from early modern English feeling subjects. We would be aliens to them, just as they are to us. Our backwards-looking affective forecasts are belated anticipations on the behalf of the dead. But all is not lost. We have the option, I think, to describe the frames around feelings we can name but cannot feel in an attempt to usefully situate or locate difficult affect. Take, for example, these lines from Massinger’s The Renegado, spoken by the soon-to-be-converted Turkish princess, Donusa, right before she rebels against her family and visits the marketplace in Tunis: I feel a virgin’s longing to descend So far from mine own greatness, as to be Though not a buyer, yet a looker on Their strange commodities. (I.ii.114–17)10

Critics including Michael Neill, Jane Degenhardt, and Benedict Robinson have shown us how Massinger transforms a Cervantean source text to enforce ethnographic conventions in an economic/ religious fantasy of perfect profit.11 The longing of Donusa to “descend” is of course distant and unknowable, even for the play’s original English audiences—that is its point. She is set up as a container for an exotic “Ottoman” or “Islamic” feeling of desperate, feminized passion or lust for European goods, a feeling that goes on to guarantee the play’s ideas about the European domination of global trade networks. That feeling is staged through the transformation of the virgin’s longing to see some commodities into a rather more straightforward longing to seduce the pseudo-merchant Vitelli, whom she meets in the midst of her descent in the market. As she hears him describe his goods in an attempt to sell them to her, she muses to herself about how it might feel to hear him describe her: “How movingly could this fellow treat upon / A worthy subject, that finds such discourse / To grace a trifle!” (I.iii.128–30). Donusa wishes to be moved by something other than an object, so she smashes Vitelli’s goods and invites him to her chambers for repayment.

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The sexual exchange that takes place there eventually becomes a religious conversion: Donusa and her treasures end up on boat back to Europe, transformed into Christian property. The economics of The Renegado are very passionate. There are no calm calculations of future profit. There are no easy transactions. Sexual desire, repentance, submission, xenophobia, heightened curiosity about the exotic object—these are just a few of the difficult feelings that dominate the play. A longer list of the play’s affects and passions might be convincingly charted out here, convincingly described, or named in ways that would help explain the mechanisms of the play. But the reason why this list would seem convincing has less to do with our ability to feel those Massingerian feelings and much more to do with what we already know about the history of empire, precolonial global commerce, and the Orientalist logics that accompanied them. For The Renegado, we have done enough historical work to make it clear how these imagined feelings, unfeelable to us, fit into a larger picture. Donusa’s longing has been well-framed, and it is thus meaningful across time. Things get a bit more difficult in The Alchemist, another play that depends entirely on excessive marketplace desires for its operation. But whereas a fairly detailed set of historical coordinates can help us chart out Donusa’s passion, Jonson pushes Sir Epicure Mammon’s appetites well beyond the pale. “Hedonics” is exactly the right word to describe Mammon’s forecast for his future life with the Philosopher’s Stone: My meat, shall all come in, in Indian shells, Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded, With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies. The tongues of carps, dormice, and camels’ heels, Boiled i’ the spirit of Sol, and dissolved pearl, (Apicius’ diet, ‘gainst the epilepsy) And I will eat these broths, with spoons of amber, Headed with diamant, and carbuncle. My foot-boy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons, Knots, godwits, lampreys: I myself will have The beards of barbels served, instead of salads; Oiled mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Dressed with an exquisite, and poignant sauce; For which, I’ll say unto my cook, there’s gold, Go forth, and be a knight. (II.ii.72–87)12

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Mammon’s fantasies about his delicious, slippery, bedazzling future determine all of his economic decisions in the play: he can appear to us to be the very definition of a poorly informed, emotionally biased economic agent. And while one might suppose Jonson wants his audiences to feel disgust here, there is no way to be certain about how the machinery of that feeling would have functioned. I personally believe that the idea of cutting off the unctuous paps of a pregnant sow is revolting, but the cultural regime surrounding victualing in the ­ twenty-first-century West is quite a bit different from what it was in the time of the Newgate Shambles and other unrefrigerated animal butchering zones scattered in and around London. Would Jonson’s hungry audiences have spent a moment in mouth-watering envy imagining the savory taste of fish tongues? Was part of the satire here built around the evocation of an outlandish spectator affiliation that would need to be repudiated, but only with reluctance? My backwards-looking affective forecast for Mammon and his earliest audience is almost sure to be wrong, even if camels’ heels cooked in pearls is probably no one’s idea of a good first course. Donusa and Mammon are emblematic characters for the history of staged marketplace passions in Tudor and Stuart England. They are both imagined consumers with outrageous desires, and they help us, and helped their original audiences, to work through problems of taste, market pleasures, and the erotics of commerce. Even without a direct correspondence of feeling between us and them, we can frame that logic in its moment, and it’s worth noting that much of the work in this volume does just that. To return to my opening image: the epistemological shadow of Galeazzo’s offered coin does not ruin the entirety of the portrait: the portrait (and what we bring to it) can frame the mysterious coin. With this in mind, let us turn now to a slightly more thorough reading of a single play—William Rowley’s A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext—in order to explore a self-aware staging of the ambiguities of marketplace affect and predictive reasoning. A New Wonder revolves around an affective paradox that clarifies some of the opportunities entailed by permitting the unknowable to play a role in our study of affect, commerce, and the early modern theater. A New Wonder might be called a “civic chronicle comedy”—that is, a kind of play that mines the work of John Stowe or other chronicle writers for stories of incredibly wealthy merchants who become case studies in charitable urban devotion.13 Like more famous examples of the type—Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me—Rowley’s

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play tells a story that features the accumulation of a huge mass of private wealth through commerce and its subsequent transformation into public works: where Dekker’s Simon Eyre builds Leadenhall and Heywood’s Thomas Gresham builds the Royal Exchange, Rowley’s Stephen Foster and Walter Brune refurbish Ludgate Prison and build St. Mary’s Hospital, respectively.14 In each of these plays, a series of drastic, unlikely coincidences stands in for the slow, mundane process of exchange and accumulation that would have characterized the ordinary economy. These chronicle comedies, in other words, are all interested in the aesthetics of impossible profit. The unlikely events in A New Wonder include Stephen Foster’s remarkable transformation from impoverished, unrepentant dice-player to inordinately successful merchant and his older brother’s instantaneous fall from wealthy trader to Ludgate beggar. But if we follow the lead of Rowley’s title, these reversals of fortune are essentially old news. The “New Wonder” that provides the comedy’s affective selling point is the rich Widow of Cornhill, who marries Stephen Foster between Acts Two and Three. The title of the play is supposed to be a bit of a joke in the style of Jonson’s The Silent Woman, but whereas Jonson makes it clear that his eponymous figure cannot exist, Rowley wants us to believe in his. The Widow introduces her fascinating predicament early in the play to a Doctor of Divinity in what looks a bit like a confession scene. Distraught, she explains that she is thirty-seven years old, she has been married and widowed, yet from her “weaning hour to this minute,” she has never once felt emotional pain: I know not yet what griefe is, yet have sought A hundred wayes for its acquaintance; with mee Prosperity hath kept so close a watch, That even those things that I have meant A crosse, have that way turn’d a blessing; Is it not strange? (sig. B3r)15

Without experiencing grief on earth, the Widow assumes, she will be locked out of Paradise (where, happily enough, her dead husband has been “stellified,” according to a vision she was granted [sig. B3v]). Not surprisingly, the Doctor has little sympathy for the Widow, but does offer a bit of droll consolation: “’Tis some affliction, that you are afflicted / For want of affliction” (sig. B3v). We are moving through strange emotional terrain here. What does it mean to be afflicted by want of affliction? Or, what does it mean to be vexed by not being vexed? There are

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no answers to these questions, no end to this cycle of tautological masochism. The Widow might be afflicted because she is not afflicted. She can have the thing she wants because she cannot have it. There is no clear stopping point on this Mobius strip of affect. Her vexedness/happiness (haxedness? veppiness?) cannot be identified because it has no stable, measurable location, no precise intensity, no logical resting place. And unlike economists, literary scholars have not yet established a functional equation that can handle affect’s incomprehensibility in early modern drama (see Image 4). What does A Woman Never Vext do with a feeling that no one can feel? It uses it as fuel for the romance narrative that forms the spine of so many economic fantasies in dramatic comedies of the period. Rowley’s recursive engine of desire, suffering, and reward spins along as the Widow goes on to admit that she has recently had her first taste of good vex: The other day, it was my hap In crossing of the Thames, To drop that wedlocke Ring from off my finger, That once conjoyn’d me and my dead husband; It sunke, I pris’d it deare; the dearer, ‘cause it kept Still in mine eye the memory of my losse; Yet I griev’d the losse, and did joy withall That I had found a griefe; and this is all The sorrow I can boast of. (sigs B3v–B4r)

Figuring possession in its loss, pleasure in a state of desperation, and agency in hapless fate, this “wedlocke Ring,” like countless other golden bands on the early modern stage, is an overdetermined s­ignifier-inmotion of domestic and erotic feeling.16 First a symbol of the bond that “once conjoyn’d” the Widow to her husband, then a “pris’d” reminder simultaneously of that bond and its loss, and finally a thing that in its disappearance into London’s great flood provides guilty pleasure and relief: the ring and its absence help the self-flagellating Widow to feel more grief and thus more joy than the death of her husband ever did. It is the work of comic convention in A New Wonder to make familial and sexual relationships bound up in the ring share in and help define

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the networks of commerce so central to Rowley’s vision of London as a whole. The dramatic appropriation of urban commerce in particular gains momentum as the missing ring suddenly—miraculously—­ reappears just as the widow finishes telling us about it. We learn in the ensuing lines of the play that it has turned up in the belly of a salmon “Bought in the Market” by the Widow’s serving-maid, Joan (sig. B4r). As the Widow learns of her latest stroke of luck, discourses of consumption and providence run together. The former initially takes precedence, as a clown/servant who brings ring, fish, and Joan on stage before the Widow and the Doctor puts a price on the object that had hitherto been valued as a domestic or familial symbol: “You see this Sammon? […] It cost but six pence: but had the Fisher knowne the worth of it, ‘twould have cost you forty shillings” (sig. B4r). The wedding ring becomes knowable as a fungible, transferable commodity, made equivalent to eighty salmon through the medium of the money form (well, seventy-nine and a half, factoring the cost of the ring-eating fish into the clown’s original forty-shilling estimate). The Widow responds, as is her wont, through the language of emotional paradox: How am I vext with blessings? […] First that this fish should snatch it as a baite; Then that my servant needes must buy that fish Amongst such infinites of fish and buyers: What fate is mine that runnes all by it selfe In unhappy happinesse? My conscience dreads it: Would thou hadst not swallowed it, nor thou not bought it. (sigs B4r-v)

Two separate events merge here to create the “unhappy happinesse” the Widow is destined to experience. The first is a humdrum, everyday occurrence, the stuff of common commerce in London and beyond: “Amongst such infinites of fish and buyers,” a servant buys a fish. The second event, however, is truly inexplicable, the stuff of myth and fairy tale: that fish has swallowed the Widow’s ring. The combination of these two events into one narrative exemplifies the dialectic of romance and commerce on the early modern stage.17 On the one hand, everyday exchange and the wide-ranging social relations inherent to it create the conditions that make possible the story of the ring and its unlikely return. On the other hand, the story of the ring works to reproduce everyday exchange

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as a providential, wondrous relation. This is a typical handling of the market by drama. The historical phenomenon of exchange (or, to stay local, the historical phenomenon of Fish Lane) provides the occasion for the deployment of comic forms; comic forms, in turn, produce affective refigurations of the market which (in this instance) render invisible the complex relations of power out of which everyday exchange is composed. How did the fish go from eating a ring to being bought? Who caught it? With what materials? Who made them? The answers, of course, don’t matter at all in the world of Rowley’s play. The practical relationships of commerce are subsumed by romance under the aegis of an unfeelable feeling. The Widow gets un-vexed (or trapped by paradoxical vexedness) not because she is immensely wealthy (which she is) or because she controls with her wealth the lives of Joan the servant and those whose livelihoods depend on commerce in London (which she does), but because, according to the affective logic of the play, she is bound to be so. The uneven economic relationships that help make The Widow what she is being rewritten into the formal elements of romantic comedy, mystifying labor, in part, through this mystifyingly paradoxical un-placeable affect. This scenario reaches its climax in a staging of poor affective forecasting. We become spectators to the Widow’s attempts to make a series of economic decisions that will finally get her what she wants. What is the Widow’s most optimal choice for happiness? Becoming poor. What is the maximally rational path to becoming poor? Again, comic convention informs the emotional logic that provides the Widow’s answer. She chooses marriage. Behavioral economics intersect here with a Jamesonian historical formalism. You do not need a degree from MIT to know that the best way to become poor is to walk away from your wealth. Sell your house; sell your clothes and plate; fill sacks with gold, then leave them in the street. This is not, however, a suitably comic path. Instead, in order to lose all her money and torture herself into Paradise, the Widow decides at the end of the play’s second act to marry a prodigal gambler who will relieve her of her comfortable income and bring her nothing but sorrow and destitution. We watch the Widow promise herself to Stephen Foster with a predictable request: I hope thou’lt vex me. I shall rayle, and curse thee I hope; yet I’d Not have thee give over neither; for I would Be vext; Here’s my hand, I am thine, thou art mine, I’l have thee with all faults. (sig. D2v)

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So speaks the female comic economic agent, defined by the marriage imperative that frames her generic landscape. And while Stephen quickly agrees to these terms, he immediately loses his ability to take advantage of them. When next we see him, he is a changed man, busy with the records of the ex-Widow’s accounts and preparing to collect on outstanding debts. Once again, the Widow’s attempts to vex herself have had the opposite effect: instead of finally ridding herself of her privileged relation to economic exchange, she has merely drawn Stephen into her unhappily happy orbit. The reprobate is inexplicably (or, rather, generically) transformed into a money-making machine, and he goes on to become an agent of progressive festivity, healing his family’s wounds by forgiving his older brother, bailing him out of jail, and teaching him to love his own son again. Comic art and economic fantasy coalesce around the Widow’s emotional paradox, framing her unfeelable feeling. I hope my textual exegesis has made that clear enough, even if Rowely’s play itself forever remains a fairly obscure text (as I suspect it will). But it is just as important for my purposes here that I make clear the tools that I myself have used in my description of her affective paradox. I, too, have created a frame for an unknowable emotion. I’ve taken up ideas about genre and the historical resonance of literary form from Stephen Cohen and Lawrence Manley, among others.18 I’ve used what I’ve learned about the history of early modern commerce, guild relations, and the material or cultural expressions of economic life in books by, for example, Joan Thirsk, Craig Muldrew, and Ferdinand Braudel.19 And, if it’s not too out of place for me to offer an even more intimate reflection here at the end of this essay, I should admit that I’ve drawn in elided ways on my own past research into the cultural geography of early modern London’s markets. I am thinking in particular of an anecdote from the 1632 additions to John Stowe’s Annales written by Edmond Howes: For divers years of late, certain fishmongers have erected and set up fish stalles in the middle of the street in the Strand, almost ouer against Denmark house, all which were broken downe by speciall Commission, this moneth of May 1630. Least in short space they might grow from stalles to shedds, and then to dwelling houses, as the like was in former time in olde fish-street, and in Saint Nicholas Shambles, and in other places.20

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Clearly this off-handed reference has nothing important to do with the Widow’s fantastic fish story. But when I tried to unfeel my way through her experience, I thought immediately of the aldermen of Jacobean London attempting to regulate the ways in which commerce and victualing were spilling outwards from their ordinary spaces and times in the city’s traditional marketplaces.21 The story of the Widow’s providential relationship to small scale commerce struck me as being a fantasy aimed as much at them, at their ineffective response to the explosive energies of buying and selling, and at the deeply seated wish fulfillment that the diversifying markets of London had begun to offer by the early years of the seventeenth century. The city, as Howes’ entry tells us, was permanently changed by the ways informal commerce housed itself along streets and alleys: Rowley’s staging of the Widow of Cornhill’s involvement in the building of St. Mary’s Hospital insinuates these modes of illegal, unregulated, but forcefully creative urban development from below into narratives of charitable civic betterment. My own feelings about early modern commerce (and late capitalism) are changed accordingly, as a fairy tale subsumes the difficult labor of fishmongers, and fishermen, and even the street cleaners struggling against the odors of a city overcome by its own effluent business. These are the historical agents that help me frame and bring purpose to my engagement with art’s depiction of unknowable materials. With all this in mind, I’d like to close here by suggesting that we can learn something about ourselves as scholars from the Widow’s situation, afflicted by her lack of affliction, framed by a fantasy that erases misery in the name of art. Why is now the time of affect in our work? What kind of market desires are we ourselves approaching or mystifying as we take up difficult emotions as a course of study? What practices or histories are we deflecting attention away from as we make our decision to feel the unfeelable? Whose coin are we taking? What condotterio, what soldier is offering it to us? And, if I may, what is our affective forecast? Why do we think we will be happier in the long run if we choose to take up the unknowable coin? These are hard questions, and more so than usual, I mean them to be vexing ones. Vexedness, rather than cool comfort, might be a valuable stance to adopt or an interpretive strategy to pursue as we seek to frame the place of affect in art and in the historical process of our economy. The moment we lose track of that vexedness and imagine ourselves in pure, providential sympathy with our world and the world of the past is the moment we erase our place in history.

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Notes









1. On the importance of being a bearded individual in a Italian Renaissance portrait, see Douglas Biow, On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), pp. 181–224; see also Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 83–128; and Eleanor Rycroft, Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). 2.  See, for example, David Ekserdjian, Parmigianino (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 126–29; Mario di Giampaolo, Parmigianino (Florence: Cantini, 1991), p. 58; both cite Ute Davitt-Asmus, ‘Fontanellato, I Sabitizzare il mondo: Parmigianinos Fesken in der Rocca Sanvitale’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz, 27 (1983): 2–40. 3.  See, for example, Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 4. For example, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’, Econometrica, 47:2 (1979): 263–91; Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: FSG, 2011). 5. For the sake of brevity and clarity, I am here vastly simplifying a complex field of economic thought. 6.  For representative work, see Bruce Smith, Phenomenal Shakespeare (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 1–37; Kathleen Craik and Tanya Pollard, ed. Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Allison Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Ronda Arab, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker, ed. Historical Affects and the Early Modern English Theater (New York: Routledge, 2015); Stephen Mullaney, The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi, ed. Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 7.  Benedict Robinson, ‘Disgust c. 1600’, English Literary History, 81:2 (2014): 553–83; Benedict Robinson, ‘Disgust: The Very Word’, on The History of Emotions Blog (Queen Mary University, London, 2016): https://emotionsblog.history.qmul.ac.uk/2016/08/disgust-the-veryword/ (accessed 14 October 2019). 8.  Jennifer Waldron, ‘The Eye of Man Hath Not heard: Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology’, Criticism, 54:3 (2012): 403–17 (p. 405). 9. Other work that has influenced my thinking here includes Laura Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Brian

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Massumi, The Politics of Affect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015); and Torey Shanks, ‘Affect, Critique, and the Social Contract’, Theory & Event, 18:1 (2015). 10. All quotations from this play are from Philip Massinger, The Renegado, ed. Michael Neill (London: Methuen Drama, 2010). 11. Philip Massinger, The Renegado, ed. Michael Neill (London: Methuen Drama, 2010); Jane Degenhardt, Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 121–51; and Benedict Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 117–43. 12. Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. Elizabeth Cook, 2nd ed. (London: A & C Black,1991), II.ii.72–87. 13.  For further discussion of this play, see Jean Howard, Theater of A City: The Places of Early Modern Comedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 93–99. 14.  Walter Brune and Stephen Foster (actually Forster) both appear in Stowe’s Survey of London, and both are noted for their charitable works. They lived 150 years apart from one another. On Forster and Ludgate Prison see John Stowe, A Survey of London, ed. Charles Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), I, pp. 39–40, 168; for Brune and St. Mary’s see I, pp. 105, 166–70. For Forster’s service as an Alderman, see also Alfred Beaven, The Aldermen of the City of London, 2 vols (London: Eden Fisher and Company, 1913), II, p. 342. 15. All quotations from this play are from William Rowley, A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext (London: Francis Constable, 1632), which is the earliest surviving edition of this play. 16. See Karen Newman, ‘Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38:1 (1987): 19–33. 17.  This relationship is explored at length by, among others, Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance, and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Zachary Lesser, ­ ‘Tragical-Comical-Pastoral-Colonial: Economic Sovereignty, Globalization, and the Form of Tragicomedy’, English Literary History, 74:4 (2007): 881–908; and Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 18. Stephen Cohen, ‘Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism’, in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 17–42; Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);

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Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Theodore B. Leinwand, The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603–1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). 19. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); and Ferdinand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Mirian Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 20. John Stowe and Edmund Howes, Annales, or, a Generall Chronicle of England (London: Richard Meighen, 1632). 21. Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 82–101.

Bibliography Arab, Ronda, Michelle Dowd, and Adam Zucker, ed. Historical Affects and the Early Modern English Theater (New York: Routledge, 2015). Bailey, Amanda, and Mario DiGangi, ed. Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts: Politics, Ecologies, and Form (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Beaven, Alfred, The Aldermen of the City of London, 2 vols (London: Eden Fisher and Company, 1913). Becker, Gary S., The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Berlant, Laura, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Biow, Douglas, On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Braudel, Ferdinand, Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800, trans. Mirian Kochan (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). Cohen, Stephen, ‘Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism’, in Renaissance Literature and Its Formal Engagements, ed. Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 17–42. Craik, Kathleen, and Tanya Pollard, ed. Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Davitt-Asmus, Ute, ‘Fontanellato, I Sabitizzare il mondo: Parmigianinos Fesken in der Rocca Sanvitale’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institut in Florenz, 27 (1983): 2–40 Degenhardt, Jane, Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

110  A. ZUCKER Ekserdjian, David, Parmigianino (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Fisher, Will, Materializing Gender in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Forman, Valerie, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). di Giampaolo, Mario, Parmigianino (Florence: Cantini, 1991). Gibbons, Brian, Jacobean City Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). Hobgood, Allison, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Howard, Jean, Theater of A City: The Places of Early Modern Comedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: FSG, 2011). Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky, ‘Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk’, Econometrica, 47:2 (1979): 263–91. Leinwand, Theodore B., The City Staged: Jacobean Comedy, 1603–1613 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986). ———, Theatre, Finance, and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Lesser, Zachary, ‘Tragical-Comical-Pastoral-Colonial: Economic Sovereignty, Globalization, and the Form of Tragicomedy’, English Literary History, 74:4 (2007): 881–908. Manley, Lawrence, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Massinger, Philip, The Renegado, ed. Michael Neill (London: Methuen Drama, 2010). Massumi, Brian, The Politics of Affect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015). Muldrew, Craig, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Mullaney, Stephen, The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). Newman, Karen, ‘Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 38:1 (1987): 19–33. Robinson, Benedict, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). ———, ‘Disgust c. 1600’, English Literary History, 81:2 (2014): 553–83. ———, ‘Disgust: The Very Word’, on the History of Emotions Blog (Queen Mary University, London, 2016): https://emotionsblog.history.qmul. ac.uk/2016/08/disgust-the-very-word/ (accessed 14 October 2019). Rowley, William, A New Wonder, A Woman Never Vext (London: Francis Constable, 1632).

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Rycroft, Eleanor, Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2019). Shanks, Torey, ‘Affect, Critique, and the Social Contract’, Theory & Event, 18:1 (2015). Smith, Bruce, Phenomenal Shakespeare (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Stowe, John, A Survey of London, ed. Charles Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908). Stowe, John, and Edmund Howes, Annales, or, a Generall Chronicle of England (London: Richard Meighen, 1632). Thirsk, Joan, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Waldron, Jennifer, ‘The Eye of Man Hath Not heard: Shakespeare, Synaesthesia, and Post-Reformation Phenomenology’, Criticism, 54:3 (2012): 403–17. Zucker, Adam, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Poesies for Prizes: Queen Elizabeth’s Lottery, Providential Rule and “Fair Advantages” in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice Lisa Martinez Lajous

The increasing secularization of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society allowed for new conceptualizations of random events. In fact, the emergence of risk as an epistemological category can be traced in part to hazarding on chance or uncertain outcomes as practiced in early modern English culture. People in early modern England were learning how to profit (both symbolically and m ­ aterially) from a newly stressed power of chance, and English drama served a ­central role not only in propagating representations of the rewards and pitfalls of negotiating with chance, but also in cultivating a complex and often contradictory posture toward risk-taking for profit in ­general. Indeed, this new encounter with chance impinged upon social and economic behavior to the extent that it occasioned new ways of ­perceiving and understanding the world. When Menenius in The Tragedy of Coriolanus exclaims “it is lots to blanks / My name hath touch’d your L. Martinez Lajous (*)  Dallas, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_6

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ears” (5.2.12–13), he is expressing the probability of an event in terms that not only directly reference lotteries in general, and perhaps Queen Elizabeth’s Lottery of 1567 in particular, but also expose an elementary understanding of probable events. Prior to the development of a mathematical calculus of probability, a basic understanding of randomness, one which was divorced from sacred notions of Providence, was already present not only in the economic practices and language of early modern subjects, but also in the dramatic and literary world of Shakespeare and his peers. This study explores the historical and literary uses of lottery devices to redistribute wealth and objects of value among players willing to exchange material stakes for the hope of even greater material gain. Specifically, by examining the lottery which Elizabeth I sanctioned in 1567, along with a series of early modern pamphlets which debate the religious and moral uses of lots, we can better understand the ­complex nexus of cultural signifiers embedded in the lottery scenes in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. I will argue that the collective body of discursive and dramatic texts on the subject of lots and lotteries clearly identifies an emerging epistemological shift in how early modern English subjects perceived chance. Just as lotteries in Tudor and Stuart England supported the Crown’s nation building efforts, I will consider whether the lottery device for selecting Portia’s suitor in Merchant of Venice functions similarly as a mechanism for establishing Belmont’s cultural dominance.1 Critical discussion of the historical and literary analogues to the famous casket scenes in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice has been less than adequate in giving context and full scope to the tremendous resonance these scenes would have possessed in early modern England. As Stanley J. Kozikowski notes, “Fortune’s dispensation of gifts by lottery […] was a popular presentational image at the time of Shakespeare’s play both on the public stage and at royal entertainments.”2 Indeed, several early modern play texts incorporate lottery drawings and there are well over a dozen references to lotteries in dramatic and prose literature from the period. Lady Fortuna is often invoked in conjunction with lotteries, but more importantly, the vocabulary used to represent lotteries is the same language used to represent early modern gaming culture, lending practices, and merchant adventurism. This shared linguistic register converges competing ideas of agency and economic practice, and converts what was

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once a simple iconographic symbol of antiquity (Lady Fortuna’s lottery wheel) into a site of contested signification.3 No longer a mere image in the emblematic tradition of Lady Fortune, lotteries were becoming an instrument for state fundraising and individual pecuniary gain. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lottery drawings became more prevalent in England and even more so on the Continent. The design of these early lottery schemes indicates a growing understanding of probability, even though a formal mathematical calculus for the theory would not emerge until the mid-seventeenth century. The basic principle of a lottery is that players purchase tickets with the hope of winning prizes in return. It is a game with a long history. The first lottery on record occurred in the Dutch town of Sluis in 1434. The term lottery is derived from the Dutch word loterij, which stems from the word “lot” meaning “fate.” Throughout the ages the system used for determining the winners of a lottery has been fairly consistent: objects consisting of tickets, balls, lots, or slips are randomly selected from within a receptacle (urn, box, container) for the distribution of prizes to players who have purchased the opportunity to play. The calculation as to what quantities and values of prize to distribute reveals a clear understanding of odds and payouts. Of course, adventurers in ­sixteenth-century lotteries could not accurately calculate their prospects for winning. They could only rely on the trustworthiness of the operation. This trust was often born out of the fact that lottery organizers were generally sanctioned by authorities or else the lotteries were directly administered by a governing body. This legitimizing feature of lotteries created the appearance (sometimes a false one) of surety. In most cases, it served as a deterrent to those who would seek to manipulate a lottery game to create unfair advantages. Furthermore, the drawing out of the winning lots was often conducted in a highly theatrical manner, something which was arguably done in order to inspire confidence in the scheme. The theatrical, ritualistic, and public nature of lotteries, such as the one Elizabeth I sponsored, created excellent source material for ­literary and dramatic stage depictions. It is worth examining the historical development of lotteries in England in order to better understand their cultural significance. The state lottery of 1567 was the first of its kind and it has left a ­remarkably conflicted legacy. Notably, instead of levying taxes or securing loans, Elizabeth introduced the lottery into England as a bold and innovative solution to her shortage of revenue. Although Hall, Holinshed, and

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Stow each record the event in their respective chronicles, the lottery has provoked surprisingly little scholarly notice. Yet this lottery is I argue, one of Elizabeth’s more fascinating legacies—a legacy that manifested on the stages of Renaissance England. The documents from Elizabeth’s lottery expose a complex dynamic of interdependence and mutual beneficence between the Tudor queen and her subjects, and they also reveal a growing acceptance and legitimization of profiting from chance. In 1567, less than a decade into her reign, Elizabeth issued an advertisement for a “very rich Lotterie generall” to be held in London, and all towns within the kingdom. The proclamation carefully describes what benefits subscribers will receive and what prizes are to be won. The prologue is as follows: A very rich Lotterie generall, without any Blanckes, contayning a great number of good Prices, aswel of redy Money as of Plate and certaine sorts of Marchaundizes, having ben valued and priced by the commaundment of the Queenes most excellent Majestie, by men expert and skillfull: and the same Lotterie is erected by her Maiesties order, to the intent that suche commoditie as may chaunce to arise thereof after the charges borne, may be converted towardes the reparation of the Havens, and strength of the Realme, and towardes such other publique good workes.4

The proclamation also contains lengthy details of the lottery’s prizes and conditions. Of note is the fact that there were no “blanckes” (i.e., tickets which would give no reward). Every ticket would yield its purchaser at least a fourth of their original investment. This feature is remarkable in its attempt to mitigate adventurers’ fears of an unfavorable outcome. The decision to remove blanks from the draw made the lottery more advantageous; however, it did not altogether eliminate the possibility of misfortune. For their return, many adventurers in Elizabeth’s lottery received only a fraction of the amount they ventured on their lottery ticket. As with any game of chance, it is impossible to guarantee a favorable outcome unless one cheats. Subsequent lotteries removed the safeguard of no blanks, leaving adventurers with an even greater likelihood of an unfortunate outcome. The lottery of 1567 was structured to encourage maximum participation, and the method used to incentivize participation implies an inherent comprehension of odds and contingencies. The lottery scheme presented “Three Welcomes” or special prizes given to the first three winners at the

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drawing. Indeed the lottery had a number of built-in incentives for the public to purchase early and to purchase in large quantities. For instance, the document stated “who soever at the time of the reading shall have five [lots] comming together successively and immediately one after another, havyng put in his Lottes within three Moneths […] shall have […] Ten pounds sterling bysides the prices.”5 These additional enticements and the scaling of rewards in proportion to the amount hazarded shows a keen understanding of odds on the likelihood of any given outcome. By increasing the value of the prize for the improbable outcome of one participant winning five times in a row, the lottery rewarded high stakes betting. Elizabeth’s subjects were urged to exchange their money for a lottery ticket and in return they were given the surety of no total losses and the beguiling hope of a very substantial reward. The top prize was a truly eye-catching “Five thousande Poundes sterling,” to be given in cash, plate, tapestries, and “good Linnen cloth.”6 The queen’s lottery represented a giant step toward legitimizing the secular operations of chance in a culture where playing with chance for profit remained a dubious pursuit. Secular uses of lotteries in s­ixteenth-century England were controversial because they brazenly transformed the biblical act of drawing lots into an occasion to make money. Indeed, Elizabeth encouraged visions of prosperity and riches by displaying the lottery prizes in the shop windows of a London goldsmith. For those who were unable to peruse the prizes in person, alluring broadsides were created to illustrate the various plates, tapestries, and money prizes to be distributed to fortunate adventurers. The broadsides feature images of a lion and griffin supporting the queen’s arms, and a depiction of London with the steeple of St. Paul’s Cathedral prominently displayed. At the bottom of the broadside is an illustration of the Judgement of Solomon. Collectively, these images represent an effort to impart a sense of legitimacy and justice; however, the juxtaposition of material wealth, ancient iconography, and biblical imagery simultaneously created a nexus of conflicting and competing ideologies. The symbolic dissonance was likely to have been lost on the average Elizabethan. However, later on, this tension would be played out on the early modern stage. As Gerda Reith observes, when “in a rigid social and economic system” like that of sixteenth-century England, “little genuine opportunity for advancement through effort or talent existed, sudden wealth through a lottery win appeared to the lower orders as a viable means—perhaps the only means—of material advancement.”7

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The vain hope that one could gain a “good fortune” from venturing in the lottery was exactly the mistaken belief that lottery organizers, ­including the queen, wanted to perpetuate. Despite all these inducements, the lottery was not a success.8 The tickets sales were so low that all of the prizes needed to be reduced by one twelfth of their value. Never again did Elizabeth resort to a ­lottery scheme to raise national funds; instead she borrowed heavily from foreign allies, seized stolen treasures from the seas, and later even sold off some of her precious jewels. Nonetheless, this first lottery represents an official endorsement of chance that is uprooted from any theological underpinnings. Elizabeth courted her subjects to exchange their money for the hope of pecuniary and material gain. While the queen forbade blank lots in order to ensure some return to every adventurer, this open form of betting was justified not by overtures to Providence, or to the ancient tradition of Lady Fortuna; rather, the queen implored her subjects to risk their money “for the strengthening of the realm,” that is to say to invest in the nascent nation-state. Early modern England had just begun to appreciate the unique opportunities and associated perils which lottery schemes presented to organizers and adventurers. It also needed to reconcile the growing tension between a theological worldview and a newly emerging epistemology that acknowledged the operations of chance and risk-taking for profit as a legitimate pursuit. In post-Reformation, pre-capitalist England, lot-drawing was ­primarily used for the determination of religious or state matters. Lots were drawn on a range of issues, including the determination of church and state offices and the settling of disputes. Materially, the objects used for drawing lots varied, ranging from stones, twigs, and bones to more elaborate devices. Yet whatever the apparatus, the authority of the lot was uncontested. Even as late as 1653 a proposal was made by a London congregation that Parliament be selected from congregational nominees “by lot after solemn prayer.”9 However, changing cultural and economic practices both in England and on the Continent began to place tension on the strictly religious notion of lots. A newfound cultural preoccupation with playing games of chance for profit took hold of early ­modern England around the same time that broader market practices began openly courting risk with the hope of material gain.10 Moreover, the ideational shift away from purely sacred notions of chance was prompted by the questioning of the role which Providence served in purely secular affairs, such as games of dice and state sanctioned lotteries. By the end

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of the sixteenth century “lots” and, by extension, “lottery” were hotly debated terms. Historically, the action of drawing lots was closely associated with biblical applications for determining God’s will. The Church condemned any uses of lots outside this paradigm—especially if private gain was involved. The most notorious exercise in lot-drawing was, of course, when Roman soldiers held a lottery at the feet of the crucified Christ. Throughout sixteenth-century England, stained glass images provided strong visual reminders of the lottery for Christ’s garments. Martin Luther, for one, staked an unequivocal position on the subject. He held the position that “casting of lots is in itself a real act of faith,” and that Christians “must believe that God directs the lots and rules our fates […] they must not doubt that gain or loss of lot and game is decided by God.”11 Luther refutes the idea that casting lots without an acknowledgment that their providential direction is acceptable. He argues, “To be sure, such casting of lots may be done without God, at random, as the heathen do who do not believe that God controls the lots but that all is determined by blind luck, as happens in dice and other games of chance.”12 According to Luther, the random casting of lots is an illegitimate activity—an act which only “heathens” undertake. As an early voice in the debate, Luther is clear that the central authority in a lottery is Divine Providence and that its proper application is for religious purposes only.13 Luther’s position on lots was not the final word, however. A rather heated exchange of opinions erupted in the first half of the seventeenth century, when two theologians staked firm positions on the lawfulness of using lots in sport. In 1609, William Ames, a pupil of William Perkins and an influential Puritan in his own right, condemned gaming in a sermon at Cambridge on the basis that lots are the special Providence of God. This assertion reawakened a debate that had begun in the late sixteenth century with the French Calvinist Lambert Daneau. The sermon created such a stir that Thomas Gataker felt justified in responding to it even ten years after it had been preached, in a pamphlet entitled The Nature and Use of Lots (1619). The text challenged Ames’ views and sparked a series of exchanges about providential intervention in randomized events. Put simply, Gataker argued that the different outcomes produced by repeatedly drawing lots revealed a non-providential operation. The assumption was that God was not fickle and would not change his mind as often as the different outcomes suggested. James Balmford,

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in 1623, was the first to respond to Gataker’s progressive interpretation with a reprinting of his 1593 text, A Short and Plaine Dialogue Concerning the Unlawfulness of Playing at Cards, along with a rebuttal of Gataker’s views. At the heart of Balmford’s reply was “the insistence that the outcome of a randomized event is determined directly by God.”14 Gataker, Ames, and Balmford’s academic argument continued until Ames’ death marked an abrupt end to their dispute. At stake in the debate was the fundamental role of God in everyday events and the question of whether the rule of Providence had any bearing on chance occurrences. The debate boiled down to whether one was willing to believe “that a miracle occurred every time the dice were thrown.”15 Essentially, moral and church leaders were facing an epistemological shift in the theoretical application of drawing lots. “Blind luck,” as Luther put it, was emerging as an acceptable conceptual category to explain arbitrary outcomes. The direct historical implications of the debate were profound. As Margo Todd relates, “The Gataker–Ames debate on the nature of providence should be placed in the context of a centuries-old debate among Western European moralists about whether a decision may be referred to a lottery.”16 Whereas Ames argued that “a lot is religious in the very nature of it,” Gataker argued for a “non-providential class of chance” that justified secular uses of lots so long as an appeal to God was not made. This position suggested the dawning of a new era of accepting secular lot-drawing in a world that had previously rejected it. In making a distinction between lots used “in mirth” and lots used to “consult with God,” Gataker addressed the moral ambiguity and carved out a new conceptual space that allowed for a non-providential understanding of chance events. At issue is the meaningful conclusion that “developing a method of discerning ‘betwixt probability and certainty,’ ‘contingency and casualty’—essentially developing a rudimentary theory of probability—is a legitimate and even a necessary pursuit for Christians.”17 It was against this changing theological backdrop that Elizabeth introduced England’s first public lottery and Shakespeare composed his Merchant of Venice. In fact, much of the tension in Shakespeare’s Merchant pivots around a central moral conundrum that the Prince of Morocco and the other suitors ultimately fail to grasp. Shakespeare has Morocco vocalize a timeless paradox that seems to problematize Portia’s lottery: “If Hercules and Lichas play at dice / Which is the better man, the greater throw / May turn by fortune from the weaker

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hand […] And so may I, blind fortune leading me, / Miss that which one unworthier may attain” (Merchant of Venice, 2.1.32–34, 36–37). Morocco recognizes Portia’s lottery as being a game of chance—a game that has nothing to do with skill or merit. According to Morocco’s logic, Fortune governs lotteries and the arbitrariness of Fortune allows baser or “unworthier” men to win. Indeed, as Jean Le Clerc remarked, “[l]otteries are a sort of Riddles [sic], which carry a Meaning very different from their sound and outward appearance”—they appear to profit those who hazard in them, while in truth they profit the organizer.18 The complaint is insightful and it consequently raises the following question: is Portia’s lottery fundamentally problematic because it operates outside the jurisdiction of Providence and meritocracy, and thereby champions chance? Would not a better scheme allow the Hercules of the world to win? The lottery for Portia’s hand in marriage is not usually read as a literal game of chance. Rather, critics tend to address the lottery scenes in terms of the larger thematic ideas they present: such as material ­versus transcendent desire or Christian versus secular virtue. Analysis often focuses on the formal thematic correlations among the lottery scenes as they speak to the allegorical tradition of Lady Fortune and the unpredictable distribution of her favors. “Once we view the lottery as a ­formal allegory,” Stanley Kozikowski argues, “we may better understand certain critical issues […] for instance, Portia clearly does not manipulate the lottery: she necessarily appears as Fortune to those who seek Fortune, and she comes forth as a modest ‘maiden’ in love before her humble lover.”19 This reading not only misses the specific historical controversy over drawing lots and the contested ways in which lotteries were perceived and operated, but it disregards the embedded significations of Shakespeare’s lottery device. It is inadequate to read Portia’s role in the lottery as being circumscribed within the mechanism of a lottery that negates her agency and posits her solely as a prize to be won. Yet, Robert Darcy forecloses any possibility that Portia affects her own outcome. He argues for a “total subordination of her agency—especially her sexual agency—to a psychological dependence on the father.”20 He contends that the system Portia’s father created does not depend upon chance because it is an “ideologically preferential test,” meaning it is biased in favor of local individuals who have been exposed to the values, beliefs, and practices of Belmont.21 Arguments that try to circumvent the chance element fail to appreciate the role of risk in Shakespeare’s play in general. Even though the riddles appear to be saturated with ideological bias,

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there is no way of insuring that an unfavorable suitor does not select the correct casket by chance. While the riddles on the caskets do espouse an ideological bias, the lottery is not, as some argue, emptied of chance operations: rather, the chance element is mitigated because Shakespeare’s Portia proves ­expedient. Not only does Portia take control of the “lottery of [her] destiny,” she also takes control of the final trial scene through “covert manipulation.”22 The compelling subject of chance and risk is intrinsic to the lottery, and indeed the play itself. I would argue that once we view the lottery as a symbol of conflicting political, theological, and economic ideas we may better understand one of the larger critical issues Shakespeare explores in the play through the figures of Portia, Antonio, and Shylock: namely, the consequences of hazarding on chance for personal gain. Shakespeare’s lottery is not a simple allegory, rather it is a provocative emblematic game of chance used to question the limits of human agency. Morocco’s analogy of a dice game is instructive because it highlights the fundamental role chance plays in the pursuit of Portia’s hand. And while the riddles on the chests are understood to mitigate the role of risk and in fact “guide” the fateful suitor, who “shall rightly love,” (1.2.32–33) to select the proper casket, they do not invariably secure an advantage for one suitor over another. In fact, the riddles on the chests underscore how aligned Portia’s lottery is to conventional lottery schemes in general. Queen Elizabeth’s lottery required adventurers to compose poesies to serve as their lots, and as in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the poetic inscriptions often revealed much about the appreciable quality of the players.23 The three poetically inscribed chests in Merchant represent the lots to be chosen. These chests are kept behind a curtain until each “drawing,” when it is ceremoniously opened for a suitor and his retinue. The chests contain a moralized epigram within that serves as a moral corrective to those who fail to choose the winning “lot.” Before adventurers are allowed to play the lottery, they must verbally agree to three conditions set forth by Portia’s father. Aragon states the conditions as follows: First, never to unfold to anyone Which casket ’twas I chose. Next, if I fail Of the right casket, never in my life To woo a maid in way of marriage.

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Lastly, if I do fail in fortune of my choice, Immediately to leave you, and be gone. (2.9.10–15)

These three demands are required of each adventurer. The selection process is presented as a “choice,” but it is also characterized as a “chance,” “hazard,” “venture,” “fortune,” and “election.”24 The lottery drawings are staged three times over the course of the play and by the end of the second Act, the logic of the lottery is fully revealed and the winning chest is known. The lottery in the Merchant of Venice functions as most lotteries do, for the distribution of “prizes” by random chance. Portia’s father, having anticipated an untimely death, determined this manner as a means by which to choose Portia’s husband in absentia. Shakespeare is clear to present the lottery as legitimate. Early in the play Nerissa advises Portia, stating “Your father was ever virtuous, and holy men at their death have good inspirations” and she therefore condones “the lott’ry that he hath devis’d in these three chests of gold, silver, and lead, whereof who chooses his meaning chooses you” (1.2.24–27). In order to play, the suitors agree to take a sizeable risk for their chance at Portia’s hand with no assurance of a favorable outcome. Conversely, the assurance that the “right” suitor succeeds resides in the riddles—the lottery “will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly but one who you shall rightly love” (1.2.27–28). The riddles are understood to act as surety against the workings of blind chance. However, in what follows I will argue that the presumed fail-safe is not located in the cultural or ideologically biased riddles, but rather in the character of Portia herself. Shakespeare indicates Portia’s willingness to beguile early in the play when, after negatively remarking on a German suitor, she tells Nerissa, “Therefore for fear of the worst, I pray thee set a deep glass of Rhenish wine on the contrary casket […] I will do any thing, Nerissa, ere I will be married to a spunge” (1.2.80–81, 83). As Portia’s comment proves, although she “claims to be a prize of fortune, she in fact knows how to take advantage of occasion to gain what she desires.”25 In fact, later in the play Portia tells Nerissa in playful fashion that “twenty of these puny lies I’ll tell” because, as she admits, “I have within my mind / A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks, / Which I will practice” (3.4.74, 76–78). Her boast reveals a willingness to exploit the situation at hand in order to obtain her desired outcome. This mindset is fully revealed during the lottery scenes.26

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In particular, Portia stalls Bassanio’s drawing and confides to him “I could teach you / How to choose right, but then I am forsworn” (3.2.10–11). Though she quickly corrects the thought, the advantage Portia falsely offers Bassanio raises questions about her agency in the lottery. Does she manipulate the outcome? Portia’s skillful maneuvers in this scene and her expert tactics during the trial scene compel us to consider the possibility. Shakespeare forces us to reconcile her pledge to cooperate (“I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtain’d by the manner of my father’s will”) with repeated suggestions that she is willing to play the false gamester (1.2.89–90). This bifurcated portrayal is suitably encapsulated in the lottery itself—as a game of chance, it has the aspect of neutrality but in truth it is subject to the false dealings of its operator. In order to complicate any simplified reading, Shakespeare’s Portia shifts between the roles of passive victim and elusive manipulator.27 Finally, as scholars have noted, the rhyming words Portia uses in Act 3, Scene 2 (“bred,” “head,” and “nourished”) are sufficient hints to Bassanio that the “lead” casket is the correct choice. Like a colluding tavern mistress who stands by the gaming table helping her favorite gamester to secure his winnings, Portia assists Bassanio in selecting the correct casket, thereby circumventing chance and cheating in her own lottery. More recent scholarship promotes the notion of a savvy and ­calculating Portia. According to Ellen M. Caldwell, “Merchant argues pragmatism in opposition to romance and suggests that the shrewdest merchant, Portia, who learns how to corner the market, determines the fortunes in the market place and in marriage.”28 While Portia may be “curbed by the will of a dead father,” she “only appears to be subject to chance—in fact, she exercises control, like Fortuna, over the livelihoods of those who risk and hazard for love and wealth.”29 Harry Berger Jr. characterizes Portia along similar lines when he argues that Portia practices “negative usury” and attempts to “embarrass not only Shylock but also Antonio—and Bassanio.”30 In keeping with this recent critical approach to Merchant of Venice—and unlike previous arguments which present Portia as being at the mercy of a father who has stripped her of all agency—I suggest that Portia seizes the opportunity to trump chance and influence the outcome of her lottery. In this way, her father has created the semblance of a fair mechanism by which suitors might win his daughter, thus increasing the credit and respectability of Belmont while at the same time preserving his interest not only in its

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future bloodlines, but in the happiness of his daughter. Portia knows which is the “winning ticket” and it is up to her to know when to rig the outcome. Unlike Bassanio, who invites risk and adventures all his resources with the hope to “hazard back again,” Portia proves risk-averse when the ultimate stake presents itself (1.1.151). Instead of hazarding, she cheats to gain her desired outcome. If we accept the premise that by design the lottery allows for Portia to manipulate the outcome, then we must also consider other thorny objectives embedded in the lottery scheme. Through the device of the lottery, her father made the shrewd calculation that, even in absentia, it could gain him a successor favored by Portia and his own ideological test, but also in the process eliminate likely adversaries to his idyllic realm. When the suitors forswear all further attempts at marriage, they are essentially staking the legitimate continuation of their bloodline to gain Portia. In Shakespeare’s Venice, contracts are the mediating bonds between parties. Similarly, in Belmont, a contract is verbally agreed before suitors can participate in the lottery. The suitors must “swear” to “Never to speak to lady afterward / In way of marriage” (2.1.41–42). Suitors who fail forfeit their right to produce offspring, at least legitimate offspring. Ironically, the “many Jasons [that] come in quest of her” come in peril of being conquered themselves (1.1.172). Lest we should question her father’s morality or intentions, Nerissa affirms that he “was ever virtuous, and holy men at their death have good inspirations” (1.2.24–25).31 Therefore, we must accept that the lottery is a deliberate and ingenious stratagem to secure a strong and secure future for Belmont. The oath to forswear marriage as set forth by the lottery is disquieting in its underhanded conquest of rival dominions. At stake, essentially, is each suitor’s future lineage. For some suitors, the lottery’s stakes prove too high and they opt not to try their lot. As Portia observes, they prove too “reasonable,” choosing to shun risk since Portia cannot “be won by some other sort than [her] father’s imposition depending on the caskets” (1.2.91, 87–88). The cost of playing the lottery requires one to gamble upon a gamble, in other words to risk one’s future progeny on winning. The exchange is a highly unfavorable one. Indeed, the destabilizing political implications of the lottery are ­striking when one considers the potential ramifications. When Portia, in gaming fashion, requests that Nerissa “over-name” her suitors—namely, a Prince of Naples, the County Palatine, a French lord, a baron of England, a Scottish lord, and a Duke of Saxony’s nephew—the potential

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conquest of these bloodlines is startling (1.2.34–76). Ultimately, only Morocco and Aragon are vanquished because most of Portia’s ­suitors decline to stake so much without any surety of gain. However, the dramatic suggestion is clear: had each of the named suitors ventured in the lottery and lost, dynasties in Italy, Germany, France, England, and Scotland would have suffered a genealogical blow. Alongside Shylock the Jew, both the African and the Spaniard are subordinated and rendered impotent as a result of their dealings with Shakespeare’s Christian heroes. The figurative and literal potential for cultural conquest is cleverly embedded in Portia’s lottery—just as it was in the 1612 lottery which James I’ used to fund the colonization of Virginia and in other lotteries which helped to fund the imperialist ambitions of the nation-states that sponsored them in the first place.32 Lotteries, whether imaginative or literal, are essentially designed to meet the otherwise unattainable demands of the lottery creators. In a world governed by the capricious and unpredictable operations of chance, one of the ways of coping with uncertainty is to appeal to morality. Shakespeare’s lottery scenes afford him the chance to moralize the actors involved as a way of justifying outcomes. Shakespeare illustrates in Merchant, as he does elsewhere, that the “gentler gamester is the soonest winner” (Henry V, 3.6.103). Portia, Antonio, and Bassanio are the gentler gamesters and their pursuits are justly rewarded. Portia, in particular, is the most protean character, and one who takes advantage of every contingency presented to her.33 Shylock, by contrast, whose intentions are altogether more vicious, is the character who ultimately is censured.34 Through The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare explores how gambling, whether through merchant adventuring, playing lottery games, or using usury, can be perilous but also richly rewarding. He also shows how these ventures are subject to the manipulations of profit-seeking agents. Moreover, the figurative correspondence between Antonio’s overseas ventures and those who venture overseas for Portia is instructive. Antonio’s merchant ships, which are sent “tossing on the ocean […] / Like signiors and rich burghers […] as it were the pageants of the sea” (1.1.8, 10–11), can be likened to Portia’s suitors, who hazard “The watery kingdom, whose ambitious head / Spits in the face of heaven, is no bar / To stop the foreign spirits, but they come / As o’er a brook to see fair Portia” (2.7.44–47). The symmetry is difficult to miss: while Antonio sends his emissaries out to all of the world to hazard for commercial gain, all of the world sends emissaries

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to Belmont to hazard for Portia. Moreover, Nerissa’s roll call of suitors from France, Spain, Germany, Scotland, and England, mirrors a similar roll call from Bassanio of Antonio’s merchant ventures in “Tripolis […] Mexico, and England, / […] Lisbon, Barbary, and India” (3.2.268–69). Shakespeare’s sailing imagery and designation of far off lands convey the sense of a hovering insatiable consumer market which presses upon Venice and Belmont alike. Antonio and Portia are players in the international marketplace, albeit in distinct ways. The language used to describe Antonio’s merchant adventurism and the pursuit of Portia aligns to suggest the mercantile aspect of both.35 The practical and imaginative uses of lotteries illustrate that early modern England was grappling with a growing practice of profiting from chance that not only anticipated a full-blown capitalist society and its economic practices of speculating, but also expressed an ­elemental understanding of probability. Ultimately, early modern lottery schemes like Elizabeth’s lottery of 1567 and dramatic representations like Shakespeare’s lottery scenes in Merchant of Venice helped to cultivate a risk-seeking society by encouraging fantasies of wealth and belief in the possibility of winning great reward in exchange for material stakes. Primarily, lotteries were mechanisms for religious determinations of providential will, before finally becoming an instrument for monetary gain (and loss) as a result of the random and secular operations of chance. The discovery and substantiation that a general understanding of probability theory existed in early modern English culture are significant because it establishes another facet of the period that helped usher in “modern” culture as we know it. Lotteries, and indeed games of chance in general, represent additional antecedents of modernity that we can verifiably evidence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture.

Notes

1. See Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700. Although Braddick does not specifically discuss the role of lotteries, he explores how political power is used to centralize control. 2. Stanley J. Kozikowski, ‘The Allegory of Love and Fortune: The Lottery in The Merchant of Venice’, Renascence, 32:2 (1980): 105–15 (pp. 107–8). 3. Terms like hazard, venture, stake, and other similar rhetoric of risk linked these different practices together in ways that many moralists and church figures found problematic.

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4. England and Wales. Privy Council, A Very Rich Lotterie Generall, Without any Blanckes (London: Henry Bynneman, 1567), p. 1 5. Ibid., p. 3. 6. Ibid., p. 1. 7. Gerda Reith, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 57. 8.  Evidently, the queen’s subjects were reluctant to participate, so she used a small army of surveyors to ‘animate the people’ and ‘move them to adventure, [with] not one parish to escape its obligation’ (see C. L’Estrange Ewen, Lotteries and Sweepstakes: An Historical, Legal and Ethical Survey of Their Introduction, Suppression and Re-establishment in the British Isles [New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972], p. 45). The aggressive campaign failed to attract adventurers. In fact, it created the impression of coerced taxation rather than a voluntary fundraiser. 9.  Reuven Brenner and Gabrielle Brenner, Gambling and Speculation: A Theory, a History, and a Future of Some Human Decisions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 6. The practice of drawing lots is well established in the Bible as noted in Nehemiah 11:1, 1 Chronicles 24:5–19, 1 Samuel 10:20–24, Luke 1:9, Acts 1:26, Hebrew 7:12, and of course the Roman soldiers who cast lots for Christ’s robe, see Matthew 27:35, Mark 15:24, Luke 23:34 and John 19:24. 10. Consider early modern insurance schemes, lotteries, merchant adventuring, and the thriving pawn broking industry in London as examples. 11. Martin Luther, Works: Volume 19: Lectures on the Minor Prophets II, ed. Hilton C. Oswold (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1974), p. 61. 12. Ibid. 13. A later figure of early modern theology, William Perkins, takes a similar position. In his Cases of Conscience (Cambridge: John Legat, 1606) Perkins simply argues that “the use of a lotte is a solemne act of ­religio[n], [and] it may not be applied to sporting”, sig. 2O8v (p. 590). 14. D.R. Bellhouse, ‘Probability in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: An Analysis of Puritan Casuistry’, International Statistical Review, 56:1 (1988): 63–74 (p. 71). 15. Ibid., p. 6. 16. Margo Todd, ‘Providence, Chance, and the New Science in Early Stuart Cambridge’, The Historical Journal, 29:3 (1986): 697–711 (p. 704). 17. Ibid., p. 707. 18. Jean Le Clerc, Reflections upon What the World Commonly Call Good-Luck and Ill-Luck, with Regard to Lotteries (London: Matthew Gillyflower, et al., 1699), sig. H1r (p. 145). 19. Kozikowski, ‘The Allegory of Love and Fortune’, p. 112.

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20. Robert F. Darcy, ‘Freeing Daughters on Open Markets: The Incest Clause in The Merchant of Venice’, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 189–200 (p. 196). 21. Ibid., p. 191. According to Darcy, ‘the trial of the caskets is […] supposed to seem a chance accident, thereby forestalling scrutiny of its mechanism for any potential bias’; but in truth, he adds, it ‘is more secretly a closed arrangement, an incestuous hoarding and withholding of the daughter until such time as a paternal surrogate and endogamous match can arrive in Bassanio’s person’. See ibid., pp. 193–94. 22. Ibid., p. 192. 23. Elizabeth’s proclamation called for all adventurers to enter their name in the lottery “under one devise, prose or poesie.” Written in several ­languages, the entries testify to the diversity of the adventurers and reveal much about their pecuniary and social aspirations. One representative example is from Sibbel Cleyon, who won two shillings and one penny with her lot, which read “I am a pore maiden and faine would marry, / and the lacke of goods is the cause that I tarry.” See Ewen, Lotteries and Sweepstakes, p. 59. Whereas the poesies in Elizabeth’s lottery reveal monetary hopes and limitations, the poetic riddles in Shakespeare’s play suggest different material attitudes toward objects of value. 24. The word “choice” or “choose” is primarily used in lottery scenes with Morocco and Aragon, see 2.1, 2.7, 2.9. With Bassanio’s, Shakespeare uses the words “chance” (2.1.38), “hazard” (3.2.2), “venture” (3.2.10), “election” (2.9.3 and 3.2.24), “fortune” (3.2.39), and “choice” (3.2.43). Such diction speaks to a rhetoric of risk and speculation, ideas and practices which are associated with Bassanio. 25.  E.M. Caldwell, ‘Opportunistic Portia as Fortuna in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 54:2 (2014): 349–73 (p. 353). 26. Kozikoswki contends that “Portia’s hints […] are the inevitable expressions of that formal role which she must play in the contention between Fortune and Love and in her comparable role in the Lottery of Fortune and Love.” See Kozikowski, “The Allegory of Love and Fortune,” p. 112. His allegorical reading of the lottery scene makes compelling connections to the dramatic tradition of Fortune, but it doesn’t give proper weight to the real role of chance as a newly stressed secular force separate but not entirely divorced of its origins in the Fortuna tradition. 27. She claims to be a victim of unfair prescriptions, lamenting, “Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one, nor refuse none?” (1.2.22–23) and then later complaining “O, these naughty times / Puts bars between the owners and their rights” (3.2.18–19), but then she openly offers a

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clue to the correct casket by invoking the story of Alcides. As Kozikowski argues, “Portia again describes, or perhaps gently prescribes, his proper attitude of choice” when she likens Bassanio to Alcides “who nobly ­hazarded all in order to rescue a Trojan King’s daughter from a malign fate.” See Kozikowski, “The Allegory of Love and Fortune,” p. 111. 28. Caldwell, ‘Opportunistic Portia as Fortuna in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’, p. 373. 29. Ibid. 30.  Henry Berger Jr., A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare’s Venice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 19. 31. This gimmick of choosing Portia has generated much critical response and has led many to conclude that Portia is sidelined by the lottery. Shakespeare certainly leads us to believe that Portia is fully compliant when she laments “the lott’ry of my destiny / Bars me the right of voluntary choosing. / But if my father had not scanted me, / And hedg’d me by his wit to yield myself / His wife who wins me by that means I told you” (2.1.15–19). Portia feels “scanted” and “hedg’d” by her father and regrets having to “yield” herself to whomever wins, but we have seen how the lottery is not irrational and nor does it erase Portia’s ability to act independently. In fact, as I have argued, some allowance is made for Portia to manipulate the outcome, and Shakespeare suggests as much throughout the lottery scenes. 32. According to historians, the use of lotteries to fund the Virginia colonies provided much of the budget for the settlers of Jamestown. See John Samuel Ezell, Fortune’s Merry Wheel: The Lottery in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 18. Lottery schemes were used repeatedly in the development of the American colonies. In fact, the many smaller lotteries held throughout England between the years 1616 and 1620 generated around 29,000 pounds in revenue. 33. It should be noted that Shakespeare implicates Portia in three ­separate playful wagers. The first occurs when Graziano sports with Nerissa, stating “We’ll play with them the first boy for a thousand ducats” (3.2.213–14). Two scenes later Portia invites Nerissa to wager “I’ll hold thee any wager, / When we are both accoutered like young men, / I’ll prove the prettier fellow of the two” (3.4.62–64). Finally, Lorenzo tells Jessica “if two gods should play some heavenly match, / And on the wager lay two earthly women, / And Portia one, there must be something else / Pawn’d with the other, for the poor rude world / Hath not her fellow” (3.5.69–73). It is fitting that Shakespeare includes these rhetorical wagers in a play that is committed to scrutinizing characters who are driven to profit from chance.

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34. Antonio has played falsely with Shylock in their past interactions, Bassanio has been foolhardy with his money, “something too prodigal” (1.1.129), and Portia, as I suggest, manipulates her own lottery. 35. We learn from Bassanio that Portia is “nothing undervalu’d […] Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth, / For the four winds blow in from every coast / Renowned suitors” (1.1.165, 167–69). And Morocco uses a similar image when he reminds us that “all the world desires her’ and ‘From the four corners of the earth they come” (2.7.38–39).

Works Cited Balmford, James, A Modest Reply to Certaine Answeres, which Mr. Gataker B.D. in His Treatise of the Nature, & Use of Lotts, Giveth to Arguments in a Dialogue Concerning the Unlawfulnes of Games Consisting in Chance ([London]: [R. Boyle?], 1623). Bellhouse, D.R., ‘Probability in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: An Analysis of Puritan Casuistry’, International Statistical Review, 56:1 (1988): 63–74. Berger, Henry Jr., A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare’s Venice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). Braddick, Michael J., State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Brenner, Reuven, and Gabrielle Brenner, Gambling and Speculation: A Theory, a History, and a Future of Some Human Decisions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Brenner, Robert, ‘The Social Basis of English Commercial Expansion, 1550– 1650’, Journal of Economic History, 32:1 (1972): 361–84. Caldwell, E.M., ‘Opportunistic Portia as Fortuna in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 54:2 (2014): 349–73. Darcy, Robert F., ‘Freeing Daughters on Open Markets: The Incest Clause in The Merchant of Venice’, in Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism, ed. Linda Woodbridge (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 189–200. England and Wales. Privy Council, A Very Rich Lotterie Generall, Without any Blanckes, Contaying a Great Number of Good Prices […] Having Ben Valued and Priced by the Commaundment of the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie (London: Henry Bynneman, 1567). Ewen, C. L’Estrange, Lotteries and Sweepstakes: An Historical, Legal and Ethical Survey of their Introduction, Suppression and Re-Establishment in the British Isles (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1972). Ezell, John Samuel, Fortune’s Merry Wheel: The Lottery in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960).

132  L. MARTINEZ LAJOUS Gataker, Thomas, Of the Nature and Use of Lots: A Treatise Historicall and Theologicall (London: Edward Griffin, 1619). Kozikowski, Stanley J., ‘The Allegory of Love and Fortune: The Lottery in The Merchant of Venice’, Renascence, 32:2 (1980): 105–15. Le Clerc, Jean, Reflections upon What the World Commonly Call Good-Luck and Ill-Luck, with Regard to Lotteries (London: Matthew Gillyflower, et al., 1699). Luther, Martin, Works: Volume 19: Lectures on the Minor Prophets II, ed. Hilton C. Oswold (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1974). McIntosh, Marjorie K., Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Perkins, William, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge: John Legat, 1606). Reith, Gerda, The Age of Chance: Gambling in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). Stow, John, Annales, or, a General Chronicle of England. Begun by John Stow: Continued and Augmented with Matters Forraigne and Domestique, Ancient and Modern, unto the End of the Present yeere (London: Richard Meighen, 1631). Todd, Margo, ‘Providence, Chance, and the New Science in Early Stuart Cambridge’, The Historical Journal, 29:3 (1986): 697–711.

‘Her Tongue Hath Guilded It’: Speaking Economically in Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV Rebecca Tomlin

As Thomas Heywood’s Edward IV enters its final stages, and Jane Shore’s husband Matthew watches his estranged wife being dragged away to perform penance for adultery, he reflects on the value of drama in forming ethical character1:

The research supporting this essay was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC grant agreement no. 617849. I am extremely grateful to Rachel E. Holmes, Lizzie Swann and Katherine Hunt for their careful readings of drafts of this chapter. Any errors or omissions that remain are of course entirely my own. The First and Second Parts of King Edward the Fourth, hereafter referred to as Edward IV. R. Tomlin (*)  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_7

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134  R. TOMLIN       Were I as young As when I came to London to be ’prentice, This pageant were sufficient to instruct, And teach me ever after to be wise. (2.19.226–29)

Referring to the pageants displayed annually at the Lord Mayor’s Show, he points to their role in inculcating the attitudes, values and ethics of the city in its apprentices and citizens. As Matthew suggests, both Jane’s penitential procession, and the pageant of which it reminds him, were performances intended to ‘instruct and teach’. Heywood’s commitment to artistic representation as a medium of ethical instruction can be found at work elsewhere, for example, in 2 If You Know Not Me (1605), his play about the founding of the Royal Exchange, a gallery of pictures of city worthies provides the inspiration for moral reformation and civic generosity. In his An Apologie for Actors (1612) Heywood defends the theatre from its critics by promoting the didactic potential of dramatic performance. Plays, he claims, ‘have made the ignorant more apprehensive’ (sig. F3r) by showing them the ‘flourishing estate of such as live in obedience’ and the contrasting ‘untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions, and insurrections’ (sig. F3v). Heywood remarks in An Apologie on the reformative power of Jane Shore’s story by which the ‘unchaste’ would be ‘shewed their errors’; ‘what’, he asks, ‘can sooner print modesty in the soules of the wanton, then by discovering unto them the monstrousnesse of their sin?’ (sig. G1v), his use of the verb ‘to print’ further connecting the materiality of textual culture to the possibility of moral reform. For Heywood, literature generally, and drama particularly, is an active form of ethical instruction that ‘hath power to new mold the harts of the spectators’ (sig. B4r), to transform ignorance into apprehension, sin into virtue and rebellion into obedience. Jonathan Dollimore has argued that early modern defences of literature, like Heywood’s Apologie, deliberately limited the scope of the knowledge conveyed by drama to the dimensions of such instruction because they were defending theatre against the authorities’ fear that it imparted ideas and information that might threaten the social order.2 Being ‘writ with this ayme and carryed with this methode, to teach the subjects obedience to their king’ (sig. F3v), according to Heywood’s Apologie, history plays (among which we might include, if somewhat hesitantly, Edward IV), have a specific role in instructing the population in conformity.3

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As Matthew observes, the function of city pageants was to teach young apprentices ‘to be wise’ (2.19.229), and the knowledge that they conveyed was an appreciation of the city’s values of ordered commerce, modesty and obedience.4 Emerging from a time of profound economic change and its political consequences, Edward IV engages with the ethical questions thrown up by the ‘economic’, conceived of here in its widest sense as concerned with the effects on social organisation of the shift from feudalism to early capitalism, and the resulting conflict between, for example, the values of the aristocracy and the rising ‘middling sort’. More established discourses such as those of theology or law offered early modern writers epistemological frameworks through which to organise knowledge, and similarly, treatises such as Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie (1595) or Thomas Heywood’s Apologie, drew on classical and contemporary models to offer a theoretical basis for discussing the form and purpose of literature. In the late sixteenth century, however, when Edward IV was first written and performed, there was no parallel structure or theory outside law or theology by which early modern thinking about a range of economic issues—including usury, foreign trade, monopolies, exchange rates, rising prices, widespread poverty, nascent capitalism and more abstract concepts such as credit, value and worth—might be systemically engaged. Texts that would later provide the vocabulary and concepts to articulate precisely the questions raised by the rapid and transformative economic changes in the early modern period did not begin to emerge until the ‘mercantalist’ debates between Gerard Malynes, Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun responded to the economic crisis of the 1620s.5 This is not to say that earlier writers did not engage in a sophisticated way with economic concerns, as many literary studies loosely grouped under the description of New Economic Criticism have shown.6 In this moment, however, we are presented with an opportunity to test out what literature, and particularly drama, can do: how it can reflect social change as understood by the people who are undergoing it, and guide them as to how to ride these waves of change. In this essay I explore some of the ways in which Edward IV grapples with the epistemic gaps between what can be apprehended through observation and the language and concepts through which it can be fully comprehended, using allusion and figurative language to reflect on elusive and otherwise unarticulated aspects of

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economic changes that he and his audience were experiencing. Despite the apparently direct didacticism that Heywood appears to advocate, I show that his is an indirect art that operated through various literary tropes and devices to subvert hierarchies and ultimately to place London at the heart of a developing culture and ethics of commerce. The story of the seduction of Jane Shore, the wife of a London goldsmith, by Edward IV, and ‘her great promotion, fall, and misery, and lastly, the lamentable death of both her and her husband’ as the play’s subtitle has it, is interwoven in Heywood’s play with historical events from the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III: the marriage of Edward to Elizabeth Woodville; the siege of London by the rebel Falconbridge; scenes from the French wars; the murder of the Princes in the Tower and the accession of Richard III. The title of the printed play text, however, indicates its centre of gravity: The First and Second Parts of King Edward the Fourth, Containing his merry pastime with the Tanner of Tamworth; as also his love to fair Mistress Shore. The abbreviated title Edward IV, which I use here for convenience, is therefore misleading; this is a play in which the stories of subjects weigh equally with those of the Court. The play was for a long time treated witheringly by critics, who found its subject matter and dramatic style inferior to Shakespeare’s, or who preferred the laconic disdain for the mercantile classes of Ben Jonson or Thomas Middleton. It was read as ‘a powerful drama of citizen life, just melodramatic and sentimental enough to make the strongest of appeals to an uncritical bourgeois audience’, and ‘racy and unhistorical […] [t]he matter of the ballad, the chap-book, and the folk-tale’ on which Heywood had ‘lavished his homely pathos’.7 The few critics who considered Heywood’s drama before the late twentieth century dismissed it in snobbish and gendered terms as ‘melodramatic’, ‘sentimental’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘homely’ and ‘domestic’. As these critical references to the play as ‘bourgeois’ indicate, the inter-twined economic and social concerns of Edward IV have long been noted. Despite the conservative tendency of Heywood’s Apologie, critics who have been interested in Edward IV’s depiction of London’s sites of commerce and its presentation of gender and class in early modern England, including Wendy Wall, Richard Helgerson, and Richard Rowland, have pointed out that it is in many ways radical in its response to the social and economic upheavals of the late sixteenth century.8 Helgerson’s article about Edward IV opens with the assumption that many of his readers would know of Jane Shore only through a passing

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reference to her in Shakespeare’s Richard III but goes on to claim a central role for the play in shaping our cultural understanding of the English bourgeoisie: ‘If the whole of our modern, middle-class world does not emerge from the story of Jane Shore—and it surely doesn’t’, he argues, ‘a fair part of its literary self-representation does’.9 The growing interest in economically focused criticism in general, together with Richard Rowland’s work on Thomas Heywood and his Revels edition of Edward IV in particular, have done much to renew interest in this play and its writer.10 Building on this body of criticism, I turn now to how Heywood’s play uses tropes of exchange such as puns, metaphors and allusions as ways of knowing beyond the didactic purpose of Matthew’s imagined boyhood pageant. In the end, Matthew is obedient to his king, and his defiance is limited to his charity towards Jane and his own willed death. His dying declamation summarises the lesson that he hopes that his audience will take away with them:       O, unconstant world, Here lies a true anatomy of thee: A king had all my joy, that her enjoyed, And by a king again she was destroyed. All ages of my kingly woes shall tell; (2.22.109–13)

The Shores’ story, he imagines, will endure as an exemplar of the corrupt injustice of kings; drama, as Heywood knows, can anatomise the world to reveal its truth, and drama can tell that story through the ages.

Knowledge and Plain Speaking This essay is concerned with the use of literary tropes as a way of understanding, and among them I include ‘plain’ speech which d ­ eliberately eschews figurative language. For Thomas Wilson, plain speaking of English, untainted by imported ‘strange ynkehorne termes’ was an expression of patriotism, and clarity was the essence of good rhetoric: ‘For what manne can be delited, or yet be perswaded, with the onely hearyng of those thynges, whiche he knoweth not what thei meane?’11 George Puttenham was suspicious of the ways in which the ambiguity created by ‘ornaments’ could circumvent transparency of meaning: they create, he argues, ‘a certaine doublenesse, whereby our talke is the more

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guilefull & abusing, for what els is your Metaphor but an inversion of sence by transport; your allegorie by a duplicitie of meaning or dissimulation under covert and darke intendments […] seeking to inveigle and appassionate the mind’?12 Heywood has some of his characters use figurative language, precisely as Puttenham suggests, to create ­meaning, and possibly with guile and ‘dark intendments’, and he adopts plain speaking to suggest honesty and good intentions in other characters. While the tanner Hobs, as we will see, uses language to hide his opinions when it suits him, at other times he expresses clearly his understanding of the social world in which he operates. As they part, Edward reflects on Hobs’ understanding of political and economic affairs: I see plain men, by observation Of things that alter in the change of times, Do gather knowledge. (1.13.98–100)

‘Plain’ is both a stylistic descriptor and an ethical assessment of the character of ‘the honest true tanner’ (1.13.97), which incorporates not only the simple and unadorned manner of his speech but also the frank and straightforward nature of what he has said. Shakespeare has Richard of Gloucester use the term ironically when he disclaims a courtier’s cunning facility with words: ‘[c]annot a plain man live and think no harm, / But thus his simple truth must be abus’d / With silken, sly, insinuating Jacks?’ (1.3.51–53). ‘Knowledge’ for ‘plain men’ can be attained by attentive watching of ‘things that alter’ but also through adherence or ‘observation’ of tradition or custom; ‘I see’ Edward says, indicating that he has arrived at this revelation through his own observation. Edward perceives ‘plain men’ as ‘gatherers’ of knowledge but not creators or processors of it; there is no place for reasoning in this process of reactive collecting. In contrast, a king, as Richard suggests, is reliant on mediated knowledge channelled through the reports of advisers and courtiers, who may ‘abuse’ the truth for their own ends. As Sidney notes, practised orators like Richard might choose to speak with apparent artlessness ‘because with a plaine sensiblenesse, they might winne credit of popular eares’13 and by putting this speech in the mouth of his duplicitous villain, Shakespeare invites us to consider whether there is ever an objective ‘simple truth’.

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Among the knowledge that Hobs shares with Edward is the economic disruption caused by issuing royal patents‚ or monopolies, to favoured courtiers. Having lied to Hobs that he is ‘Ned’, a courtier, Edward expects that he will seek economic advantage from their encounter: ‘Hath thee no suit touching thy trade?’ (1.13.72) he asks, and in a direct reference to contemporary royal interference in established markets, he offers Hobs a monopoly over the leather trade in his area. Hobs objects strongly to the idea of monopoly, enforced by letters patent (‘pattens’): By the mass and the matins, I like not those pattens! Sirrah, they that have them do as the priests did in old time: buy and sell the sins of the people. So they make the King believe they mend what’s amiss, and, for money, they make the thing worse than it is. (1.13.75–79)

In an anachronistic reference to a pre-Reformation ‘old time’, Hobs creates a moral equivalence between the abusive sale of indulgences and royal patronage. While money here is associated with corruption, the market, with its potential to ‘do good to many through the land’ (1.13.83) is an ethical realm. It is notable that although we see many commercial activities in the play, none of the characters actually sells anything; money changes hands instead within an economy of ‘benevolence’ and charity.14 Moreover, the king is misled about the true nature of trade by those who would persuade him to issue monopolies for their own benefit; in direct contrast to Hobs’ own knowledge gathered by observation, ‘they’ (his courtiers) ‘make the King believe’, deceiving him for their own ends, that they are acting for the good of the realm. The economic analysis given by Hobs is later restated by Jane, who angrily refuses to advance Rufford’s suit to export corn and lead, which she believes to be against the national interest15: I had your bill, but I have torn your bill; And ’twere no shame I think to tear your ears, That care not how you wound the commonwealth. (1.22.64–66)

Reluctantly co-opted into Edward’s economy of patronage, Jane, like Hobs, sees properly regulated commerce as part of the commonwealth.

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Her transformation from private city housewife to royal courtesan expands her domestic oeconomia into the management of the resources of the state and her assertions based on her own observations are expressed in the plainest language. Plain speaking in Edward IV allows discussions of trade in terms that avoid the commoditising effect of metaphor, just as the play is permeated with commerce without actually showing cash, the ultimate economic metaphor, changing hands. David Hawkes argues that the play is concerned with the difference between value and worth created by money exchange in a capitalist market,16 and plain speaking is here, I suggest, put to use to indicate the ethical superiority of transparent and fair trading without the distorting interference of royal patronage. A play, ­however concerned it is with ethics, is not the medium through which to lecture an audience and the use of plain speaking throughout would be exceedingly dull. Drama is a form through which to explore ambiguity and complexity, to show rather than to tell; ‘so much more profitable and gracious’ as Edmund Spenser noted ‘is doctrine by example than by rule’.17 Accordingly, I now turn to some other literary devices deployed by Heywood to construct meaning in his play, including allusion, genre, metaphor and punning.

Literary Allusion and Disrupted Hierarchies Some of the sniffy early twentieth-century responses to Edward IV were provoked by its refusal to lie neatly within generic boundaries. The play is comprised of two parts that are constructed with total disregard for unities of time, place and action, comprising instead several interwoven, and sometimes baggily digressive plot lines, some of which fall out of the story well before the end of the play. Edward IV energetically mixes, inverts and appropriates genres to reflect on the economic transformations taking place in early modern London, for an audience that increasingly saw its relationships in terms of the market. As a participant itself in a theatrical market, the play appeals to a wide range of possible buyers, from those who wanted to laugh at Hobs the tanner, or see dramatic reconstructions of the siege of London, to those who wanted to weep over the sad end of Jane and Matthew’s story. We know from his Apologie that Heywood was fully aware of Renaissance generic decorum but in Edward IV he disregards classical categories of ‘history’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘comedy’ to dramatise the transformative possibilities of economic

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change, which allow a goldsmith to become a chivalric hero and his wife to become a king’s closest companion. As a play that is related to London chronicle comedies (although it does not share their celebratory tone) Edward IV like them undertakes ‘the cultural work of subordinating the monarchical to the citizen narrative’,18 in this case with a clear demonstration that the city’s (bourgeois) ethics of loyalty, charity, oeconomia and the commonwealth are superior to those of the court, which are suggested to be aggression, lust, inconsistency and vengefulness. Jane’s elevation to the status of ‘secular saint’, as Helgerson argued, is an assertion of the right of London’s citizens to inhabit the high-status genres of tragedy and history.19 The play’s treatment of the Shores as historic and tragic figures, combined with other plot details such as the elevation of a foundling to Lord Mayor, amounts to a radical reorganisation of feudal hierarchies and classifications, both of genre and social status. The ‘great promotion, fall, and misery’ of the play’s title signals that Jane’s story is in part based on the model of classical tragedy, and the play challenges conventional hierarchical structures in part through its appropriation and reworking of this elite genre. From the start of the play, Falconbridge’s threat, ‘Thy wife is mine, that’s flat. / This night, in thine own house, she sleeps with me’ (1.4.46–47) shouted at her husband across the walls of London which he is defending, aligns Jane’s story with that of Lucretia. Through the many Renaissance ­re-tellings of this classical story of the foundation of Rome, Lucretia became a complex but powerful emblem of republican virtue and resistance to tyranny in early modern English poetics.20 Her story had been recently told by Shakespeare in Lucrece (1594) and Heywood would return to it in his play The Rape of Lucrece (1608). In the first scene in which Jane herself appears, her response to Falconbridge’s threats also evoke Lucretia’s story: These hands shall make this body a dead corse Ere force or flattery shall mine honour stain. (1.8.30–31)

Lucretia’s story was famously one of violated chastity, and like that of Mistress Shore, the infamous courtesan, was well known by the time that Edward IV was performed. The irony of Jane’s statement that she would die rather than be dishonoured was probably recognised and enjoyed by the audience.21 Although tellings of Lucretia’s story diverge,

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in all versions her virtue and her desirability are a product of, and signalled by, her domesticity; Sextus, son of the Tarquin king of Rome, is first gripped by his desire for her when a group of men surprise Lucretia at home, finding her with her women industriously engaged with their weaving. Sextus’s violation of his host’s wife is a betrayal of hospitality that triggers a series of events that lead to the downfall of the house of Tarquin and the establishment of the Roman Republic. Heywood seems to gesture towards this story throughout Part 1 of Edward IV, a play in which tyrannous kings and out-of-control nobles threaten the civic virtue of London, embodied by Jane. In aligning Jane with Lucretia, Heywood claims for a London citizen’s wife the status of an emblematic tragic and republican heroine. Like Sextus, Edward is first struck by desire for Jane when he meets her in the role of ideal hostess, as she helps her uncle, the widowed Lord Mayor of London, to entertain the king at a banquet. The word oeconomia (οἰκονομία), from which ‘economy’ derives, refers to management of the oikia (dwelling) or household domestic skill. Jane, like Lucretia, is a synecdoche of the city in which she lives, and its civic virtue is aligned with her own. Edward IV reworks the familiar stories of both women in an intertextual appropriation that uses literary allusion to suggest that communal civic virtues of honour and hospitality are primarily those of the domestic, feminine virtue of oeconomia. In The Rape of Lucrece, Lucretia tells her servants that ‘we must be careful, and with providence guide his [her husband’s] domestic business’; a wife’s duty, she says, is ‘the true manage[ment] of his household’s state’ (sig. F1v). Jane’s ‘homely help’ (1.16.47) as Matthew describes it, demonstrates virtuous humility and willingness to labour. Watching her work, Matthew and the Mayor do not comment on Jane’s beauty, but instead admire her domestic industry, which they see as both attractive and exemplary: Why, see how neatly she bestirs herself, And in good sooth makes huswifery to shine. (1.16.48–49)

Jane is secure in her domestic capabilities: ‘let his highness now come when he please, / All things are in perfect readiness’ (1.16.54–55). The Mayor’s gratitude confirms that a man’s credit is enhanced by the effective management of his household by an able woman: ‘I [am] beholding, niece, to you, / That take such pains to save our credit now’

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(1.16.56–57). ‘Credit’ in its early modern usage is a multivalent word that indicates an intricate combination of financial probity, moral worth and social status, ‘the social production of a marketable self’, as Ceri Sullivan puts it.22 Jane’s huswifery displays the Mayor’s wealth, his command of his household and its resources, and his status as a worthy host to the king. In this scene, just before Jane and Edward first meet, she is presented as an exemplary citizen’s wife, diligent and hard-working, and in full command of the city’s leading household. When Edward is introduced, he suggests that Matthew has wronged Jane by turning down the knighthood that would have made her a lady, but Jane embraces her status as private citizen’s wife: ‘Yet how both God and Master Shore I thank / For my continuance in this humble state’ (1.16.99–100). The play models the citizen household as a space of well-ordered hospitality and generosity, and Edward is shown to be a disruptive figure, led by his senses when he leaves the banquet precipitously, unable to conquer his desire for Jane, despite the troubling rejection of hospitality that this represents. In the banquet scene Jane’s oeconomia is associated with hospitality, but in her next encounter with Edward, it is shown to be embedded in the commerce of the city. In the scene that immediately follows the Lord Mayor’s banquet, Matthew’s apprentices enter ‘preparing the goldsmith’s shop with plate’ (1.17.s.d.). This, the audience is shown, is a hard-working and diligent household; Jane tells an apprentice to make haste and not loiter about his errands. Jane’s domestic labour is further demonstrated by the stage directions that she enters ‘with her work in her hand’ and later ‘sits sewing in her shop’ (1.17.s.d.); like Lucretia’s weaving, Jane’s sewing symbolises her commitment to domestic production and to keeping herself fruitfully occupied.23 Impressed by status and wealth, Jane’s neighbour and confidant, Mistress Blage, is in no doubt however that life as king’s mistress would be preferable to life in the city. Referring to Jane’s exemplary domesticity, Blage notes that ‘A household’s government deserves renown; / But what is a companion to a Crown?’ (1.19.61–62) Blage however offers false counsel, and the audience can have been left in no doubt by subsequent events that Jane’s correct choice would have been ‘household government’, not life as a courtesan. The parallels between Lucretia’s story and Jane’s diminish once she has been, in Helgerson’s phrase, ‘seduced into history’,24 and her own death, as audiences may have noted, is a form of secular martyrdom rather than Lucretia’s un-Christian suicide. Matthew’s

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speech about the pageant, quoted at the start of this chapter, reflects on the moment that Mistress Blage, Jane’s false friend, betrays her to Richard’s henchman. The play shows us that domestic hospitality, intertwined with the civic honour displayed in the defence of London by its citizens, is ethically superior to the behaviour of masculine nobility, characterised in the play by the aggressive militarism of Falconbridge, the exploitative desire of Edward and the murderous ambition of Richard. The history element of the play shows that the noble characters ‘have moved tumults, commotions, and insurrections’, and that is they, and not the bourgeois Shores, with whom many of the audience may have identified themselves, who need to learn the ‘obedience’ promised by Heywood’s Apologie. The appropriation of the Lucretia legend begins to translate Jane and Matthew Shore’s story from a history into mythology; from an instrument to teach obedience to subjects, towards a foundational myth of London’s identity that demonstrates the possibility of civic resistance to royal power.25 Heywood’s appropriation of the elite genre of tragedy points to the changing social structures of early modern London, and its promotion of oeconomia over courtly values offers an inversion of ­traditional hierarchies based on rank and birth in which the king was figured as ‘husband’ of the state.26

Exchanging Words: Metaphors and Puns While Heywood’s deft use of literary allusion shapes his narrative, I return now to the mercantilist Gerald Malynes, mentioned briefly in the introduction to this chapter, in order to illustrate how figurative language, in some hands at least, turns out to be insufficient to describe precisely economic development in England. Malynes, like Heywood, was writing from within a culture that was immersed in allegory, and which was adept at using creative metaphor and other figurative language to allow for meaning to be suggestive, unfixed and fluid, but which also understood that such language could be clumsy and imprecise, or deliberately obfuscatory, a ‘dark conceit’ the meaning of which is unclear. In 1600 Malynes was appointed to a government committee considering exchange rates and around the same time prepared his own, unfortunately flat-footed, allegory Saint George for England (1601), which is almost contemporary with Edward IV.27 Saint George is a conservative and idealistic account of a predatory dragon that is destroying

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a commonwealth (England) of ‘equality’ and ‘concord’ in which every man lives ‘contentedly and proportionably in their vocation’ (sig. A6v).28 Apparently finding the English language inadequate and allegory unwieldy, Malynes laboriously spells out his conceit in Latinate terms in his prefatory address: ‘This dragon is called Foenus politicum [“politic exchange”],29 his two wings are Vsura palliata and Vsura explicata [“veiled” and “open” usury], and his taile inconstant Cambium [“Exchange”]’ (sig. A8r). The allegory collapses as, instead of ­showing the reader his argument through action and character, Malynes falls back on listing over one hundred examples of ‘insinuating dealings’ and ‘cruell proceedings’ (sig. C1r) of the dragon, the main features of which are usury, bondage and ‘falsifying the valuation of mony’ (sig. A7r). As Judith H. Anderson notes of Malyne’s later work, Lex Mercatoria, ‘nearly all the similitudes are explicit comparisons whose function appears to be largely illustrative rather than deliberately expansive or creative’.30 Malynes seems to be uncomfortable with what Spenser described as the ‘dark conceit’ of allegory and the possibility of ‘jealous opinions and misconstructions’ by which ‘all allegories may be construed’.31 He is ­ perhaps among those, who as Spenser comments, ‘had rather have good discipline delivered plainly by way of precepts […] than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devices’.32 Malynes struggles with his allegory partly because the many and varied aspects of financial misbehaviour that he describes are non-sequential and thus not conducive to a single narrative progression, resulting in his resort to the plainly delivered list. Bradley Ryner argues that Saint George is more successful if we think of the image of the dragon less as an allegory than a sort of Venn diagram, a model for conceptualising the interaction of different aspects of the economy rather than a sequential narrative; thought of in this way, allegory could be, Ryner suggests, an appropriate mode for attempting to construct an abstract model of the economy.33 Malynes shows us how difficult it can be to make abstract economic concepts ­ apprehensible through the elusiveness of allegory and metaphor. Edward IV, a play which, as Janette Dillon put it, is ‘fascinated by the idea of exchange’,34 uses language to shape hierarchy while also showing unease that the ­slipperiness of metaphor reveals how contingent and unstable hierarchy may be, whether comically in the case of Hobs, or transgressively in the case of Jane and Edward, as a tanner, a goldsmith and his wife respond to the somewhat surprising appearance of a king in their midst.

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While the citizens of London are defending their city from the rebellious Falconbridge, Edward is taking a rural honeymoon jaunt in the Midlands, where he encounters Hobs the Tanner, with whom he enjoys the ‘merry pastime’ of the play’s title. The scenes between Edward and Hobs were evidently much enjoyed by the play’s first audiences since they receive top billing in the printed play’s title, even above the t­ragedy of Mistress Shore. Drawing on the popular ‘disguised king’ trope of ballads and plays, in which the king encounters a commoner who can provide insight otherwise inaccessible to him,35 Edward IV uses the playful dialogue between Hobs and the king (disguised as the courtier ‘Ned’) to explore current economic matters and their political implications. Although, as discussed above, Hobs sometimes chooses to be plain speaking, he is a skilful user of language who deploys economic paronomasia as his default approach to dialogue, using it to elide status distinctions with higher status characters. In his encounters with ‘Ned’, Hobs denies status hierarchy by introducing homonyms and puns which reference the exchangeability of the market: Ned’s ‘courser’ is paired with ‘scorse’ (i.e. to barter or exchange) (1.13.1–5); ‘boot’ means both the footwear and financial bounty (1.13.1–7). Mutual trading of word play establishes parity between them: ‘I begin to like thee well’ (1.13.13) says Hobs. As ‘Ned’ tries to find out what ‘the people’ think about the power struggles between the houses of York and Lancaster, asking ‘tell me, what say they of the King?’ (1.13.15) Hobs refuses to be drawn into favouring either Henry or Edward, claiming instead a disinterest in royal power games: ‘for I am just akin to Sutton windmill: I can grind which way so e’er the wind blow. If it be Harry, I can say “well fare Lancaster”; if it be Edward, I can sing “York, York, for my money”’ (1.13.45–48). Hearing of Henry VI’s death he comments, ‘For, as one comes, another’s ta’en away— / And seldom comes the better, that’s all we say’ (1.14.85–86); kings, so far as Hobs is concerned, are fungible. Hobs trades in what Sandra Fischer has called ‘econolingua’ a ‘new language’ in which play with words with multiple meanings, including the economic, becomes ‘an infinitely variable exchange medium with which it speakers can reap profits (through wit and bon mots) and with which they can commit semantic usury (through puns)’.36 Like the Sutton windmill, Hobs can grind, not only his allegiance but his meaning, according to the direction of the wind. Bradley Ryner, in this volume, discusses how the staged effacement of physical differences between bodies in Brome’s plays of the 1620s

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effectively commodifies people and enables them to be interchangeable. In Hobs’ social economy too, women—like kings—are interchangeable, as he refuses the distinctions of status which are signified by dress and appearance. Hobs exploits in full what Sophie Read describes as the ‘unstable economies of concealment and revelation’ created by punning, to collapse hierarchies by implying the equivalence of radically different entities.37 Encountering the Duchess and the Queen while they hunt, Hobs pretends to misunderstand them, using playful, if conventional, homophones: ‘hart’ for ‘heart’, ‘deer’ for ‘dear’ (1.11.22–28) in a game of elocutionary confusion which introduces commodity exchange into what should be a deferential relationship: ‘Do you demand what’s dear?’ (1.11.25). This ‘easy intrinsic ambiguity’ of these homophones, which allows Hobs’ ‘heart’ to be substituted for the ‘hart’ that the ladies are chasing, suggests that such distinctions are fortuitous and fundamentally comic.38 Hobs’ levity effaces the difference between women of different social status, as he makes suggestive comments to the ladies with whom he would like to ‘smutch’ and ‘job faces’ (kiss). He remarks repeatedly on the resemblance between his daughter and the Queen: ‘a good smug lass, well like my daughter Nell’ (1.11.26–27); ‘These be but women, and one of them is like my wench’ (1.11.37–38); ‘I saw a woman here that they said was the Queen; she’s as like my daughter—but my daughter is the fairer—as ever I see’ (1.11.70–72). Referring to the fashionable practice of wearing protective ‘vizards’, he grumbles, ‘see if all gentlewomen be not alike when their black faces be on’ (1.11.48–49); again, as far as Hobs is concerned, high-status women are exchangeable commodities.39 Later on, when he confuses the Lord Mayor for the king, he says that he knows the king by his red robes, because that is how the king is dressed when the players perform an ‘an enterlout or commodity’ at Tamworth (1.23.47).40 Reminding us that professional playing was a commercial affair, and that plays were tradable commodities, Hobs’s verbal playfulness, in which word meanings, women and kings are all comically interchangeable, reflects his understanding of the world as a forum for exchange, but one in which he has some (albeit limited) agency.

Guilt and Gilded Tongues Thomas Wilson, drawing on Cicero, says about metaphor, or ‘woordes translated from one significacion to another’, that they should be ‘used to beautify the sentence as precious stones are set in a ring to commend

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the gold’.41 Even though Heywood creates his citizen hero in part by resisting the stereotypical association between gold-smithing and usury, the imagery of the play is resonant with the metaphor ical possibilities of possession, display, gold and precious stones that a goldsmith’s shop offers.42 The objectifying comparison of Jane to a jewel, a commodity to be passed between men, pervades the play, and even Matthew, who usually avoids figurative speech, slips into this metaphor when he refers to Jane as his ‘treasure’ and berates himself for displaying her too openly to tempt ‘every gazer’s eye’ (1.18.149–51). Jane and figurative speech itself are translated in the metaphor of a jewelled ring, so that both the woman and the words become transferable objects of speech, whose value lies in their beauty. Thus, while plain speaking generally characterises the play’s ‘middling sorts’, Jane’s eloquent speech to Edward when he arrives at the Mayor’s banquet is the earliest indication that her values are shifting towards the court, and it sets in motion the attraction that will end in tragedy: You spake the word well—verie well, i’ faith— But Mistress Shore, her tongue hath gilded it. (1.16.111–12)

In the 1600 edition of the play, ‘gild’ and ‘guilt’ are spelled as ‘guilt’ and ‘guild’, indicating that they were near-homophones.43 This is Edward’s first meeting with Jane and the notion of gilding and guilt permeate the play from here on; Mistress Blage later argues that the king’s ‘greatness may gild over ugly sin’ (1.20.49), while Matthew notes Jane’s attempts to redeem herself by interceding with the king on behalf of petitioners: ‘Yet all this good doth but gild o’er thy ill’ (1.22.38). When Edward arrives in disguise outside the Shores’ shop, seductive mood and figurative mode combine as, watching her from the street, he compares Jane to a phoenix and a diamond. Word play, exchangeability, trading and ‘cheaping’ come together in this pivotal scene, as Edward begins his seduction of Jane, and Heywood’s depiction of Jane as a model citizen wife begins to come under pressure. Edward engages Jane in stichomythic banter in which the words ‘thing’ and ‘it’ are used to refer to both the sapphire ring Jane is trying to sell, and her hand on which it is displayed, in an exchange that plays with ideas of ‘value’, ‘worth’, ‘purchase’ and ‘gift’ as these words are repeated and used in antithesis.

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Edward. ’Tis set, indeed, upon the fairest hand       That e’er I saw. Jane.      You are disposed to jest.    But, for the value, his majesty might wear it. Edward. Might he, i’ faith? Jane.      Sir, ’tis the ring I mean. Edward. I meant the hand. Jane.      You are a merry man.    I see you come to cheap, and not to buy. (1.17.48–53)

And so on, for a further twenty-five or so lines. The repeated references to an undefined ‘it’ and ‘thing’ admit a knowing and bawdy ambiguity into their discussion, which slides from the ring, to Jane’s hand, to a ‘thing’ and ‘it’ which might be Jane’s body, her love or her honour. In his discussion of the use of hypallage (another form of verbal change and exchange) in The Changeling, Bradly Ryner notes that it seems to be used by Webster where the ‘ascribed value of an object seems to triumph over material reality’.44 Here, by contrast, in Heywood’s knowing, suggestive, sliding kind of exchange of the ring for the metonymic hand, what value to attribute to a ring, a hand, a woman’s love, or a man’s desire is also at issue, but the change from material to immaterial is never quite made explicit. After a series of exchanges, this slippery object of bargaining has escalated to ‘a kingdom of content’ that might be valued by a king as highly as his crown—at which point Edward reveals himself to be such a king. In the bargaining process, signifiers and signified are exchanged, as the demands of courtesy and commerce are equated and Jane and Edward negotiate about the value of ‘the thing which once was giv’n away for love’ (1.17.59), and what it is worth. Jane’s participation in this witty dialogue signals the start of her translation from exemplary citizen’s wife to morally transgressive courtesan; her subsequent lie to her husband that she has not recognised the king is a sign of her defection from city to court (1.17.120). As with Hobs’ use of puns, Jane’s use of ‘econolingua’ breaks down status-based hierarchies by exchanging deference for a relationship established through financially based wit; the banter which exchanges object for object erodes the distinction between subject and monarch. Where Malynes tries to pin down the meaning of his conservative allegory by hemming it around with lists of examples, the troubling capacity of metaphor to blur,

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obfuscate and extend the signified (Spenser’s ‘cloudy wrapping’) is used in Edward IV both to signal the possibility of a change in Jane’s status, from wife to courtesan, and to effect that change. Eventually, however, we are shown that all of this word play is merely a courtly game as Edward asserts his royal prerogative to coerce her into leaving her home and husband to become his mistress: But leaving this, our enigmatic talk: Thou must, sweet Jane, repair unto the court. His tongue entreats, controls the greatest peer (1.19.102–4)

In the end, the power of words to entreat is superseded by Edward’s power as king to control the bodies of his subjects‚ however great they may be. Like Edward, Matthew finds ‘enigmatic talk’ less effective than plain speech in his confrontation with Jane towards the end of Part 1. In soliloquy he uses the word ‘concubine’ twice (1.22.23, 26) to describe Jane, but he does not use this word with her directly, instead working around it, ‘now thou art nor widow, maid, nor wife’ (1.22.85); unspoken in this list of female identities is the one he cannot voice.45 In his formulation she falls outside the category of women with identifiable household value, becoming instead a tradable commodity. Jane responds with a metaphor echoing the earlier action of the play, that figures herself as a fort which endured ‘the long’st and greatest siege / That ever battered on poor chastity’ (1.22.89–90). For Jane, the indirectness of metaphor is a way to try to edge round her emotional difficulty while Matthew refuses the possibility for excess that metaphor allows in preference for the unspoken gap. In an exchange where Jane offers money, ‘a million’, to compensate Matthew, he resists his wife’s commodification of herself and makes the distinction between worldly wealth and spiritual worth and the impossibility of measuring one in terms of another: ‘I have lost what wealth cannot return. / All worldly losses are but toys to mine’ (1.22.123–24). Fischer remarks that characters engaging in conversations that deploy economic wit ‘tacitly acknowledge acceptance of a new mode of value’46; in his plain speaking, Matthew refuses the evasive slide between wealth, value, concubinage and wifely chastity that is effected by Edward and Jane’s mercantile banter. By the end of Part 1 Matthew’s stubborn insistence on plain language has demonstrated that love is not

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purchasable, and neither is a wife a commodity which can simply be exchanged for money. Jane is to go on to learn in Part 2 that the gilt that a king’s greatness, and his wealth, may offer is only a thin cover over guilt, shame and sexual impropriety.

Conclusions In his treatise on English poetics, George Puttenham wrote of the ‘great and uglie Gyants’ that march through the streets as part of the city’s pageants ‘but within they are stuffed full of browne paper and tow, which the shrewd boyes underpeering, do guilefully discover and turne to great derision’.47 Apparently the things that shrewd boys learned from pageants might not always conform to the organisers’ intent and performance might instruct them in derision, rather than the obedience promised by Heywood. The wisdom that Matthew Shore hoped an ­ apprentice might learn, could arrive obliquely, through the misdirection of puns and the imprecision of metaphor, the ‘underpeering’ that teaches that things are not always as they seem; marching giants may turn out to be laughable frauds. As Malynes’ Saint George demonstrates, literature of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century struggled to find the ­ ­appropriate register and vocabulary in which to express concerns about economic matters and especially anxiety about the assumed equivalence between moral worth and financial value that Alexandra Shepard finds to have been prevalent in early modern English society.48 It would not be long before dramatists including Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton would develop the satirical city comedy as a mode in which the gap between moral platitudes and worldly desires, negotiated by money, could be exposed. In the meantime, the ‘show’ that Matthew comments on at the start of this chapter is a cautionary tale of the inconsistency of ‘flattery’, ‘dissembling love’ and ‘base catching avarice’, a didactic performance that the play also offers to its audience. But alongside the overt cautionary tale of the promotion and fall of Jane Shore, the play utilises literary language and allusion to subvert hierarchies and offer lessons that promote London, not the court, as a source of rectitude and moral probity.

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Notes







1. I accept here Richard Rowland’s argument that Heywood is the most likely author of the play, although Martin Wiggins and Catherine Richardson say that this attribution is ‘tentative’, see British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue: Volume 4: 1598–1602 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). There is critical consensus that the play was first performed shortly before it appeared in print in 1599. Quotations from Edward IV are from Thomas Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 2. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. xxxiv–xxxv. 3. Hesitantly because, as I will explore below, it is neither a straightforward re-telling of historical events nor does it teach unquestioning ‘obedience to the king’. 4. Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 5. Bradley D. Ryner, ‘Not by Record but by Discourse: The Emergence of “Economics” as a Genre’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: Sources and Documents of the English Renaissance, ed. A.F. Kinney (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), pp. 411–19; Thomas Leng, ‘Epistemology and Knowledge in the World of Commerce’, in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 97–116; and David Hawkes, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 6. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and the many subsequent works of ‘new economic ­criticism’. Ceri Sullivan is especially helpful on the economic context from which Edward IV emerged, see The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Vancouver: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). Rowland’s Introduction to Edward IV also discusses contemporary economic references in detail. 7.  Mowbray F. Velte, The Bourgeois Elements in the Dramas of Thomas Heywood (London: Haskell, 1922), p. 31; A.M. Clark, Thomas Heywood, Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931), pp. 216–17.

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8.  Wendy Wall, ‘Forgetting and Keeping: Jane Shore and the English Domestication of History’, Renaissance Drama New Series, 27 (1996): 123–56; Richard Helgerson, ‘Weeping for Jane Shore’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 98:3 (1999): 451–76; Richard Rowland, ‘“Speaking Some Words, but of No Importance”? Stage Directions, Thomas Heywood, and Edward IV’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 18 (2005): 104– 22; and Richard Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 9. Helgerson, ‘Weeping for Jane Shore’, p. 452. 10. Rowland, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639; Heywood, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Rowland. 11. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London: Richard Grafton, 1553), sigs y2r, a1v–a2r. 12. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589), sig. S2v. 13. Sidney Philip, The Defence of Poesie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. I4r. 14. In the last scenes in Part 1 the King gathers ‘benevolences’ from his loyal subjects to fund the war in France which are carefully framed as neither tax, loan nor tribute but as a gift from loyal subjects (1.18.33–35). 15. The problems resulting from an imbalance of foreign trade are Malyne’s chief concern: ‘This Dragon by the means of his tail causeth others to transport whole woods, with trees, houses and lands into foreign country’. 16. David Hawkes, ‘Thomas Gresham’s Law, Jane Shore’s Mercy: Value and Class in the Plays of Thomas Heywood’, ELH, 77:1 (2010): 25–44. 17.  Edmund Spenser, ‘Allegory and the Chivalric Epic’, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 297–301 (p. 299). 18. Jean Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 21. 19. Helgerson, ‘Weeping for Jane Shore’, p. 467. 20. Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 21. The play’s characterisation of the Shores’ marriage as initially loving and Jane as an exemplary wife is unique. In other versions of the story she is reluctantly married to her elderly husband and only too happy to embark on an amorous adventure with the king. 22. Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit, p. 11. 23. In Heywood’s version of The Rape of Lucrece, the women are sewing, not weaving, when Collatinus and Sextus surprise them at their work. See also Wall, ‘Forgetting and Keeping’, p. 142.

154  R. TOMLIN 24. Helgerson, ‘Weeping for Jane Shore’, p. 455. 25.  Rowland notes for example that the urban myth that Shoreditch was named after the Shores exasperated Stow. See The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Rowland, p. 57. 26. Hannah Crawforth and Sarah Lewis observe that ‘The idea that political hierarchies and identities might usefully be evoked within discourses of the family is almost ubiquitous in the period’, see Family Politics in Early Modern Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 1. 27. Gerard Malynes, Saint George for England, Allegorically Described (London: William Tymme, 1601). All references to this work are from this edition. 28. See Judith Anderson, ‘Mixed Metaphor and the Cultural Watershed of Gerrard de Malynes’, Prose Studies, 25:3 (2002): 30–40; Judith Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 29. Foenus Politicum has been translated as ‘political usury’, ‘hardship of the polity’ and ‘politic exchange’. See Bradley D. Ryner, Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 30; Bradley D. Ryner, ‘The Panoramic View in Mercantile Thought, or, A Merchant’s Map of Cymbeline’, in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, ed. Barbara Sebeck and Stephen Deng (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 77–94 (p. 84); and Anderson, Translating Investments, p. 210. However, ‘foenus’ can mean variously interest (on money primarily), debt, gains, profit, or advantage; thus the economic resonances which are present in the Latin are partly lost in translation. I am grateful to Rachel E. Holmes for this point. 30. Anderson, Translating Investments, p. 172. 31. Spenser, ‘Allegory and the Chivalric Epic’, p. 297. 32. Ibid., p. 299. 33. Ryner, Performing Economic Thought, pp. 30–32. 34. Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London Theatre, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 57. 35. Kevin Quarmby, The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Rochelle Smith, ­‘King-Commoner Encounters in the Popular Ballad, Elizabethan Drama, and Shakespeare’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 50:2 (2010): 301–36; and Nora L. Corrigan, ‘The Merry Tanner, the Mayor’s Feast, and the King’s Mistress: Thomas Heywood’s 1 Edward IV and the Ballad Tradition’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 22 (2009): 27–41.

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36.  Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 16. 37.  Sophie Read, ‘Puns: Serious Wordplay’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 81–96 (p. 92). 38. Read, ‘Puns: Serious Wordplay’, p. 86. 39. The vizard mask as sign of female inter-changeability appears again when Jane enters ‘ladylike attired’ and ‘unpinning her mask’ after becoming the king’s mistress (1.22.s.d.). 40.  See David Hawkes, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 99–105 for a full discussion of the early modern valences of ‘commodity’ as ‘a word settling into its modern meaning’ in the late sixteenth century. 41. Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, sig. Y4r. 42. Matthew’s characterisation as a goldsmith is a literary invention, initiated by Drayton and taken up by Heywood. The historical Shore was called William and was a Mercer. See The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Rowland, p. 82. 43. Fischer (Econolingua, p. 29) gives guilt/gild as an example of economically inflected punning. Garrett Sullivan offers ‘guild’, in the sense of a livery company, as another homophone. See The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). On puns of guild/guilt in Shakespeare’s works see Read, ‘Puns: Serious Wordplay’, p. 91. 44. Ryner, Performing Economic Thought, p. 94. 45. In response to a similar formation used to describe Mariana in Measure for Measure, the Duke concludes that she must therefore be ‘nothing’ while Lucio assumes that she is a prostitute (V.i). 46. Fischer, Econolingua, p. 12. 47. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, sig. S2v. 48. Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), passim.

Bibliography Agnew, Jean-Christophe, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University ­ Press, 1986). Anderson, Judith, ‘Mixed Metaphor and the Cultural Watershed of Gerrard de Malynes’, Prose Studies, 25:3 (2002): 30–40.

156  R. TOMLIN ———, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Clark, A.M., Thomas Heywood, Playwright and Miscellanist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931). Corrigan, Nora L., ‘The Merry Tanner, the Mayor’s Feast, and the King’s Mistress: Thomas Heywood’s 1 Edward IV and the Ballad Tradition’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 22 (2009): 27–41. Crawforth, Hannah, and Sarah Lewis, Family Politics in Early Modern Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Dillon, Janette, Theatre, Court and City, 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London Theatre, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Donaldson, Ian, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Fischer, Sandra K., Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985). Hawkes, David, ‘Thomas Gresham’s Law, Jane Shore’s Mercy: Value and Class in the Plays of Thomas Heywood’, ELH, 77:1 (2010): 25–44. ———, Shakespeare and Economic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Helgerson, Richard, ‘Weeping for Jane Shore’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 98:3 (1999): 451–76. Heywood, Thomas, The Rape of Lucrece (London: John Busby, 1608). ———, An Apology for Actors (London: Nicholas Okes, 1612). ———, The First and Second Parts of King Edward IV, ed. Richard Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Hill, Tracey, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1585–1639 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Howard, Jean, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Leng, Thomas, ‘Epistemology and Knowledge in the World of Commerce’, in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 97–116. Malynes, Gerard, Saint George for England, Allegorically Described (London: William Tymme, 1601). Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589). Quarmby, Kevin, The Disguised Ruler in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). Read, Sophie, ‘Puns: Serious Wordplay’, in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 81–96.

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Rowland, Richard, ‘“Speaking Some Words, but of No Importance”? Stage Directions, Thomas Heywood, and Edward IV’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 18 (2005): 104–220. ———, Thomas Heywood’s Theatre, 1599–1639 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Ryner, Bradley D., ‘The Panoramic View in Mercantile Thought, or, A Merchant’s Map of Cymbeline’, in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, ed. Barbara Sebeck and Stephen Deng (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 77–94. ———, ‘Not by Record but by Discourse: The Emergence of “Economics” as a Genre’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: Sources and Documents of the English Renaissance, ed. A.F. Kinney (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), pp. 411–19. Ryner, Bradley D., Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Shepard, Alexandra, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Sidney, Philip, The Defence of Poesie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595). Smith, Rochelle, ‘King-Commoner Encounters in the Popular Ballad, Elizabethan Drama, and Shakespeare’, Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900, 50:2 (2010): 301–36. Spenser, Edmund, ‘Allegory and the Chivalric Epic’, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 297–301. Sullivan, Ceri, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Vancouver: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002). Sullivan, Garrett, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Velte, Mowbray F., The Bourgeois Elements in the Dramas of Thomas Heywood (London: Haskell, 1922). Wall, Wendy, ‘Forgetting and Keeping: Jane Shore and the English Domestication of History’, Renaissance Drama New Series, 27 (1996): 123–56. Wiggins, Martin, with Catherine Richardson, British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue: Volume 4: 1598–1602 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorique (London: Richard Grafton, 1553).

“To Look on Your Incestuous Eyes”: Knowledge, Matter, and Desire in Richard Brome’s The Queen’s Exchange and The New Academy, or the New Exchange Bradley D. Ryner

At first blush, Richard Brome’s plays The Queen’s Exchange and The New Academy, or the New Exchange seem to have very little in common. The Queen’s Exchange, which was likely performed either by the King’s Men or the Prince’s Men circa 1634–1635, is a tragicomedy set in Britain’s mythic past and dealing primarily with conflicts arising from a proposed marriage between the West Saxon queen, Bertha, and the Northumbrian king, Osric. The New Academy, likely performed by the King’s Revels in 1636, is a city comedy in the Jonsonian tradition that traces multiple humorous characters across a seventeenth-century London obsessed with money and style. However, the titles of these two plays not only signal their shared interest in the concept of “exchange” but also connect this interest to the commercial geography of Brome’s London. Although the physical building does not appear in the play, the title The Queen’s B. D. Ryner (*)  Department of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_8

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Exchange would certainly have brought to mind the commercial burse built by Thomas Gresham, which was known interchangeably as the Royal Exchange and the Queen’s Exchange after Queen Elizabeth designated it as such in 1571.1 The subtitle of The New Academy refers to the site of luxury shopping that opened on the Strand in 1609, and which, to distinguish it from the Royal Exchange, was termed the New Exchange.2 The two buildings served different commercial functions, but each was significant as a highly visible nodal point in the international movement of money and goods. Merchants met in the Royal Exchange to transact business necessary to England’s commercial expansion while shoppers flocked to the New Exchange to buy the consumer goods made available by this expansion—or, at least, to admire those who had the money to do so. In what follows, I argue that Brome’s plays engage with questions of knowledge and valuation linked to these buildings. The Queen’s Exchange and the New Exchange connected Londoners to vast networks of commercial transactions that were ultimately unknowable in their systemic totality. The transacting of exchanges in these sites required uncertain assessments of value, judging not only what a good, or a coin, or a contract was worth, but also how its value might change in the future. Brome’s plays raise questions about whether value adheres in the materiality of a thing or in its desirability, and whether either can be satisfactorily known. To some degree, the happy endings of both plays hold out the promise that commodity exchange can fulfill one’s desires irrespective of material limitations. However, this optimistic view is troubled by another shared feature of the two plays: both their endings are shadowed by the possibility of accidental incest, suggesting that what appears to be the fulfillment of desire through exchange might instead be an illusion that could be dispelled by greater knowledge. I conclude this essay by briefly suggesting affinities between the ambivalent relationship these plays take up with the commodity form and later, post-Marxist ambivalence about the commodity form. Specifically, Brome’s plays’ exacerbation of a tension between the promise of the commodity form to realize desire and its threat to undermine this desire by emptying it of specific content resonates suggestively with a similarly vexed tension in the works of Giorgio Agamben. Comparing Brome’s staging of the commodity form to its presentation by subsequent thinkers reveals how the formal properties of the commodity

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form—conceptually available in any monetary transaction—receive different inflections in different historical circumstances. I argue that Agamben and Brome are both interested in the ways that the commodity form arouses desire, although they consider this desire from two different historical vantage points. They look at the rise of a pervasive logic of commodification from its early and late stages, respectively, with different mixtures of optimism and dread.

Bills of Exchange and Questions of Value The uneasy convergence of commercial exchange and incest in Brome’s exchange plays is exemplified by the plot revelations that hinge on a bill of exchange in The New Academy. Bills of exchange were routinely used in the period to transact business internationally without transporting physical coinage.3 They were sold in one geographic location and specified payment in a different location and in a different national currency, with transaction costs built into the exchange rate or negotiated as part of the price of the bill. Although transactions depending on bills of exchange were ubiquitous, they were reviled by some early economic thinkers, such as Thomas Milles and Gerard Malynes.4 Milles and Malynes argued that bills of exchange usurped royal authority because they allowed individuals to determine the prices of the money being bought and sold, regardless of official exchange rates. Thus, they might facilitate usurious lending by masking excessive interest in the negotiated exchange rate. Moreover, Malynes argued that merchants dealing in bills of exchange might unknowingly be duped into trading English coins with a high content of precious metals for foreign coins with a lower one, or into failing to recognize that the true price of foreign goods was obscured by inequitable exchange rates, and thereby suffering a “secrete losse.”5 The bill of exchange in The New Academy resonates with these concerns about occluded value. The audience only learns about the existence of the bill in question at the end of the play, at which point they are suddenly able to reevaluate several key relationships in what they have witnessed. In the final act, we learn that Captain Hardyman, a member of the gentry living on the Isle of Wight, had a “bill of change” worth £100 payable in London by the merchant Matchil (5.1.1060).6 He originally sent the bill to his daughter, Hannah, instructing her to receive the money for him, but sent a subsequent letter instructing her that, if she encounters her “spendthrift”

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half-brother Valentine and he is in need of money, she may use the £100 to “furnish him according to [her] own discretion” (5.2.1163). The revelation that Hannah and Valentine are half-siblings with the same mother finally makes sense of her treatment of him throughout the play. Early in the play, Hannah, the wife of a shopkeeper in the New Exchange, upbraided her husband, Camelion, for attracting male customers to the shop by leaving her in the shop on display like “a thing / Set out […] for common sale,” while his elaborate protestations of not being jealous have given him “the reputation of a wittol” and left her subject to “all assaults and hazards” (2.1.222, 218). Having recognized her halfbrother Valentine (who did not recognize her because she had left home as a young girl), she allowed him to attempt to seduce her, creating an appearance of infidelity gauged to make her husband jealous. Under this guise, she allowed the money she gave him to appear as a sign of her affection, giving Valentine hope that he would soon “lie with her” because he was able to “lay with, drink, and wear her money” (2.1.247, 248). While audience members are likely to suspect that Hannah, who faults her husband for not being jealous, is not really seeking an affair, the audience is not privy to her plan or to her true kinship with Valentine until the very end of the play. By the fifth act, Valentine has become convinced that Hannah’s refusal to have sex with him and reluctance to give him more money is a sign that she “ha[s] got / Some new-found horn-maker, that [she] may think / Deserves [her] husband’s money better” (5.2.1117). He then tries to blackmail Hannah and her n ­ ow-jealous husband with the threat of ruining her reputation by making public their relationship (which the audience, like Camelion, cannot prove to have been non-sexual). Only at this point does Hannah reveal that they are half-siblings and produce the letter from Hardyman instructing her to supply Valentine with the money from the bill of exchange. Like real-life bills of exchange, the fictional bill imbricates the characters in a network of relationships that they do not have full knowledge of. The economic thinkers who opposed the use of bills of exchange did so because they made the value of money uncertain by treating it as a commodity whose price changed from place to place and fluctuated with the needs of the buyer and seller. Malynes argued that money should be the measure of commodities, not a commodity in itself. He therefore promoted stabilizing international exchange by only allowing coins from one country to be exchanged for coins that would “countervalue the same in the like weight and finenesse,” thereby resulting in

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an equal amount of precious metals being exchanged.7 In transacting bills of exchange, the price of money was “agreed upon between partie & partie, which is termed the price of exchange, werof the merchants have the only and whole disposing.”8 Malynes believed that English merchants did not “know perfectly the weight, finenesse & value of our English coine” and failed to “compare the same with other foriegn forrain coin” when they negotiate bills of exchange.9 He feared that lacking this knowledge, their apparent profits would prove illusory and warned that merchants may “imagine the price” to be one thing but its true cost would only really be known if one were able to calculate how much precious metal they were selling compared to how much they were receiving. The New Academy focuses attention on the imagined value and true material being not of the coins but of the characters. Like Malynes’s naive merchants, Valentine misunderstands the economy in which he participates, mistakenly valuing his sister as a sexual conquest and source of revenue. Hannah, just as Malynes proposed could be done in currency exchange, corrects this misvaluation with reference to material being, in this case their consanguinity: “I am that sister, brother, but no whore” (5.2.1167). This is, to be sure, a different sort of revelation from that which Malynes had in mind when he encouraged merchants to look carefully to the material reality underpinning bills of exchange; however, the capacity of a bill of exchange to obscure the very transactions it facilitated made it an apt plot device for the unraveling of Hannah’s and Valentine’s true relationship. Moreover, the plays’ deployment of the bill of exchange to trace questions about the ontology and value of people, rather than goods or money, is facilitated by the commodification of money enacted by such bills. As Marx has shown, the defining feature of the commodity form is that it obscurely figures human relations in objective form. As Marx famously put it, “The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists […] simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.”10 Ontologically, commodities exist not only as “sensuous things” but simultaneous as the “suprasensible or social.”11 What Marx terms “commodity fetishism” is the failure to recognize that the value of a thing is not an inherent property of it but the effect of its place in a larger structuring system of value. Commodity fetishism reaches its apex in the money form, “which conceals the social character of private labour and

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the social relations between individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly.”12 In other words, the money form fosters a blindness to the human social activity reified in the commodity. Thus, in the slightly tongue-in-cheek parable that Marx tells of a pious weaver, this blindness can make the fluid transformation of 20 yards of linen into £2 and then into a Bible appear as though it came about due to the objective properties of the linen, the money, and the book, outside of their place in the social world.13 The illusion of exchange value as the property of things themselves appears in its most negative light, for Marx, when the illusion that profit-making is a natural property of the commodity masks the social roots of capitalist profit, allowing the capitalist investor to buy a commodity that he intends to sell for a greater amount of money without acknowledging that this profit is structured by a larger system of labor and exchange.14 Bills of exchange invited the blindness to the production of value that Marx designated “commodity fetishism” by virtue of their abstraction from the material coinage that was itself simultaneously a commodity (in so far as coins consisted of gold or silver with a certain market value) and a representation of other commodities (in so far as, as money, a coin’s exchange value was independent of its metal content and linked, instead, to the arrogate demand for a nation’s commodities). Milles’s and Malynes’s condemnation of the notion of value not anchored by reference to physical currency as a uniform measure of material value to some degree prefigures Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism.15 Seventeenth-century English attitudes about such exchanges, though, were far from all negative. Milles’s and Malynes’s ideological opponents, Thomas Mun and Edward Misselden, embraced the potential for the expenditure of money to generate more value. Thomas Mun calculated that by spending £100,000 the English East India Company could purchase wares that they could then resell for £500,000.16 In this way, he proclaimed, “money begets trade and trade increases money.”17 As Valerie Forman has argued, Mun and Misselden are uncritical prefigurations of Marx, celebrating “the transformability of money into wares and vice-versa” in an infinite cycle in which capital is created as “a constantly renewing (and, according to Mun, orderly), self-valorizing, self-moving substance.”18 It is easy to see the appeal of a fantasy of ­self-generating profit without material limit. The remaining sections of this essay will examine the elements of Brome’s two plays that activate this fantasy

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without fully foreclosing it, as the Hannah and Valentine plot does, through the reestablishment of a material check on desire.

“Outward Seeming as Your Royal Person” The Hannah and Valentine plot of The New Academy stages a literal bill of exchange. However, as I have suggested above, its intellectual engagement with exchange takes place primarily in a figurative register, applying a commodity logic to the half-siblings’ bodies. This same mode of engagement operates in the treatment of Bertha’s and Mildred’s marriages in The Queen’s Exchange and those of the Matchil’s and LaFoy’s children in The New Academy. Both plays style their marriageable characters as internationally traded commodities. In the Hannah and Valentine plot line, no characters dwell on the fact that their consanguinity is by no means an absolute guarantee against a sexual relationship—even though Valentine’s desire for Hannah, which is presented as equally financial and physical, certainly allows for this possibility. Moments before he learns she is his sister, he fantasizes in an aside about impregnating her while her husband “keeps our chamber door for us,” proclaiming that “She tempts me strongly now” and wishing “she would call me / About it presently” (5.2.1147). However, the play gives the audience no reason to conclude that Hannah is sexually attracted to Valentine, despite his initial misreading of her careful scrutiny as sexual desire, when upon their first meeting, “her eye was fixed / And straight ran over [his] delineaments” (2.1.250). And, confronted with the truth of their parentage, Valentine immediately turns his attention to the rich widow Lady Nestlecock. In contrast, the other plot-lines I will examine do not fully disallow the possibility of incest. Instead, they present the characters’ happiness as the result of exchanges that seem to allow their desires to transcend any material limitation, while the fear that such transcendence might be illusory persists in the figure of the disconcerting possibility of accidental incest. The Queen’s Exchange begins with a dispute over Queen Bertha’s desire and will. Segebert argues that she would do better to marry one of her subjects (as her deceased father suggested she might) rather than marry a foreign king who might vitiate the Saxon’s “wholesome laws, / Customs, and all the nerves of government” (1.1.4). Bertha declares that Segebert is politically powerless to “oppose [his] sovereign’s will” (1.1.5). Her other councilors insist on the manifest benefits of her marrying “him

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she affects,” arguing that her deceased father’s will cannot compel her “affection to [a subject’s] blood,” and Segebert is banished (1.1.12, 34). The conflict is resolved when Segebert’s son, Anthynus, who—for reasons never explained—is physically indistinguishable from Osric, surreptitiously returns from exile and takes Osric’s place as the bridegroom. One might read the undetected substitution of her subject Anthynus for King Osric as a vindication of Segebert’s belief that she has no objective reason to “undervalue a subject’s blood” (1.1.36).19 However, the disruptions to expectations about representational convention and plot structure that accompany this substitution serve more to foreground than to resolve questions of the relationship between the physical body and its valuation. When Anthynus and Osric are first introduced, the audience is given no indication that these two characters should be understood to be physically indistinguishable, and the subsequent development of this understanding does not follow the conventional rules of early modern theatrical representation. Any number of plays in which presumably non-identical actors played identical twins depended on a representational code whereby similar costuming, reinforced by descriptions in the dialogue, cued audience members in on the fact that different actors should be understood as identical characters.20 Conversely, doubling worked because the audience understood that if the same actor appeared in different clothes and was identified in the dialogue as a different character, he should not be imaged as physically identical to the other character(s) he played. What is jarring about the treatment of Anthynus and Osric in The Queen’s Exchange is that both appear separately on stage, costumed differently, without any character remarking on their similarity before the third act. Even if the actors resembled one another, nothing in conventional theater semiotics would have prompted audiences to think of the characters as identical for much of the play. The donning of similar costumes that in a play like Comedy of Errors would have identified characters as identical from the start occurs within the diegetic action of The Queen’s Exchange. Osric, mad with love for Anthynus’s sister, whom he has only seen in a picture, costumes himself as a pilgrim, “clad / In poorest habit of humility,” and traipses around his lands (3.1.388). His costume closely enough resembles the one that Anthynus has worn into exile with his father that when Osric’s counselors search him out and find the unconscious Anthynus instead, they mistake him for Osric. At first, it seems as if we have a simple variation on the impenetrable disguise convention, signaled by Edelbert’s

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identification of Anthynus as Osric due to his “habit, / The pilgrim’s weed he went in” (3.2.431, 432). However, the characters continue to insist on the indistinguishability of the two, regardless of how they are costumed. When the counselors realize their mistake and present Anthynus to Osric, one of them proclaims:                                    Your own eyes, sir, Cannot in likeness answer each the other More than this face doth yours. His hands, his legs, All his dimensions bear the same proportion To outward seeming as your royal person. Nature herself, were she now to behold Her work on both of you, could scarce distinguish, By an exterior view, a difference. (3.3.508)

Only with this speech’s emphatic focus on the characters’ bodies does it become undeniable that these two characters are to be understood as truly physically identical. For the remainder of the play, Anthynus is taken for Osric regardless of whether he is dressed in sleeping attire or full royal trappings. Even as the two characters stand next to each other at the end, costumed differently, the onstage characters insist on their underlying physical indistinguishability. This indistinguishability leads to a specter of incest that is never exorcized. By the time Anthynus arrives in Northumbria, Osric has seen a picture of Anthynus’s sister, Mildred and fallen in love. He decides to take advantage of the appearance of his unexplained doppelganger by leaving Anthynus in his place while he secretly travels to court Mildred. Unknown to either Anthynus or Osric, Mildred has long been suppressing an incestuous desire for Anthynus, which Osric’s identical body is ultimately able to satisfy. When Osric arrives at Segebert’s household, dressed as “a Northumbrian gentleman,” the household servants assume that it is Anthynus in a disguise that they all see through. As Mildred’s maid says, “if I am I, / If you are you, if anything be anything, / It is Anthynus” (5.1.686). Because the play offers no explanation for the indistinguishability of Osric and Anthynus, it leaves open the possibility that the union between Osric and Mildred, which Mildred believes will allow for a non-transgressive fulfillment of her desire, is incestuous after all. Either of the two explanations that most readily present themselves for the resemblance of Osric and Anthynus troubles the play’s apparent

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resolution of its central conflicts. As Jackson Cope points out, original audiences would almost certainly have expected Anthynus and Osric’s similarity to set up “one of the almost inevitable tragicomic tropes, that of the lost and recovered royal son.”21 So, why does Brome not let this convention play out to its expected end? If Anythnus is Osric’s son or brother, then a Northumbrian prince is now the West Saxon king—the event that Segebert warned in the opening scene would open W ­ estSaxon law to supersession by the more oppressive Northumbrian law. The prospect that Anthynus’s value is not legible in his body but determined by events unknown to all the parties involved, even Anthynus himself, would have resonated with fears, like those of Gerard Malynes, that in the process of exchange obscure international forces were working to England’s detriment, setting them up for unwelcome surprises when the material reality became apparent. The idea that the policies of foreign monarchs were secretly vitiating English royal authority was precisely what Malynes attempted to convince his readers of. If, on the other hand, Anthynus and Osric are both Segebert’s sons, then Osric’s match with Mildred is incestuous. The first eventuality imagines the perfect transformability of the commodity form producing the object of desire but revealing this production to be determined by forces outside of anyone’s control. The second eventuality vitiates the object of desire itself as the material reality of Osric’s and Mildred’s bodies make impossible Mildred’s fantasy of realizing her desire for Anthynus’s/Osric’s body without the taint of incest. By conspicuously not explaining Osric’s resemblance to Anthynus, Brome permits the playhouse to sustain the fantasy of the commodity form balanced precariously between the Scylla of untransformable materiality and the Charybdis of empty, imaginary interchangeability beyond one’s control. Enjoying the play as a hopeful realization of desire necessitates the suppression of the possibility that it might be undercut by external forces related to an unknown material reality. This tension, implicit in The Queen’s Exchange, is explicitly thematized in The New Academy.

“I Would Take Either of ’Em” In addition to referencing London’s commercial geography, the subtitle of The New Academy, or The New Exchange might have been an attempt at self-promotion, alerting anyone who had enjoyed Brome’s The Queen’s Exchange at the Red Bull, Globe, or Blackfriars (its original staging

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location is uncertain) to the fact that Brome had authored a new play at the Salisbury Court. Not only the title but also key conceptual concerns carry over from one play to the other. The New Academy continues thinking through the relationship between imagined and material being that is evident in The Queen’s Exchange but shifts from tragicomedy to city comedy. While its mimetic staging of commerce makes its economic concerns more apparent, the play’s most interesting engagement with concepts of exchange is nevertheless still figurative, with the international trading of children figuring wealth. Before the opening action of the play, the English merchant Matchil has sent his son abroad to be raised in France in exchange for raising the Frenchman Lafoy’s daughter. When he receives the false report that his son, Philip, has died in France, he retaliates for Lafoy’s apparent negligence by banishing Lafoy’s daughter, Gabriella, from his house. The exchange of Philip for Gabriella with the expectation that Philip will return enhanced by his experiences abroad suggestively parallels the mercantile practice, lauded by Thomas Mun and Edward Misselden, of exchanging English currency for foreign currency with the expectation that a greater value of English currency will return at the end of a series of international exchanges. Like The Queen’s Exchange, the conclusion of the The New Academy reveals that exchanges not fully known to the characters involved have fortuitously resulted in a happy ending. However, the suggestion implicit in The Queen’s Exchange that this apparent happy ending might be imperiled by an unknown material factor, figured as incest, is made explicit in The New Academy, which at first leads onstage characters and audiences to believe that each of the lovers has mistakenly married a sibling before it is revealed that Matchil’s children have actually been married to Lefoy’s. The New Academy stresses the power of the commodity form to supersede materiality. When Matchil banishes Lafoy’s daughter, Gabriella, from the house, Matchil’s daughter, Joyce, makes the argument that the exchange has rendered the two daughters materially identical: You know, sir, form our infancy we have been Bred up together by your tender care As we had been twin-born, and equally Your own; and by a self-same education We have grown hitherto into one affection; We are both but one body, and one mind; What Gabriella was, I was, what I, was she. (1.1.87)

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The speech begins in simile: they have been raised as if they had been “twin-born.” However, they have “grown hitherto into one affection” to the point that it is unclear how metaphorical Joyce is being when she identifies them as “one body, and one mind.” In Joyce’s mind, at least, Gabriella has become Matchil’s daughter, just as Joyce herself is, by virtue of having been treated as such. Because incest taboos are never only biological but also cultural, the presentation of Gabriella as an adopted daughter is sufficient to raise the specter of incest even for the “correct” marriages between the Matchils and Lefoys that prevail at the end of the play.22 The claim that she and Joyce have become “one body” heightens the aura of incest by placing a specifically physical emphasis on their similarity, effectively imagining socially designated kinship as physical consanguinity. The ultimate pairings off of the siblings come about through the commodification of Gabriella and Joyce. When Matchil turns both of them out, they seek shelter with his half-brother Strigood, an unscrupulous character who, we later learn, started the rumor that Philip was dead in the hopes of taking his place as Matchil’s heir. Strigood puts Gabriella and Joyce to work in what is nominally a manners academy but which he plans to run as a brothel. Philip and Frances, having traveled to England under the names Papillion and Galliard, pay Strigood for sex with Joyce and Gabriella. When they learn that the women are not willing to have sex, they demand their money be refunded, but offer to marry them instead, if they can verify that they are members of the gentry. Each brother initially courts own his sister and, at the end of the fourth act, the young couples plan what most audience members must already suspect are incestuous marriages (4.2889–93). In the final scene of the play, they finally appear before their parents for the revelation of their true identities. Matchil exclaims to Lafoy, “This is your daughter. And this mine. Each married to her brother” and then says in disgust to his children, “I know not how to bless you, or to look / On your incestuous eyes” (5.2.1280, 1282). Brome then offers two resolutions to the problem. First, the level-headed Hardyman points out that “The error of the persons nullifies / The verbal ceremony.” Because they have not consummated the marriage, they can simply “exchange [prospective spouses] / And marry in due order” (5.2.1285). The siblings all happily agree to what they call this “new exchange” (5.2.1286). Their amenability to swapping spouses is unsurprising, as the play has stressed from their first encounter that they view each other as interchangeable: Gabriella tells Joyce, “I would take either of ’em,” to

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which Joyce replies, “I care not which I have” (4.2.844, 845). In a parody of commodity logic, the equal valuation of the lovers makes their different material beings irrelevant to the couples. After the first proposed solution seems settled, though, the audience learns that it is unnecessary because the lovers have actually already made this exchange. Philip reveals that the four learned the truth of their identities on the verge of their planned marriage (presumably in the process of verifying each other’s social standing) but pretended to have gone through with the marriage to demonstrate to Strigood, “The worst that might have happened by his practice” (5.2.1302). Matthew Steggle argues that this second solution revises “the moral stature of the participants,” allowing Brome to distance the play from the market by showing “how the moral values of theatre could differ from the values of the marketplace.”23 While Steggle’s reading of the play is largely compelling, it is difficult to accept the didactic theater presented at the end as an unironic vision of Brome’s own theater. For one thing, Strigood is not necessarily reformed by his staged lesson. He announces that he will cease attempting to harm Matchil only because he has discovered, “I have no power to hurt you” (5.2.1312). Moreover, the swapping of spouses still follows the commodity logic of their interchangeability. If anything, the superfluous ending with its overt theatricality highlights the appeal of the theatrical commodity, which can stage for paying audiences whatever pleasurable and/or morally satisfying resolutions the audience seems to desire. A variety of scholars have argued that commercial playhouses emerged concurrently with the rise of commodity consumption in London as sites for the distribution of a unique commodity whose existence approximated the commodity form itself: an empty imaginary space carrying the promise of being filled with any desired entertainment.24 The New Academy ambivalently thematizes its commodity status, fulfilling its audience’s desire of entertainment while simultaneously calling into question the material limits of this fulfillment.

(Hi)stories of the Commodity Form Having shown how The Queen’s Exchange and The New Academy deploy the material and generic resources of the stage in ways that interrogate the logic of commodity exchange which informed England’s commercial expansion, I will conclude by considering Brome’s ambivalent representation of the commodity form against a later form of post-Marxist

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ambivalence, one which is exemplified by Giorgio Agamben, whose works resonate with the tension in Brome’s plays between the commodity form’s promise to realize any desire and its threat to vitiate this desire by overriding the specificity of the body. From two different historical vantage points, Brome and Agamben tell two differently inflected stories of the commodity form: Brome tells a story of promise tinged with unease; Agamben tells a story of disillusionment nonetheless carrying residual hope. While Marx condemned commodity fetishism, his own relation to the commodity form was more ambivalent because in his formulation the commodity form not only occludes collective social labor but also preserves it in hieroglyphic form. Whereas, for Marx, commodity fetishism blinds one to the social dimension of the physical object, the social nonetheless haunts the physical object in its commodity form. As Derrida keenly notes, “Marx does not like ghosts […] He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else.”25 Derrida posits a redemptive potential in the split ontology of the commodity as both sensuous and suprasensible, what he calls its “hauntology,” which marks it as a potential site for the emergence of new modes of being.26 More traditional Marxist thinkers have been much more qualified in their appreciation of the commodity form. Because Agamben has been particularly frank about the conflicted attachment to the commodity form and because Agamben explicitly understands this attachment as an erotic one, his work offers provocative points of comparison with the ambivalently erotically charged plays of Richard Brome. The vexed status of the commodity and its relationship to desire is a major focus of Agamben’s The Coming Community. Anticipating much of Agamben’s later work, The Coming Community consists of short, poetically elliptical mediations on the possibility of thinking categorically about groups without accepting an exclusive opposition between “the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal.”27 Agamben terms the singularity that is ineffable in its individuality but also intelligibly universal “whatever being,” a designation that he derives from the term quodlibet in medieval scholastic phrases such as “quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum seu perfectum—whatever entity is one, true, good, or perfect.” He finds in the will (libet) of this quodlibit an invitation to conceptualize a “whatever” that does not mean that which does not matter but that which “has an original relation to desire” such that its singularity always matters.28 He writes:

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Love is never directed toward this or that property of the loved one (being blond, being small, being tender, being lame), but neither does it neglect the properties in favor of an insipid generality (universal love): The Lover wants the loved one with all its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such—this is the lover’s particular fetishism.29

The “lover’s particular fetishism” should be absolutely anathema to Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, which inverts the traditional model of “fetishism” as an irrational veneration of a particular material object into a veneration of an empty abstraction that renders all particular matter perfectly interchangeable. However, Agamben imagines a historical trajectory in which it is precisely the movement through an era of pervasive commodity fetishism that may lead to the utopian communal future of whatever being. For Agamben, it is from commodity fetishism that the ineffable individuality of the lover’s particular fetish will receive its universal intelligibility. Setting his readers up to view the history of the commodity from a shifting temporal perspective, Agamben opens a chapter titled “Dim Stockings” with a nesting of historical displacements: he reads a 1970s French stockings advertisement in a style strikingly reminiscent of the 1950s, Mythologies-era Roland Barthes with explicit reference to the cultural critics of the generation before Barthes, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. In Agamben’s account, Kracauer and Benjamin witnessed, in the 1920s, “capitalist commodification [beginning] to invest the human body” and, though “they were by no means favorable to the phenomenon,” they “could not help but notice a positive aspect to it.”30 The positive aspect was that it “seemed […] to redeem the body from the stigma of ineffability that had marked it for millennia. Breaking away from the double chains of biological destiny and individual biography, [the commodified body] appeared for the first time perfectly communicable, entirely illuminated.” In short, “While commodification unanchors the body from its theological model, it still preserves the resemblance: Whatever is a resemblance without archetype—in other words, an Idea.”31 After holding out the fleeting promise of finding whatever being in the commodity form (a possibility multiply framed through these temporal displacements as part of the past of cultural studies), Agamben snaps us into the dystopian present of “the age of the complete domination of the commodity form over all aspects

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of social life” in which the promised transformation has remained confined to the domain of the image divorced from the lived body, such that “the glorious body of advertising has become the mask behind which the fragile, slight human body continues its precarious existence, and the geometrical splendor of the ‘girls’ covers over the long lines of the naked, anonymous bodies led to their death in the Lagers (camps).”32 He then calls on us to reclaim this deferred promise of the commodity form, “to link together image and body in a space where they can no longer be separated, and thus to forge the whatever body, whose physis is resemblance.”33 Thus, while Agamben, like Derrida, sees a spectral promise in the commodity form, he simultaneously voices a reactionary nostalgia of the sort Derrida criticizes, a nostalgia for the “opacity of sexual difference” over “the transsexual body,” for “the incommunicable foreignness of the singular physis” over “spectacle,” for the “organic body” over “commodities,” and for “the intimacy of erotic life” over “pornography.”34 The mix of the progressive and the reactionary, the utopian and the nihilistic, that characterizes Agamben’s work with the commodity form also characterizes Brome’s exchange plays, in which the possibility of incest creates a tension between a thing’s (or person’s) distinctive material existence and its existence in the commodity form. The comedic resolutions of these plays suggest an optimism that the working of exchange can produce beneficial new modes of being, breaking down ontological distinctions between monarch and subject in The Queen’s Exchange and satisfying the lovers’ desire. Nonetheless, these endings also unsettlingly suggest an absolute subordination of singularity to interchangeability that makes the genealogy of Osric’s body and the distinguishing features of the lovers irrelevant. In this way, both plays’ attitudes toward the boundless exchanges promised by the commodity form are ambivalent, generating optimism about generative transformability but also entertaining the possibility of an unpleasant material limit to it. The differences between the historical positionings and affective contours of Agamben’s and Brome’s presentation of the commodity form are revealing. Agamben is looking back with cultivated disillusionment from a post-industrial vantage point from which the proliferation of commodity logic appears as a scam—a trick by advertising agencies to deprive consumers of their money, rather than fulfill their desires. Brome’s vantage point is different for reasons both broadly historical and uniquely personal. On the national level, the expansion of foreign

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trade held out the promise not only of increased profit to merchants, such as Thomas Mun and Edward Missleden, but also the promise of an increased standard of living for most of the population.35 Brome himself experienced firsthand the upward mobility of the growing economy. Apparently born into poverty, he seems to have gotten a foothold in London’s commercial theater scene while working as a domestic servant for Ben Jonson.36 In this burgeoning economy, Brome was able to convert his imagination into money by selling his plays to a variety of successful playing companies before he took the risk in 1635 of contracting himself to the players managed by Richard Heton at the Salisbury Court playhouse, an arrangement that, Elenaor Collins has convincingly argued, was not customary at the time but offered both the acting company and the playwright the prospect of greater economic stability.37 In Brome’s case, this risk did not pay off. The New Academy seems to have been one of the few plays Brome completed under this contract before plague closures caused Heton to cease paying Brome, setting off a contentious legal battle that was not settled until 1640.38 Two years later, the outbreak of the Civil War closed the playhouses, putting an end to Brome’s chief livelihood. It is impossible to say in detail how Brome eked out a living over the next decade. Some sort of patronage seems necessary for Brome to have gained admission to the charitable Charterhouse Hospital in 1650, where he died in 1652.39 In a prefatory poem to a collection of five of Brome’s plays, which was published in 1659, Alexander Brome glumly summed up the trajectory of Richard Brome’s life: “Poor he came into th’ world, and poor went out.”40 When writing the exchange plays, Brome had no way of knowing his future, but sinking into poverty must have been an ever-present anxiety against which he set the enriching promise of a theatrical marketplace in which his plays appeared as profitable commodities. In this way, Brome’s experience of the uncertain promises of the commodity form reiterates at the local level the experience of uncertainty in the global economy, where the abstraction of money promised to generate more of itself. Brome’s forward-looking optimism, which remained haunted by the possibility that some unknown material factor might reveal the promise of the commodity form to be illusory, is the historical mirror image of Agamben’s backward-looking disillusionment with the failed promise of the commodity form to offer the material realization of desire rather than its spectral form.

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Notes









1.  After 1571, when Elizabeth designated the commercial burse built by Thomas Gresham ‘the Royal Exchange,’ the building was referred to conventionally either as ‘the Queen’s Exchange’ or ‘the King’s Exchange,’ depending on the sex of the regnant monarch, though Elizabeth’s establishment of the exchange gave the term ‘Queen’s Exchange’ historical primacy. See The Royal Exchange, ed. Ann Saunders (London: W.S. Maney & Son, 1997); Jean Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598– 1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), chapter 2; Ceri Sullivan, Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), chapter 5. When the first printing of The Queen’s Exchange (1657) was reissued in 1661, the publisher re-titled it The Royal Exchange. Matthew Steggle, Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004) presents this re-titling as a bit of deceptive advertising that ‘holds out an illusory promise of place-realism,’ characteristic of Brome’s popular city comedies, like The Weeding of the Covent Garden, to market a less-popular tragicomedy (p. 191). However, the synonymous status of ‘the Queen’s Exchange’ and ‘the Royal Exchange’ means that if a bait-and-switch was at working in the titling of the reissue, something similar was already at work in the play’s earlier title. 2. On the Brome’s depictions of the New Exchange, see Steggle, Richard Brome, pp. 90–100; Howard, Theater of a City, pp. 188–92, 209–10. For related analysis of his depictions of the fashionable Covent Garden area, see Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 3. 3. C.E. Challis and P.H. Ramsey, ‘Currency and the Bill of Exchange in Gresham’s England’, in The Royal Exchange, ed. Ann Sanders (London: W.S. Maney & Son, 1997), pp. 59–75. 4. Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. chapter 4; and Bradley Ryner, Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), chapter 3. 5. Gerard Malynes, A Treatise of the Canker of Englands Common Wealth (London: William Johnes, 1601), sig. E8r. 6. All citations of Brome’s plays are to Richard Brome Online (http://www. hrionline.ac.uk/brome). 7. Malynes, Canker, sig. B8r. 8. Ibid., sig. C2r. 9. Ibid.

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10. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), pp. 164–65. 11. Ibid., p. 165. 12. Ibid., pp. 168–69. 13. Ibid., p. 199. 14. Ibid., pp. 248–57. 15. Claus Germer, ‘The Commodity Nature of Money in Marx’s Theory’, in Fred Moseley, ed. Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) argues that, in Marx’s theory of value, money must be a commodity such as gold (rather than a representation, such as a bank note) because money must first and foremost be a product of individual labor that becomes ‘an expression of social labour’ (p. 28). Germer’s analysis, though, downplays the countervailing force that Marx finds in the money form: the occlusion of social labor in a fantasy of exchangeability. 16. Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies (London: John Pyper, 1621), sig. E1v. 17. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London: Thomas Clark, 1664), sig. D3r. 18.  Valerie Forman, ‘Transformations of Value and the Production of “Investment” in the Early History of the English East India Company’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34:3 (2004): 611–41 (p. 618). 19. Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) argues that The Queen’s Exchange and William Cartwright’s The Royal Slave (1636) make the political statement that the subject does not need royal blood to ascend to royal authority by refusing to give its protagonist the expected royal genealogy. See also Jessica Dyson, Staging Authority in Caroline England: Prerogative, Law and Order in Drama, 1625–1642 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 20. On the commodity logic of indicating identity by costumes and props, see Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chapter 5. 21. Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 137. 22.  For Renaissance attitudes toward incest, see Marc Shell, The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Idea of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and Kingship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and Maureen Quilligan, Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).



178  B. D. RYNER 23. Steggle, Richard Brome, p. 99. 24.  See especially: Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare; John Parker, ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man: Shakespearean Drama as Marxian Fetish, the Fetish as Sacramental Sublime’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34:3 (2004): 643–72; and Richard Halpern, ‘Marlowe’s Theatre of Night: Doctor Faustus and Capital’, ELH, 71:2 (2004): 455–95. 25. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), p. 57. 26. Ibid., p. 63. 27. Giorio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 1. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 2. 30. Ibid., p. 47. 31. Ibid., p. 48. 32. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 33. Ibid., p. 50. 34. Ibid., p. 86. 35. The causes of the higher standards of living were complex and attributable not only to growing international commerce but also to rising agricultural prices. Additionally, it must be noted that the most poor were excluded from improvements to the standard of living. See Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 36. Steggle, Richard Brome, pp. 3–5. 37.  Eleanor Collins, ‘Richard Brome’s Contract and the Relationship of Dramatist to Company in the Early Modern Period’, Early Theatre, 10 (2007): 116–28. 38.  Anne Haaker, ‘The Plague, The Theatre, and the Poet’ Renaissance Drama, 1 (1968): 283–306. 39.  Eleanor Lowe, ‘Confirmation of Richard Brome’s Final Years in Charterhouse Hospital’, Notes & Queries, 54:4 (2007): 416–18. 40. ‘On the Comœdies of the late facetious POET, Richard Brome’, in Five new Playes, Viz. The English Moor, or the Mock-Marriage. The L ­ ove-sick Court, or the Ambitious Politique. Covent Garden Weeded. The New Academy, or the New Exchange. The Queen and Concubine (London: A. Crook, 1659), sig. a3r (edited in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome: Containing Fifteen Comedies, ed. John Pearson, 3 vols [London: John Pearson, 1873], II, sig. B2r).

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Select Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and Kingship (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Bruster, Douglas, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006). Forman, Valerie, ‘Transformations of Value and the Production of “Investment” in the Early History of the English East India Company’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34:3 (2004): 611–42. ———, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Halpern, Richard, Eclipse of Action: Tragedy and Political Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Harris, Jonathan Gil, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Howard, Jean, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598–1642 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). Malynes, Gerard, A Treatise of the Canker of Englands Common Wealth (London: William Johnes, 1601). Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990). Moseley, Fred, ed., Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). Muldrew, Craig, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Mun, Thomas, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East-Indies (London: John Pyper, 1621). ———, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London: Thomas Clark, 1664). Parker, John, ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man: Shakespearean Drama as Marxian Fetish, the Fetish as Sacramental Sublime’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34:3 (2004): 643–72. Quilligan, Maureen, Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Sander, Ann, ed., The Royal Exchange (London: W.S. Maney & Son, 1997). Shell, Marc, The End of Kinship: Measure for Measure, Incest, and the Idea of Universal Siblinghood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

180  B. D. RYNER Sullivan, Ceri, Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (London: Associated University Presses, 2002). Zucker, Adam, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Wondrous Exchanges

‘Mirifica commutatio’: The Economy of Salvation in Reformation Theology Torrance Kirby

This theme of ‘Change and Exchange’, and of their implicit ­interrelation, has a deep resonance with theological questions and concerns at the ‘Crossroads of Knowledge’ in the early modern period. ‘Change’ or transformation in the context of sixteenth-century religious culture is frequently construed in a discourse of conversion, understood on occasion as a sudden transformation or reorientation, and alternatively, as a gradual, ongoing process of readjustment of behaviour. Change of religious orientation can be cognitive or habitual, passive or active, and depends upon a whole range of moral ontological assumptions. ‘Exchange’ also holds a significant place in the realm of religious and theological discussion. In the course of his explication of the exercise of the ‘publique offices of Religion’ in the fifth book of his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1597), Richard Hooker remarks that solemn places of worship are purposely designed ‘for mutual ­conference and as it were commerce to be had between God and us’.1

T. Kirby (*)  School of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal, PQ, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_9

183

184  T. KIRBY For what is the assembling of the Church to learn, but the receiving of Angels descended from above? What to pray, but the sending of Angels upward? His heavenly inspirations and our holy desires are as so many Angels of intercourse and commerce between God and us.2

The notion of religious practice as in some sense modelled upon a mercantile transaction between mortals and divinity—Hooker’s ‘angelic commerce’, as it were—is deeply rooted in Judæo-Christian tradition. In the Book of Genesis we read about God’s covenant with Noah: after his deliverance, Noah built an altar to the Lord: I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.3

Genesis also records a covenant with Abraham with a promise of blessing: ‘I will make of thee a great nation’4; Abraham performs a sacrifice and in return receives a promise of land: ‘in the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates’. When Abraham offers to sacrifice Isaac, he is promised the multiplication of his seed ‘as the stars of the heaven’.5 There is a further covenant negotiated with Moses whereby Israel is designated ‘a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation; if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine’.6 Yahweh instituted a priestly covenant ( brith ha-kehuna) with Aaron and his descendants, and another with David which establishes his kingship and that of his descendants in the united monarchy of Israel.7 John the Baptist prophesied a new covenant,8 a covenant which Christ later confirms.9 The latter covenant, executed in blood, has a sacramental character: ‘this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood’.10 Does this scriptural covenantal exchange imply change? And are change and exchange somehow mutually implicated? Adherence to such covenants requires a specific orientation of the agents or commercial partners in the angelic commerce; to what extent and in what precise fashion does such exchange presuppose change, transformation, reorientation, conversion?

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Economy of Salvation The scriptural ‘economy of salvation’ may be described as an instance of Charles Taylor’s concept of a ‘moral ontology’. In his book Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Taylor employs the language of Hans-Georg Gadamer in explaining moral ontology as: …the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand […] To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.11

The concept of the soul’s transformation through conversion or repentance is implicated in the heavenly commerce—of covenant, contract, treaty, pact, or bond. Moreover, this linkage of ‘change and exchange’ holds considerable significance not only in the biblical narrative, but also in theological reflection upon that narrative. Underlying the covenantal relationship, there is the presupposition of an ‘economy of salvation’. The term oikonomia, which appears in Aristotle’s Politics, refers of course to the regulation of the household (oikia). The entire creation is, by analogy, the household of the creator. How does this divine economy operate? Richard Hooker’s account of the bond uniting creature to creator carries with it an ontological supposition. Addressing the ontology of creation, Hooker observes that: All other things that are of God have God in them and he them in himself likewise. Yet because their substance and his wholly differs, their coherence and communion either with him or among themselves is in no sort like to that before mentioned. God has his influence into the very essence of all things, without which influence of deity supporting them their utter annihilation could not choose but follow. Of him all things have both received their first being and their continuance to be that which they are. All things are therefore partakers of God, they are his offspring, his influence is in them, and the personal wisdom of God is for that very cause said to excel in nimbleness or agility (Wisdom 7:23), to pierce into all intellectual pure and subtle spirits, to go through all, and to reach to everything which is. Otherwise how should the same wisdom be that which supports (Hebr. 1:3), bears up, and sustains all?12

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On Hooker’s account, the divine economy is founded upon the love that the Father bears towards the Son through whom, as the Wisdom of God, the eternal Logos, the creation is brought forth. Again since all things do accordingly love their offspring as themselves are more or less contained in it, he which is thus the only begotten must needs be in this degree the only beloved of the father. He therefore which is in the father by eternal derivation of being and life from him must needs be in him through an eternal affection of love.13

Thus, according to the law of the divine economy, God loves the creation as his own possession or property, indeed as himself: All things which God in their times and seasons has brought forth were eternally and before all times in God as a work unbegun is in the artificer which afterward brings it to effect. Therefore whatsoever we do behold now in this present world, it was enwrapped within the bowels of divine mercy, written in the book of eternal wisdom, and held in the hands of omnipotent power, the first foundations of the world being as yet unlaid.14

The ontological horizon within which Richard Hooker takes his stand is broadly shared by his contemporaries, both by religious reformers and by adherents to the Council of Trent. Where the reformers and the traditionalists differ is mainly in their understanding of how the economy of salvation operates within this horizon. Despite their broad agreement on the ontological framework of the economy of salvation, there is marked disagreement between them concerning the actual means of salvation. Soteriological disagreement in the sixteenth-century hinges upon interpretation of the precise manner of the communication of divine grace to humanity. Where Luther, Calvin, and their magisterial Protestant adherents insist upon salvation by (1) Christ alone (solus Christus), (2) through grace alone (sola gratia), (3) by means of faith alone (sola fide), (4) revealed in scripture alone (sola scriptura), and (5) ultimately caused from outside history by God’s predestining will alone (soli Deo gloria), the Council of Trent argued a very different position in response. For Tridentine Catholics, salvation depended upon a contrary set of assumptions, namely (1) the necessary mediation of salvation by the Church hierarchical with its intricate medieval apparatus of the sacraments (lex divinitatis), (2) the cooperation of divine grace with human

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nature in order to bring the faithful to perfection by steps and degrees (gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit), (3) the consequent requirement of good works in addition to faith in order to merit salvation (meritum de condigno), (4) the affirmation of the traditions and teaching authority (magisterium) of the Church as essential to the interpretation of scripture and the continuing definition of saving dogma, and finally (5) the premise that God’s saving purpose presupposed a disposition within the soul capable of receiving grace (capax Dei) and cultivating it as a ‘habit’ (on the model of habitual virtue as expounded by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics: salvation requires the Christian ‘to do what lies within you’ (facere quod in se est). These theological differences concerning the doctrine of grace and salvation, which came to define the great rupture of the Church at the Reformation, inevitably resulted in a ripple effect in their respective formulations of the global narrative of salvation history.

Conversion as Cognition The change necessary to exchange is suggested by the discourse of ‘repentance’—as John the Baptist proclaimed, ‘Μετανοεῖτε, ἤγγικεν γὰρ ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν’, translated by Erasmus in the Novum Instrumentum as ‘Resipiscite, in propinquo est regnum cœlorum’, and shortly thereafter translated by William Tyndale as ‘Repente ye, for the kingdome of heven is at honde’.15 The idea that radical ‘change’ of orientation could be construed either as passively cognitive, or actively habitual, is highlighted by Erasmus’s controversial rejection of the Vulgate translation of μετανοεῖτε as ‘pœnitentiam agite’—literally translated ‘do penance’. Erasmus’s choice of the Latin verb ‘resipiscere’ to render μετανοεῖτε is emblematic of his reform agenda outlined in the Enchiridion (1503). Whereas the Vulgate’s formula pœnitentiam agite is heavily weighted by its association with sacramental ritual performance of penance, resipiscere is closer to the sense of the original Greek in evoking a return to one’s right mind, literally ‘to become wise again’—μετανοεῖν. The root of the verb resipiscere is ‘sapere’—to think, to discern, to be wise (as in Kant’s famous formula ‘sapere aude’, dare to be wise)— with the addition of the inchoative stem ‘–sc’ suggestive of cognitive process.16 Resipiscere is more about cognition than about the performance of ritual action. As its derivation from sapere suggests, it is a verb

188  T. KIRBY

distinctly concerned with intellectual awakening. The great Renaissance philologist Lorenzo Valla interprets resipiscere in his Elegantiarum linguae Latinae of 1488 as a ‘recovery of the senses’.17 Erasmus’s account of cognitive conversion effectually recapitulates Plato’s theory of knowledge.18 In his famous allegory of the Cave in Book VII of Republic, Plato depicts the philosopher as one who turns away (periagoge) from the fleeting images of sensuous ‘phantasia’ and who, on coming out of the Cave, ascends upward to the brilliant luminosity of the intellectual Sun—an epistrophe towards the Form of the Good.19 Such epistemological conversion grips the imagination of early modern religious reformers and humanists alike, both philosophers like Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Erasmus as well as theologians of the Reformation like Luther, Calvin, and Vermigli. In a letter attached to a presentation copy of his Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses20 addressed to his confessor Johann von Staupitz on 30 May 1518, Luther takes a stab at defining conversion in a similarly Erasmian cognitive vein: I progressed further and saw that metanoia could be understood as a composite not only of ‘afterward’ and ‘mind,’ but also of the [prefix] ‘trans’ and ‘mind’ [transmentanimi] (although this may of course be a forced interpretation), so that metanoia could mean the transformation of one’s mind and disposition. Yet it seemed to express not only the actual change of disposition but also the way by which this change is accomplished, that is, the grace of God. Such transition of the mind, that is, the most true pœnitentia, is found very frequently in Holy Scripture […] Continuing this line of reasoning, I became so bold as to believe that they were wrong who attributed so much to penitential works that they left us hardly anything of pœnitentia, except some trivial satisfactions on the one hand and a most laborious confession on the other. It is evident that they were misled by the Latin term, because the expression pœnitentiam agere suggests more an action than a change in disposition; and in no way does this do justice to the Greek metanoein.21

On Luther’s account, penitence is foremost a cognitive reorientation rather than a ritual performance. This interpretation of metanoia reprises his broad approach to sacramental theology. For Luther, ‘performative representation’ renders the sacrament mechanical in its emphasis in the sense of ‘ex opere operato’, the sacramental equivalent of the righteousness of works as distinguished from justifying faith.22

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Change as Repentance: A Scholium of Peter Martyr Vermigli In a scholium addressing Repentance in his Loci Communes (1576), the Florentine reformer, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562), constructs his account of conversion on the foundation of Luther’s famous soteriological formulation of Justification by Faith only.23 Vermigli states that ‘The fountaine of repentance’ is to ‘have the goodness of God manifested’ and ‘to apprehend it by faith’.24 Not only does Vermigli affirm conversion to be effectively passive and cognitive, he does so in a philological discussion that reveals his Erasmian humanist training, which draws specifically upon his grounding in the hermeneutics of the trilinguum. He begins his construal of repentance, that is change through conversion, by referring to the diction and usage of the three biblical languages—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin: The Hebrues have this word Schub (‫)בוש‬, which signifieth To Turne, and to be converted: from whence they have derived the two nownes, Schuva, & Shiva; that is to saie, Inversion, and Conversion: when our minds being changed, and sinne sequestred, a new course of life is taken in hand. The Græcians called it μεταμέλεια and μετάνοια which is a certeine changing of the mind (transmentatio) so that in steed of an evill mind, we establish a good. We Latines use the verbe Pœnitere, derived of Pœna; that is, Paine; because the things which we have committed, are greevous and bitter vnto vs.25

In diverse places the Hebrew Scriptures portray conversion as a passive, cognitive phenomenon, a divinely initiated reorientation of vision, as for example in Psalm 80: ‘Turn us again ( /eschibnu), O Lord God of hosts, cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved (‫ש ִונְו‬ ָּ ‫׃ ָה ֵֽׁע‬/ u-noschoe)’.26 A ‘new course of life’, an active conversion of practice and behaviour—a renewal of the covenantal relation—that is ‘our minds being changed, and sinne sequestered’ is a consequence of a prior, divinely instigated turning. ‫בוש‬/schub as a divine motion appears again at verse 14 of the same Psalm: ‘Return, we beseech thee ( /schubna), O God of hosts: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine’.27 In The Lamentations of Jeremiah, the prophet depicts conversion as initiated by a prior divine motion: ‘Turn thou us (‫ּונֵב ִׁישֲה‬/eschibnu) unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned (‫ב ֶוׂשנו‬/unschub); renew our days as of old’.28 In the Vulgate, this verse is translated as ‘converte nos Domine ad te et convertemur innova dies nostros sicut a principio’.

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Jerome’s translation of ‘turn us’ as ‘converte’ suggests religious ­conversion, which is precisely how Vermigli interprets this passage.29 The divine act of turning initiates a consequent conversion of God’s people, a return to an original condition now lost—‘sicut a principio’—as it was in the beginning. In this repentance, two senses of conversion are in play: metanoia and epistrophē, that is cognitive alteration and a change in orientation, the change undergone by the soul and the relation of the soul to its divine object in the form of a transaction or an exchange. Scriptural emphasis on the priority of divine agency and the passivity of the soul’s experience of conversion, stressed by Jerome’s use of the passive voice—‘convertemur’30—becomes a distinguishing feature of this reformed biblical scholar’s critique of medieval Scholastic accounts of ethics and the virtues. Scripture, however, is to some degree ambiguous on the order of conversion. In his Commentary on Lamentations, Vermigli observes that ‘this is a golden verse which we always ought on our part to place opposite those other passages, such as, ‘Be turned to me, and I shall be turned to you’ (Mal. 3:7), when they are thrown at us by the defenders of free will. That is the Law, something God requires of us, but our part is to respond to him in turn, Turn us […] to You, and we shall be turned’.31 Another similar passage in Zechariah (1:3) inverts the order of conversion by ascribing to Yahweh the following speech: ‘Return to me, that I may return to you’. In his famous disputation with Luther, Erasmus placed emphasis on the passages from Malachy and Zechariah as tending to support the innate freedom of the will in conversion.32 Following Luther, Vermigli placed priority on gracious divine turning (in the active voice) as the initiation of repentance, followed by human response (in the passive voice, or future indicative— the voice here is ambivalent) as found, e.g. in Jeremiah 31:18: ‘Convert me (‫יִנֵ֣ביִׁשֲה‬/aschibne) and I shall be converted (‫הָבּוׁ֔שָאְו‬/uaschuba), for Thou art the Lord, my God’; and in the Vulgate: ‘converte me et revertar quia tu Dominus Deus meus’. Daniel Shute suggests that Vermigli’s playing off these two sets of verses is indicative of his exceptional knowledge of the Midrash of the medieval rabbis, knowledge unequalled by any other Christian theologian of his generation, with the possible exception of Immanuel Tremellius (1510–1580), sometime Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge.33 The question of the order of turning is of pivotal importance for the reformers of the sixteenth century, or as Richard Hooker described it in A Learned Discourse of Justification, ‘that grand question, which hangeth yet in controversy

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between us and the Church of Rome, about the matter of justifying righteousness’.34 For many of the theological participants on both sides of this great controversy, a thorough account of repentance and conversion is central to the moral ontology of change. In his distinctive orientation as simultaneously an Erasmian humanist reformer and a scholastic friend of Aristotle, Vermigli presents a fascinating case for addressing the place of conversion in the early modern discourse of ‘virtue ethics’. Superficially, and to a large extent in received opinion, the Reformation is deemed to be irreconcilably at odds with Aristotle and Aristotelianism. Perhaps nowhere was this reading more prevalent than in the sphere of ethics. After all, in his Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, Luther bluntly stated that ‘virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace’. And ‘no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle’. Then, in case the point was not sufficiently clear, he adds ‘Briefly, the whole of Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light’.35 Can a biblical theology of repentance as a passive, cognitive event be reconciled with the supposition of virtue ethics that conversion is a dynamic process of habituation? Vermigli articulates this conundrum well when he states in the introductory essay to his Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (1563) that while practical wisdom (phronesis) necessarily begins with action, ‘in scripture, speculation (speculativum) comes first, since we must first believe and be justified through faith. Afterwards, good works follow’.36 The soul must be turned before it is capable of turning. Vermigli’s understanding of repentance or conversion as speculative metanoia effectively turns the entire edifice of Aristotelian virtue ethics on its head. Rather than treating god-like contemplation as the hard-won goal of the strenuous exertion of virtuous activity as Aristotle had argued in Book X of the Ethics, in his account of the pursuit of virtue, Vermigli reverses the order of to praktikon and to theoretikon, the active and the cognitive moments in the soul’s transformation. According to Vermigli’s definition of repentance, the soul’s disposition to the life of virtue depends foremost upon passive cognition, a turning of the mind, through a divinely originated exchange. One recalls here Erasmus’s exegesis of John the Baptist’s call to repentance: most significantly for Erasmus’s Platonist translation of the Greek verb μετανοεῖτε as ‘resipiscite’, in place of Jerome’s ‘pœnitentiam agite’!37 Whereas for Aristotle, change of disposition into character in the process of attaining to a virtuous life required practical exertion in the formation of habits, for Vermigli, following

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Luther’s teaching on faith and justification, conversion is construed as intrinsically passive and cognitive: ‘in Scripture’, Vermigli states, ‘the speculative comes first’, that is to say a passive recognition of human shortcoming and incapacity for the life of virtue through a turning of the mind towards the Good—repentance or conversion (Metanoia).38 Whereas the final goal of Aristotelian virtue ethics is to reach ‘that beatitude that can be acquired in this life by human power and agency’, where the active life of praxis (vita activa) necessarily precedes and indeed renders possible the life of theoria (vita contemplativa), Vermigli’s account of conversion decisively inverts the Aristotelian ethical order. The starting point of practical wisdom from the perspective of Vermigli the reformer is closely analogous to the place where the argument of the Nicomachean Ethics actually concludes, that is to say with contemplation (theoria). And while for Aristotle, and for his medieval Scholastic proponents, practical philosophy aims at practical habituation which in turn prepares the soul for the higher condition of blessed contemplation (theoria, or visio Dei); for Vermigli and other reformers, repentance as a passive conversion of the mind is the starting point; the knowledge of faith, and of its concomitant justification understood as a kind of ethical completeness or fulfilment, must precede the life of habitual virtue; on this view the passive and contemplative precede the active and practical. Returning to the Theaetetus, if to become righteous (dikaios) as God is dikaios is the final goal of the practice of virtue, then the question is whether the virtue of Justice (dikaiosune), or justification as the theologians speak, is either passively received as a gift, or achieved through energetic habitual striving.

Atonement As I hope the discussion hitherto demonstrates, the concept of the soul’s change through conversion or repentance is implicated in the heavenly commerce—of covenant, contract, treaty, pact, or bond. Moreover, this linkage of ‘change and exchange’ holds considerable significance not only in the biblical narrative, but also in theological reflection upon that narrative. Underlying the covenantal relationship, there is the presupposition of an ‘economy of salvation’. This oikonomia is superbly articulated by a twelfth-century Archbishop of Canterbury—by none other than Anselm, in his treatise Cur Deus Homo—Why God became Man. Anselm links the doctrine of the Atonement to his exposition of the Incarnation,

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and he draws upon an economic model of debt and repayment or satisfaction of a liability, of obligation, and of justice obtained: The crux of the problem was why God became a man in order to save mankind through His death, although He was apparently able to accomplish man’s salvation in some other way. Responding to this problem, you showed by many compelling reasons that the restoration of human nature ought not to be left undone and, yet, could not be done unless man paid what he owed to God for his sin. This debt was so great that only God was able to pay it, although only a man ought to pay it; and, thus, the same [individual person] who was divine was also human. Hence, it was necessary for God to assume a human nature into a oneness-of-person, so that the one who with respect to his nature ought to make payment, but was unable to, would be the one who with respect to his person was able to. Next, you showed that that man who was God had to be taken from a virgin by the person of the Son of God; and you showed how He could be taken sinless from the sinful mass. You proved very clearly that the life of this man was so sublime and so precious that it can suffice to make payment for what is owed for the sins of the whole world – and even for infinitely more [sins than these]. Therefore, it now remains to show how His life is paid to God for the sins of men.39

Thus Anselm portrays redemption of fallen humanity as a commercial transaction between man and God. As his correspondence reveals, the redemption of debt, payment of obligations incurred in quotidian transactions, were inevitable in Anselm’s experience of monastic life as Prior and Abbot.40 It is hardly surprising that the ontology of a cosmic and spiritual order is reflected in that of the everyday. Martin Luther echoes Anselm’s economics of salvation in his interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:21: ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’. In a letter of spiritual counsel to George Spenlein, Luther spells out the significance of this exchange: Therefore, my dear brother, learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to pray to him and, despairing of yourself, say: ‘Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am thy sin. Thou hast taken upon thyself what is mine and hast given to me what is thine. Thou has taken upon thyself what thou wast not and hast given to me what I was not.’ Beware of aspiring to such purity that you will not wish to be looked upon as a sinner, or to be one.

194  T. KIRBY For Christ dwells only in sinners. On this account he descended from heaven, where he dwelt among the righteous, to dwell among sinners. Meditate on this love of his and you will see his sweet consolation. For why was it necessary for him to die if we can obtain a good conscience by our works and afflictions? Accordingly you will find peace only in him and only when you despair of yourself and your own works. Besides, you will learn from him that just as he has received you, so he has made yours sins his own and has made his righteousness yours.41

In his sermon on Two Kinds of Righteousness (1518), Luther expresses this transaction by analogy to an exchange of vows, a mystical transaction of marriage: ‘through the first righteousness arises the voice of the bridegroom who says to the soul, ‘I am yours’, but through the second comes the voice of the bride who answers, ‘I am yours’. Then the marriage is consummated; it becomes strong and complete in accordance with the Song of Solomon (2:16): ‘My beloved is mine and I am his’.42 Wolfhart Pannenberg summarises Luther’s interpretation of these mystical nuptials as a ‘Happy Exchange’.43 Who then can value highly enough these royal nuptials? Who can comprehend the riches of the glory of this grace? Christ, that rich and pious husband, takes as a wife a needy and impious harlot, redeeming her from all her evils, and supplying her with all His good things.44

Calvin and the duplex gubernatio Underpinning the soteriological discourse of exchange is an affirmation of the Augustinian dialectic of the two cities where the key consideration is the avoidance of mixture or confusion of things spiritual with things temporal. Possibly the most articulate and influential formulation of this Augustinian political theology in the sixteenth century is by a French reformer, Jean Calvin, who states the dialectic in this way: In man government is twofold: the one spiritual, by which the conscience is trained to piety and divine worship; the other civil, by which the individual is instructed in those duties which, as men and citizens, we are bold to perform. To these two forms are commonly given the not inappropriate names of spiritual and temporal jurisdiction, intimating that the former species has reference to the life of the soul, while the latter relates to matters of the present life, not only to food and clothing, but to the enacting of laws which

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require a man to live among his fellows purely, honourably, and modestly. The former has its seat within the soul, the latter only regulates the external conduct […] By attending to this distinction, we will not erroneously transfer the doctrine of the gospel concerning spiritual liberty to civil order, as if in regard to external government Christians were less subject to human laws, because their consciences are unbound before God, as if they were exempted from all carnal service, because in regard to the Spirit they are free.45

Under attack in the Rabelaisian satire of Antoine de Marcourt’s Boke of Marchauntes is the competing ‘retail’ logic of the so-called lex divinitatis, famously formulated by Boniface VIII in the bull Unam Sanctam, where the ontology supporting the merchants of grace is most eloquently stated.46 With the able assistance of a learned canon lawyer, Giles of Rome, Boniface provides a concise synopsis of the merchandising logic of medieval sacramental spirituality which is at odds with the Augustinian position staked out by Calvin. In formulating the theological principle of priestly, sacramental function, Boniface invokes the lex divinitatis, the fundamental ‘law of divinity’ as pronounced by the great sixth-century Syrian Neoplatonist, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.47 In Unam Sanctam, Boniface defends the doctrine of the papal sovereignty (plenitudo potestatis) by asserting the necessary hierarchical subordination of temporal to spiritual jurisdiction: For according to the Blessed Dionysius, it is the law of divinity (lex divinitatis) that the lowest things are led to the highest by intermediaries. Then, according to the order of the universe, all things are not led back equally and immediately, but the lowest by the intermediary, and the inferior by the superior […] Therefore if the terrestrial power err, it will be judged by the spiritual power.48

This relation of subordination between the spiritual and the temporal realms establishes the ecclesiastical hierarch as an ordained agent or sacramental mediator between the two worlds. It is precisely this function of priestly mediation between the two realms which constitutes Marcourt’s category ‘the estate of marchaundyse’,49 and the ontology of such mediation serves as the principal target of his evangelical satire throughout the Boke of Marchauntes. From Marcourt’s Augustinian standpoint, the mercantile principle of the merely ‘external’ mediation of goods between one temporal realm and another of the same order ‘for the tyme of this present lyf’ is ‘worthy

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prayse and righte utyle’.50 As long as hierarchy functions within the boundaries of the external forum politicum, it is acceptable. Yet any attempt ‘to change/ conserve and transporte many sortes of marchandyses’ from the realm of the divine and spiritual life into the realm of temporal and civil life is ‘accursed and detestable’. Such trade is not the work of ‘good herdmen/ and trewe ministers of [God’s] holye worde’ but of ‘furiouse theves/ and insaciable ravening wolves’. The attempt to act as an intermediary between the two realms is in the nature of a deception, namely ‘to sell the thinge that is nat his’ to sell; it is to confuse the substance of one order of reality with another, after the example of an Alchemist: The gret Lycyfere/ I wolde say the gret lorde of these marchauntes/ which is the sleyghtest of all / holdeth his banke open unto all folks/ convertynge the leade unto golde. There was never such multiplying by Alkemyst seen in this worlde/ as he and his doth fynde/ to fynde suche a vayne of golde under lead.51

There is a curious resonance between this satirical depiction of merchandising alchemy by Marcourt and Chaucer’s ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ in the Canterbury Tales, which incidentally was one of the twenty or so books published by Thomas Godfray in the midst of Cromwell’s propaganda campaign of the early 1530s.52 Chaucer’s Pardoner is the very personification of Marcourt’s entrepreneurial cleric—‘I preche of no thing but for coveityse. / Therefore my theme is yet, and evere was, / Radix malorum est cupiditas’.53 As with the Boke of Marchauntes, the Canterbury Tales were published cum privilegio regali, with royal sanction. Given the sharpness of Chaucer’s critique of the vagaries and abuses of the late-medieval Church, it is arguable that the republication of Canterbury Tales might itself be considered a contribution to the campaign of propaganda orchestrated by Thomas Cromwell to coincide with the revolutionary doings of Parliament at this time. Now to Calvin’s theology, our terminus ad quem. In the second book of his Institutio, Calvin devotes a lengthy chapter to a consideration of the claim that ‘everything proceeding from the corrupt nature of man damnable’, in short hand ‘total depravity’.54 In this discussion, Calvin provides a summary of his understanding of conversion:

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The beginning of right will and action being of faith, we must see whence faith itself is. But since Scripture proclaims throughout that it is the free gift of God, it follows, that when men, who are with their whole soul naturally prone to evil, begin to have a good will, it is owing to mere grace. Therefore, when the Lord, in the conversion of his people, sets down these two things as requisite to be done, viz., to take away the heart of stone, and give a heart of flesh, he openly declares, that, in order to our conversion to righteousness, what is ours must be taken away, and that what is substituted in its place is of himself […] He could not more clearly claim to himself, and deny to us, everything good and right in our will, than by declaring, that in our conversion there is the creation of a new spirit and a new heart. It always follows, both that nothing good can proceed from our will until it be formed again, and that after it is formed again in so far as it is good, it is of God, and not of us.55

Conversion involves exchange: a ‘heart of stone’ for a ‘heart of flesh’. Calvin, however, does not regard this exchange as dependent upon human agency—the action of an exchange is accomplished entirely from the divine side. Indeed it is the same ‘wonderful exchange’ as that described by both Anselm and Luther. Whereas depraved humanity owes the debt, the magnitude of original sin is such that only God has the capacity to make restitution. The solution in accord with the economy of salvation is, as Anselm maintained, a God-man, who encompasses both the need of redemption and the capacity to pay the debt. According to Calvin’s ‘penal substitution’ interpretation of the Atonement, the exchange of hearts is made possible by Christ’s assuming the punishment due to humanity and thus satisfying the demand of the divine justice, so that God consequently can show his grace. The benefits of the restitution are then communicated to humanity as a consequence of their having been grafted onto the Vine. Calvin quotes John 15: ‘As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me’ (John 15:1, 4). If we can no more bear fruit of ourselves than a vine can bud when rooted up and deprived of moisture, there is no longer any room to ask what the aptitude of our nature is for good. There is no ambiguity in the conclusion, ‘For without me ye can do nothing’.56 This theology of Atonement underpins Calvin’s account of the Sacrament as ‘mirifica commutatio’ or ‘wondrous exchange’. According to Calvin, Pious souls can derive great confidence and delight from this sacrament [of the Eucharist], as being a testimony that they form one body with Christ, so that everything which is his they may call their own. Hence it follows,

198  T. KIRBY that we can confidently assure ourselves, that eternal life, of which he himself is the heir, is ours, and that the kingdom of heaven, into which he has entered, can no more be taken from us than from him; on the other hand, that we cannot be condemned for our sins, from the guilt of which he absolves us, seeing he has been pleased that these should be imputed to himself as if they were his own. This is the wondrous exchange (mirifica commutatio) made by his boundless goodness. Having become with us the Son of Man, he has made us with himself sons of God. By his own descent to the earth he has prepared our ascent to heaven. Having received our mortality, he has bestowed on us his immortality. Having undertaken our weakness, he has made us strong in his strength. Having submitted to our poverty, he has transferred to us his riches. Having taken upon himself the burden of unrighteousness with which we were oppressed, he has clothed us with his righteousness.57

As Athanasius observed in the fourth century, ‘God became man that men might become God (θεοποιηθῶμεν)’.58 Or, as Richard Hooker summarises this ‘wonderful exchange’ in A Learned Discourse of Justification: Such we are in the sight of God the Father as is the very Son of God himself. Let it be counted folly, or phrensy, or fury, or whatsoever. It is our wisdom and our comfort; we care for no knowledge in the world but this: that man hath sinned and God hath suffered; that God hath made himself the sin of men, and that men are made the righteousness of God.59

The economy of salvation is an exchange across the gulf that separates human finitude and injustice from a perfect justice and divine goodness: ‘Then are we happie therefore when fully we injoy God, as an object wherein the powers of our soules are satisfied even with everlasting delight: so that although we be men, yet by being unto God united we live as it were the life of God’.60 The bargain is theosis, adherence to the very form of God. Again, according to Richard Hooker, Finally since God has deified our nature, though not by turning it into himself, yet by making it his own inseparable habitation, we cannot now conceive how God should without man either exercise divine power or receive the glory of divine praise. For man is in both an associate of Deity.61

Thus, in the sixteenth century we have a lively theological discussion of ‘change and exchange’ in the context of the moral ontology of an

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‘economy of salvation’. Erasmus, Luther, Vermigli, Marcourt, Calvin, and Hooker have all in their fashion contributed to the formulation of conversion as a transformation in the orientation of the mind which, in its turn, is shaped by an ‘angelic commerce’ between earth and heaven in the divine management of the household of creation. Just as fiduciary trust lies at the heart of activity in the material economy, it can hardly be surprising that the same should apply in the divine economy. For these early modern theologians, it would hardly come as a surprise that the organisation of quotidian, material change and exchange should mirror the spiritual economy. Unencumbered by the frenzied delusion of Ludwig Feuerbach, all naturally assumed that action in the earthly city had consequences for the heavenly city, and vice versa, in matters concerning change and exchange.62

Notes











1. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, V.18.1; 2:65.7–8. All references to the Lawes cite the standard Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977–1997). Citations are abbreviated hereafter as Lawes with references to book, chapter, and section numbers followed by volume, page, and line numbers in the Folger edition (FLE). 2. Lawes, V.23.1; FLE, 2:110.10–14. 3. Gen. 9:9–13. 4. Gen. 12:1–3. 5. Gen. 22:18. See also Gen. 26:4, Exod. 32:13, Deut. 1:10. 6. Exod. 19:5–6; 3:4–10; 6:7. 7. 2 Sam. 7:8–19. 8. Luke 1:68–78. 9. Matt. 26:28; 16:17–19. 10. Luke 22:20. 11. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 28. 12.  Lawes, V.56.5; FLE, 2:237.23–25. 13. Lawes, V.56.3; FLE, 2:236.2–7. 14. Lawes, V.56.5; FLE, 2:237.15–22. 15. Matt. 3:2; cp. Matt. 4:17. For an extended discussion of Erasmus’s translation of this passage see Brendan Cook, ‘The Uses of resipiscere in the Latin of Erasmus: in the Gospels and Beyond’, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 42 (2007): 397–410.

200  T. KIRBY 16.  According to Kant in his essay Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (Berlinische Monatschrift, 1784), ‘enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’, a sentiment with considerable Erasmian resonance. See Immanuel Kant, et al., Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 17. In the opening paragraph of his essay, Kant quoted Horace’s Epistles, 1.2.40: ‘dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude, incipe’ (‘He Who Has Begun Is Half Done: Dare to Know, Dare to Begin!’). I am indebted to Brendan Cook for his helpful morphological analysis of this Latin verb in ‘Uses of resipiscere’, 400 ff. 17. Lorenzo Valla, Opera omnia (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), p. 162, quoted in Cook, ‘Uses of resipiscere’, p. 404. 18. Desiderius Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Antwerp: D. Martens, 1503). 19. Plato, Republic, Steph. 514a–520a. 20. Full title Explanations of the Disputation Concerning the Value of Indulgences, in LW, 31:79–252; WA, 1:525–628. 21.  LW, 48: 64–68; WA, 1:525–27. See also LW, 31:79; WA, 1:525. 22. See David Hawkes, ‘Commodification and the Performative Sign in the Eucharistic Ethics of Luther and Calvin’, Literature and Theology, 32:3 (2018): 290–305, esp. pp. 294–99. 23. ‘I began to understand that “the justice of God” meant that justice by which the just man lives through God’s gift, namely faith. This is what it means: the justice of God is revealed by the gospel, a passive justice with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: “He who through faith is just shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates’. See the Preface to the complete edition of Luther’s Latin Writings (Wittenberg, 1545). WA, 54:179–87; LW, 34:328. I am indebted to previous studies of Vermigli’s soteriology by Eric Parker, ‘A Christian and Reformed Doctrine of Right Practical Reason: An Examination of Thomistic Themes in Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics’ (unpublished MA Thesis, Jackson, MI, Reformed Theological Seminary, 2009) and a McGill Postdoctoral Fellow, Simon Burton, in ‘Peter Martyr Vermigli on Grace and Free Choice: Thomist and Augustinian Perspectives’, Reformation and Renaissance Review, 15:1 (2013): 33–48. 24. Vermigli, Loci Communes, Bk. III.8; p. 672. 25. Loci Communes, III.8; p. 672. ‘Priusquam ulterius pergamus, agendum est de vi vocabuli. Hebraei habent vocabulum Schub [‫]בוש‬, quod significat redire & converti, Hinc derivarunt duo nomina Schuva & Schiva, inversio, [note] conversio: cum mutantur rationes, ut sepositis peccatis, nova

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ratio agendi assumatur. Graeci dixerunt, μεταγινώσκεια, μεταμέλεια, μετανοεῖα. Hinc μεταμέλεια & μετάνοια: est transmentatio quaedam, ut ex mente mala, bonam inducamus. Latini habent verbum pænitendi, quod est à poena: quòd nobis sint molesta & acerba quae fecimus. [my emphasis]’ For scholia see Vermigli’s commentaries on Samuel and Judges: In Duos Libros Samuelis, 2 Sam. 2. See also In Librum Iudicum, 2:4 (English translation: Vermigli, Commonplaces, Bk. III, p. 204). 26. The verse is repeated three times in Psalm 80 at vv. 3, 7, and 19. In the Vulgate, Ps. 79, vv. 4, 8, and 20: ‘Deus converte nos et ostende faciem tuam et salvierimus [ ]’. In v. 8 the Psalmist addresses ‘Deus

virtutum’ and in v. 20 ‘Domine Deus virtutum’.

27. This verse (v. 15 in the Vulgate) names God as ‘Deus virtutum’, a translation of LXX: ‘ὁ θεὸς τῶν δυνάμεων’. 28.  Lam. 5:21. See Westminster Leningrad Codex: ‘ [eschibnu]

[unschub] ’; and the LXX: ‘ἐπίστρεψον ἡμᾶς κύριε πρὸς σέ καὶ ἐπιστραϕησόμεθα καὶ ἀνακαίνισον ἡμέρας ἡμῶν καθὼς ἔμπροσθεν’. Cp. Jeremiah 31:18: ‘Convert me and I shall be converted, for Thou art the Lord, my God’; Vulgate: ‘converte me et revertar quia tu Dominus Deus meus [my emphasis]’.

29. Peter Martyr Vermigli, In Lamentationes Sanctissimi Ieremiae Prophetae Commentarium (Zurich: Jacob Bodmer, 1629). See Peter Martyr Vermigli, Commentary on the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah, ed. Daniel J. Shute (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), p. 209. See also Shute’s note 98. 30. ‘ἐπιστραϕησόμεθα’ in LXX. 31. Vermigli, Lamentations, p. 209. 32. Desiderius Erasmus, De Libero Arbitrio Diatribe (Basle: Froben, 1524), sig. b8r. See Gordon Rupp, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), p. 56. 33. Vermigli, Lamentations, pp. 209–210, see note 101. 34. Richard Hooker, The Folger Library Edition of the Works: Volume 5: Tractates and Sermons, textual ed. Laetitia Yeandle, commentary Egil Grislis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 109. 35. Martin Luther, Disputation against Scholastic Theology, in Selected Writings of Martin Luther, ed. Tappert G. Tappert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), theses 41 and 44; p. 38. 36. Peter Martyr Vermigli, Libri ethicorum Aristotelis; Peter Martyr Vermigli, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Joseph C. McLelland and Emidio Campi (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2006), p. 8.

202  T. KIRBY 37.  See Torrance Kirby, ‘The “Silenus of Alcibiades”: Desiderius Erasmus’s Platonic Narrative of Conversion in the Enchiridion’, an unpublished essay. 38. ‘At in sacris literis priori loco Speculativum occurrit, quantum prius credendum est & fide iustificamur, postea sequuntur bona opera’, Vermigli, Libri ethicorum Aristotelis, p. 8. 39. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo: ‘Summa quaestionis fuit cur deus homo factus sit, ut per mortem suam salvaret hominem, cum hoc alio modo facere potuisse videretur.Ad quod tu multis et necessariis rationibus respondens ostendisti restaurationem humanae naturae non debuisse remanere, nec potuisse fieri, nisi solveret homo quod deo pro peccato debebat. Quod debitum tantum erat, ut illud solvere, cum non deberet nisi homo, non posset nisi deus, ita ut idem esset homo qui deus. Unde necesse erat, ut deus hominem assumeret in unitatem personae, quatenus qui in natura solvere debebat et non poterat, in persona esset qui posset. Deinde quia de virgine et a persona filii dei esset assumendus homo ille qui deus esset, et quomodo sine peccato de massa peccatrice assumi potuerit monstrasti. Vitam autem huius hominis tam sublimem, tam pretiosam apertissime probasti, ut sufficere possit ad solvendum quod pro peccatis totius mundi debetur, et plus in infinitum. Restat ergo nunc ostendere quomodo illa solvatur deo pro peccatis hominum’. See Anselm, Libri Duo Cur Deus Homo, ed. Hugo Laemmer (Sumtibus G. Schlawitz, 1857), II.18. 40.  See G.E.M. Gasper and S.H. Gullbekk, ‘Money and Its Use in the Thought and Experience of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1093– 1109)’, Journal of Medieval History, 38:2 (2012): 155–82. 41. ‘To George Spenlein, 8 April 1516’, in Martin Luther, Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. Theodore G. Tappert, Library of Christian Classics 18 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955), p. 110. 42. ‘Two Kinds of Righteousness’, LW, 31:158. 43. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology: Volume 2, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 427. See also Eberhart Jüngel, ‘The Mystery of Substitution’, in Theological Essays II, trans. J.B. Webster and A. Neufeldt-Fast (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), pp. 145–62 (p. 152). 44. Martin Luther, On the Freedom of a Christian (1520), c. 12. WA, 7:25. 45. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (London: S.C.M. Press, 1961)., III.19.15. 46. Antoine de Marcourt, Boke of Marchauntes (London: Thomas Godfraye, 1534). 47. For a discussion of the appeal to the lex divinitatis by Boniface, see David Luscombe, ‘The Lex Divinitatis in the Bull Unam Sanctam of Pope Boniface VIII’, in C.N.L. Brooke, et al., ed., Church and Government in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 205–21. See also Wayne J. Hankey, ‘“Dionysius dixit, Lex divinitatis

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est ultima per media reducere”: Aquinas, hierocracy and the “augustinisme politique”’, Tommaso D’Aquino: proposte nuove di letture. Festscrift Antonio Tognolo, ed. Ilario Tolomio: Medioevo, 18 (1992): 119–50. 48.  Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, 2 vols (Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1879; reprinted Graz: Akademische Druk-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1955; 1959), I, col. 1245–46: ‘One sword ought to be subordinated to the other, and temporal authority subjected to spiritual power. For, since the Apostle said: “There is no power except from God and those that are, are ordained of God” (Rom 13:1–2), they would not be ordained if one sword were not subordinated to the other and if the inferior one, as it were, were not led upwards by the other. For according to the Blessed Dionysius, it is the law of divinity that the lowest things are led to the highest by intermediaries. Then, according to the order of the universe, all things are not led back equally and immediately, but the lowest by the intermediary, and the inferior by the superior […] Therefore if the terrestrial power err, it will be judged by the spiritual power; but if a minor spiritual power err, it will be judged by a superior spiritual power; but if the highest power of all err, it can be judged only by God, and not by man […] This authority is not human but rather divine, granted to Peter by a divine word and reaffirmed to him and his successors […] Therefore whoever resists this power thus ordained by God, resists the ordinance of God [Rom 13:2], unless he invent like Manicheus two beginnings […]’. See Giles of Rome, De ecclesiastica potestate, ed. Arthur P. Monahan (Lewiston: Mellen Press, 1990), I.4, pp. 17–20, and Monahan’s introduction, p. xxvii. For Thomas Aquinas’s formulation of the lex divinitatis, see Summa Theologica, IIa, IIae Q. 172, art. 2. 49. Marcourt, Boke of Marchauntes, sig. A2v. 50. Marcourt, Boke of Marchauntes, sig. A3r. 51. Marcourt, Boke of Marchauntes, sig. B4v. 52. Geoffrey Chaucer, Workes of Geffray Chaucer, ed. William Thynne (London: Thomas Godfray, 1532). See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. A.C. Cawley (London: Dent, 1975), pp. 494–518. The canon’s yeoman’s reference to his master’s ‘slidynge science’ (l. 732) and ‘crafty science’ (l. 1253) has an echo in the ‘sleyghtnesse’ [habilité] of Marcourt’s merchants; both the ‘Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’ and Marcourt’s satire convey a travesty of transubstantiation. Compare Marcourt, Boke of Marchauntes, sig. A6v. 53. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ll. 424–26; see pp. 343–60. 54. Calvin, Institutes, II.3. For an English translation, see Institutes, ed. McNeill. 55. Calvin, Institutes, II.3.6. 56. Calvin, Institutes, II.3.9. 57. Calvin, Institutes, IV.17.2.

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58. Athanasius, On the Incarnation: De incarnatione verbi Dei, ed. and trans. A Religious of the C.S.M.V., 2nd ed. (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1953), 54.3. 59. Hooker, Justification; FLE, 5:113.6–12. 60. Lawes, I.11.2; FLE, 1:112.17–20. 61. Lawes, V.54.5; FLE, 2:224.14–18. 62. See, for example, Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Faith According to Luther (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

Bibliography Anselm, Libri Duo Cur Deus Homo, ed. Hugo Laemmer (Sumtibus G. Schlawitz, 1857). ———, Why God Became Man (Cur Deus Homo), ed. and trans. Jasper Hopkins and Herbert W. Richardson (Toronto: Mellen Press, 1974). Athanasius, On the Incarnation: De incarnatione verbi Dei, ed. and trans. A Religious of the C.S.M.V., 2nd ed. (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1953). Calvin, Jean, Christianae religionis institutio (Geneva: R. Stephanum, 1559). ———, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill (London: S.C.M. Press, 1961). Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, ed. A.C. Cawley (London: Dent, 1975). ———, The Workes of Geffray Chaucer, ed. William Thynne (London: Thomas Godfray, 1532). Cook, Brendan, ‘The Uses of resipiscere in the Latin of Erasmus: In the Gospels and Beyond’, Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d’histoire, 42:3 (2007): 397–410. Erasmus, Desiderius, Enchiridion Militis Christiani (Antwerp: D. Martens, 1503). Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essence of Faith According to Luther (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). Friedberg, Emil, ed., Corpus Iuris Canonici, 2 vols (Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1879; reprinted Graz: Akademische Druk-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1955; 1959). Gasper, G.E.M., and S.H. Gullbekk, ‘Money and Its Use in the Thought and Experience of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1093–1109)’, Journal of Medieval History, 38:2 (2012): 155–82. Hankey, Wayne J., ‘“Dionysius dixit, Lex divinitatis est ultima per media reducere”: Aquinas, hierocracy and the “augustinisme politique”’, Tommaso D’Aquino: proposte nuove di letture. Festscrift Antonio Tognolo, ed. Ilario Tolomio: Medioevo, 18 (1992): 119–50. Hooker, Richard, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie. All references to the Lawes cite the standard Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977–1997). Abbrev: Lawes & FLE. ———, The Folger Library Edition of the Works: Volume 5: Tractates and Sermons, textual ed. Laetitia Yeandle, commentary Egil Grislis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990).

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Jüngel, Eberhart, ‘The Mystery of Substitution’, in Theological Essays II, trans. J.B. Webster and A. Neufeldt-Fast (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), pp. 145–62. Kirby, Torrance. ‘Wholesale or Retail? Antoine de Marcourt’s The Boke of Marchauntes and Tudor political theology.’ Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme, 28.2: (2004): 37–60. Luscombe, David, ‘The Lex Divinitatis in the Bull Unam Sanctam of Pope Boniface VIII’, in Church and Government in the Middle Ages, ed. C.N.L. Brooke et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 205–21. Luther, Martin, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 91 vols (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1883–2009). Abbrev: WA. ———, Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. Theodore G. Tappert, Library of Christian Classics 18 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955). ———, Luther’s Works, gen. ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols (St. Louis: Concordia; Philadelphia: Muhlenburg Press, 1955–1986). Abbrev: LW. ———, Selected Writings of Martin Luther, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007). Marcourt, Antoine de, The boke of marchauntes, right necessarye unto all folkes. Newly made by the lorde Pantapole, right expert in suche busynesse, nere neyghbour unto the lorde Pantagrule (London: Thomas Godfraye, 1534). Pannenberg, Wolfhart, Systematic Theology, Volume 2, trans. G.W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994). Rupp, Gordon, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969). Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Vermigli, Peter Martyr, Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. and trans. Joseph C. McLelland and Emidio Campi (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2006). ———, Commentary on the Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah, ed. Daniel J. Shute (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002). ———, Common Places, trans. Anthonie Marten, 4 bks (London: Henry Denham and Henry Middleton, 1583). ———, In Duos Libros Samuelis Prophetae […] Commentarii (Zurich: C. Froschauer, 1564). ———, In Lamentationes Sanctissimi Ieremiae Prophetae Commentarium (Zurich: Jacob Bodmer, 1629). ———, In Librum Iudicum […] Commentarii (Zurich: C. Froschauer, 1563). ———, In Primum, Secundum, et Initium Tertii Libri ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum (Zurich: C. Froschauer, 1563, 1582; Lich: Nicholas Erbenius, 1598). ———, Loci Communes (London: Kingston, 1576).

‘In Vulcano Veritas’: Sir Hugh Platt’s Alchemical Exchanges Ayesha Mukherjee

Crossroads of Alchemy: Practical or Arcane In his notebook, the Elizabethan scientific practitioner, natural philosopher, trader, and poet Sir Hugh Platt (1552–1608) drafted a receipt on drawing ‘a trew Quintessence from Herbes, Suger, Corall, Pearle, Egges, Blood &c’ by taking a ‘pure, clear, & simple ­philosophical heaven’ and grinding it ‘with the salt of that simple whose quintessence you wold haue’. Residue from the evaporated lee of the calcined substance was incorporated; the ‘heaven’ was brought to its ‘first ­ collor & forme’ by repeated ‘ablution’; the mixed substances were sealed in a glass vessel and ‘digested’ in a ‘temperate Balneo […] till it hath passed all the Colors in Philosophie’. Thus, wrote Platt, ‘you haue your heaven stellified with the Astrum of that Herbe you seeke’.1 Cryptic and magical as this may sound to our modern ears, in Platt’s world, it was a common alchemical procedure, possessing pragmatic and e­conomic value,2 and could be adapted (as Platt’s 19 variations show) to different

A. Mukherjee (*)  Department of English and Film, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_10

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materials—pearl, coral, sugar, honey, ambergris, metals, blood, or dead body parts—and to different purposes—medical, domestic, or commercial. Such variations directly shaped the practitioner’s technical v­ ocabulary, explicatory methods, and rhetorical choices. What may seem like arcane obfuscation was rhetorical reinforcement of alchemy’s laboriously repeated physical tasks: ‘and hic tere, tere, iterum tere ne te taedeat’.3 Latin insertions were not intended to cloud the mundane; metaphorical abstractions referred to concrete alchemical processes. The ‘philosophical heaven’ (coelum philosophorum) meant volatile spirits rising to the top of the alembic during vaporisation of the philosopher’s stone. The legendary alchemist Calid described the sublimation of the stone’s matter as an ascent ‘from the Earth into Heaven’, and distillation as the reverse, ‘to the intent to make the body which is Earth, into a Spirit which is subtil, and then to reduce that Spirit into a body again which is gross, changing one Element into another’.4 In Platt’s receipt, the spirituous universal quintessence was mixed with gross matter and cleansed of impurities, so that mercurial waters could resurrect the stone’s matter in the alembic. The passing of ‘colours’ marked stages of transformation from black to white.5 Platt was applying the Paracelsian (and Rupescissian) idea that the arcana restored harmony between an inner astrum or star and the heavenly astrum; thus the opus alchymicum aimed to harness celestial virtues (‘stellify’).6 This depended on labour, repetition, and a system of affinities—expressed through the receipt’s circular language, structure, and procedure. The process had multiple practical uses in households, husbandry, medicine, and trade in the London market.7 Such a receipt might become a ‘product’ if it was an item in a popular published receipt book, if its material outputs were sold, if the manuscript receipt itself was bought and sold within a network of practitioners, or if the wider base of knowledge that informed the receipt was traded among secret coteries. All these circumstances are visible in Platt’s case. His popular publications contained permutations of the quintessence receipt.8 Inventories of his shop, the ‘Jewell House’, named after his book The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594), listed alchemically prepared medicines and their prices, while his inventory of trading plans listed the ‘secrete[s]’ of verdigris, saltpetre, and wine, as well as ‘Medecines’ and ‘Teaching of thart Spagiricall’.9 Other manuscripts recorded his medical practice: remedies, patients, their locations and dates.10 Platt taught medical

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alchemy, exchanging knowledge and receipts with correspondents whose names he often concealed if they were of high rank.11 In some cases, like Thomas Elkinton, whom he helped set up a medical practice, and Dekyngeston, with whom he exchanged alchemical receipts, both knowledge and money changed hands.12 Extracts from ‘Rypley, Arnolde and other bookes for my better and perfecte remembrance’, possibly sold to Platt, were inscribed, ‘This is the hande of a pore man / The more pitie he is so [inserted by another hand] / let all be don in the name of god’, signed ‘E. Dekyngston’.13 Through such exchanges, alchemy and arcane beliefs entered and merged with the everyday world of households and trades. Recent histories of early modern alchemy have usefully blurred previously imagined boundaries between practical and philosophical, mundane and arcane functions of alchemical knowledge-making. While much of this work addresses European contexts, it has implications for local English alchemical contexts.14 Platt’s alchemical manuscripts provide points of entry for studying intersections between seemingly discrete domains of knowledge and exchange in early modern England.15 The receipts illustrate an alchemical practice positioned within an economy of knowledge as well as products. Platt habitually cross-referenced fellow practitioners. As an alchemical and (unlicensed) medical practitioner, admirer and critic of the Paracelsian corpus, he evolved a personal theory and practice of alchemy and distillation, traceable through his reading, collating, and application of authors to issues affecting pragmatic lives of people in his neighbourhood. His manuscript records of alchemical experiments, translations, and drafted treatises, in the Sloane Collection, are linked to his reading practices, which are visible through the marginalia which he left in his books, many of which are now at St. John’s College, Cambridge.16 As I have argued elsewhere, Platt’s pursuit of alchemy did not set him on the sidelines of society: neither a fraud, nor an abstruse mystic philosopher, the intersection of his alchemical philosophy and technology with diverse areas of knowledge and experimentation placed his alchemical work firmly within everyday concerns of local communities, and broader socio-­ economic questions affecting early modern England.17 Platt’s work demonstrates exchanges between literary practice, theology, natural philosophy, gardening, land management, household economy, and trade. This chapter recovers complex transactions between these sites of knowledge and production enabled by Platt’s imaginative literary

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exegesis, stimulated by his alchemical work. Rather than regarding it simply as part of a proto-history of the Royal Society’s knowledgemaking programmes, I locate Platt’s alchemy in its own moment, when literary imagination and representation constituted part of the practice of making knowledge in early modern England. As Gareth Roberts observed, alchemical language simultaneously addressed the elevated, exotic, and ‘disgustingly prosaic’.18 In his ‘theorie vppon the vegetable and animall stone’, Platt made similar observations. There is a thing in the world whose virtue is so manifest, & yet so hidden, as euery one receiuing benefit therby, & no man liuing without yt, yet very few or almost none do see into the depth of the excellency therof. In whose territories the fiery dragon, the Toad, the basilisk, the deuouring Lion, & the Ostridge haue their places. He also is the mightiest king in the world, in whose treasure howses by the meanes of the great authority and power of his officers, the heauenlie forces and virtues, together with the Elementes are continually most abundantly receiued, & bountifully ­deliuered owt againe. Here is our foundation, & nowe to the process.19

Self-conscious play on the paradoxes of ‘manifest’ yet ‘hidden’, ‘living’ yet not ‘seeing’, emphasised that the art of alchemy, which united opposites, was itself imbued with oppositions. The series of animal symbols, characteristic representations of alchemical ingredients and procedures, drew attention to the variability of meanings in alchemy. The dragon could mean the earthly corpus,20 or the dual-natured Mercury uniting male and female seeds.21 The toad was the base or swelling matter of the Stone in the alembic during putrefaction.22 Dragon, toad, serpent, panther, crow, and green lion were often overlapping terms. The ‘basilisk’ represented the ‘great Elixir’ that, as Ripley explained, could kill the base metal and transmute it to gold instantly—that is, if ‘gold’ meant gold.23 Some terms were explained by their effect rather than material composition; while others, like ‘stomach of the Ostrich’, gave rise to multiple explanations and experiments, heightening their indeterminacy.24 The metaphor of ‘territories’, in the quoted passage, set the alchemical adept at the centre of his invisible kingdom served by ‘officers’, personified as exotic and prosaic animals. The true adept was ‘the mightiest king in the world’, but ‘true’ alchemy was much contested and subject to continuous literary parody, from Chaucer to Ben Jonson. The latter famously

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parodied alchemical taxonomy and its ‘worlds of […] strange ingredients’ that ‘would burst a man to name’—‘What else are all your terms, / Whereon no one o’ your writers ’grees with other? / […] Your toad, your crow, your dragon, and your panther, / Your sun, your moon, your firmament, your adrop’.25 While revealing awareness of this terminology, Surly’s speech exploited alchemy’s unstable meanings, and subverted serious practical exegesis. The need to counter such parody led practitioners to develop their own rhetorical stance, partly visible in the sermonising tone of Platt’s exposition: ‘Here is our foundation, & nowe to the process’. The foundation of alchemy was simultaneously built and destabilised by the metaphorical and allegorical layering of its terms; but it could be understood through processes. Alchemical practices heavily imbued with arcane symbolism had pragmatic efficacy across seemingly separate knowledge domains. After the quintessence receipts, MS 2212 contains a curious set of guidelines, ‘Physicall [medical] uses to be made of the partes of a dead man’.26 Corpse medicine, as Richard Sugg argues, was part of everyday practice among Elizabethans, especially unlicensed medical practitioners, deriving from a long Classical tradition. By the sixteenth century, ‘Partes of a dead man’ became medicine in many forms. ‘Mumia’ was a substance which could be derived from the corpses of embalmed Egyptians, travellers recently drowned in Arabian sandstorms, or freshly executed criminals.27 ‘The whole mumia of man philosophically prepared’, wrote Platt, ‘worketh renovation in man’.28 Its efficacy relied upon the paradox of dead flesh rejuvenating living bodies, thought to work through a system of correspondences where each part had a specific remedial function. Powdered skull (of a victim of war, or other violent death) remedied agues, or was made into pills with sugar paste to cure headaches. Sties and moles were cured by stroking them with a dead hand, but a dead child’s hand would cure a child and a dead adult’s hand a fellow adult. Scabs and itches were cured with water that had washed a dead body; toothache by applying a dead man’s tooth, dried and ground. Such remedies were connected with blood medicines—the quintessence of a young and healthy man’s blood could rejuvenate a patient; while the ‘common mumia’ cured internal bruises, and a ‘purgia hominis’ had a startling effect on one of Platt’s acquaintances: it ‘cured the sinewes of Mr Harrington’s hande being shronke so as hee cold not strech foorth his hand’.29 There was a market in corpses and medicines made from them, to which Platt contributed. By 1602, his fever

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remedy, incorporating powdered skull, was famous enough that another unlicensed medical practitioner Francis Anthony, defying the Royal College of Physicians, admitted he had mastered this receipt ‘communicated to him by Hugo Plat’.30 The prose fiction writer Thomas Nashe’s claim that to ‘physicians and their confectioners’, mummies were ‘as familiar as mumchance amongst pages’,31 and similar witticisms about mumia remedies, were as popular as Jonson’s comic ridicule of alchemy. Looking beyond the parodic, discourses of transformation in such remedies were founded on positive ethical and rhetorical nuances of transforming dead bodies of felonious, violent individuals into a cure. In an era where dead men’s bones were ground into flour for bread during famines, the corpse was not an item to waste.32 The ‘disgustingly prosaic’ was absorbed into a philosophical system where the human microcosm was understood to contain qualities of the ‘Stone Microcosmus’, the philosopher’s stone, which duplicated within the alembic God’s own macrocosmic creation.33 In Platt’s world, alchemy transmuted the value of things deemed valueless. Just as often as it turned the material into the symbolic, it transformed the macabre into the mundane, and the seemingly ludicrous into something serious. Rather than simply being secretive, obscure, ancient, and allegorical, alchemical language operated crucially at the crossroads of knowledge by maintaining its dual, transitional, Janus-faced quality.

Becoming an Adept: Collection to Translation The fluidity of Platt’s alchemical corpus shows the alchemical knowledge-maker’s ability to stand at the crossroads of knowledge ­ was the outcome of treading a long and laborious scholarly path. Platt described writing and knowledge-gathering as alchemical purification, separating the dross of authors who had filled their books ‘with vntrew and frivolous wonders’ from accounts of ‘great workman shipps and labors’. This affected alchemical practice: ‘by Vertew retentiue of some of their partes remaining’, they ‘sometimes bring some thinges in some cawses to an indifferent good effect’.34 By distilling good practice out of these texts, Platt recast processes of humanist learning in alchemical terms. In his manuscripts, humanist knowledge-making methods, with their sophisticated forms of collection, copying, collation, cross-referencing, abridgement, translation, and composition, were transmuted by Platt’s approach.

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This was visible in formative collations of alchemical texts in MS 2170 (quotations and treatises from Ramond Lull, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, George Ripley, Giambatista della Porta, Arnold of Villanova, and ‘Aristotle’) and the more carefully collated, indexed, and categorised excerpts of MS 2195, which schematised Platt’s areas of learning and expertise. Some excerpts in MS 2170 were copied by assisting hands, corrected and annotated by Platt. One contained Platt’s signature and the accompanying marginal note: ‘I hade this coppie, herafter, of Jo. Baptista: whose practice was greately hervpon: altho he kepte the same very secreate’.35 A closely annotated copy of della Porta’s work exists among the surviving books from Platt’s library.36 Platt’s ­cross-referencing brought these authors in dialogue: ‘Note here the wordes of Raymond Lullii: what fyer he makes in his 26 leafe of his Codicilla.*?’.37 Diagrams of experiments and equipment were added to some receipts; while some incorporated instructions from other practitioners: Note this that Mathias, that was the chese workeman to Mr Pope at quinborowghe castell: who is a stranger borne was in tymes paste a verie good Apothecarie: tolde me that he was wonnte when he dyd occupie pothecarie ware: to bye the Beste blewe Romayne Vitrioll. at the Cittie of Francforde (which is one of the free Citties of hie Iarmanye) at two tymes in the yere: vnto the which Citie of Francforde all nacions hathe greate trafficke: so well Englishe Merchantes as others: And theare he sayes I may have the beste Blewe Calcantum Romany at ii tymes of the yere: That is to saye abowght Shrostyde & Michalmas.38

Jennifer Rampling terms the process of interpreting alchemical works ‘practical exegesis’, replicating procedures across generations of alchemists.39 Platt’s manuscripts show how generic elements of ‘practical exegesis’ were adapted to the objectives, reading habits, experimental patterns, and exchange networks of a practitioner. By appropriating Matthias’s practices, Platt worked into his notes a contemporary narrative of ‘a stranger borne’ who had given up his old profession as an apothecary, migrated to England, and become a cheese-maker, at a time when European migration shaped the burgeoning alchemical knowledge market.40 His expert advice as an apothecary was valued by Platt for his own practice of medical alchemy. Economic pressures that may have led Matthias to develop new expertise as a ‘chese-workeman’ did not erase the market value of his previous knowledge. He knew where and how

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to buy the best quality ingredients, and his information allowed Platt to access newly expanded trading opportunities. Thus, ‘practical exegesis’, in Platt’s version, included comprehension of the potential for economic exchanges embedded in processes of alchemical knowledge exchange. This did not mean that traditional forms of alchemical exegesis were eschewed; rather, commentary on sources, markets, and practitioner networks within and beyond England coexisted and interacted with conventional cross-referencing with other manuscripts, authors, and books. In one marginal note, Platt asked, ‘What is Ceration? Look for more herof in my Blake Booke of Bacons fo.64 of oyle of Tartar. I also remember here Ripley in steade of this Calx of ☽ [silver] and ☿ [mercury] he occupied the Calx of ☉ [gold] and ☿ which when they were precipitate and [Platt’s symbol of amalgamated gold and mercury] made bothe one than he did Dissolve hit with Sal Anatron’.41 This created a consistent dialogue in the margins of Platt’s manuscripts with great alchemists of the past. He saw himself as part of this lineage, as well as being dynamic in questioning previous conclusions. If MS 2170 represented a formative stage in Platt’s practical exegesis, the structured MS 2195 methodically codified his work. It began with a list of 46 alchemical philosophers and works, including Platt (at nos. 37 and 43).42 His own work was thus firmly positioned within his constructed alchemical canon.43 This was followed by Platt’s ‘Alchimiae Anatomia’ itemising ten stages of the opus alchymicum,44 and ‘H. Platti Censura in Authores chimicos’, a prefatory evaluation of alchemical philosophers.45 Most of the manuscript contained indexed and numbered quotations from the listed alchemists, categorised by subject.46 A preceding folio clustered topics together, identifying ‘which titles do help to giue light one to an other’. Platt’s reading demonstrates interest in Hermetic and Eastern traditions. The preface claimed there was fundamental agreement among ‘trew philosophers being truly vnderstood’ regarding ‘the matter and manner of the working of the stone’ but variations in practice. Collation and commonplacing expedited progress towards ‘true’ understanding, and translation was an important stage in the transmutation of understanding. The flourishing alchemical book market fuelled Platt’s translation efforts.47 His translations of Paracelsus’ De spiritibus planetarum, Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, and some collected quotations were meticulously structured.48 As Platt’s preface explained, ‘epitome’ was the core method in his textual practice. Agrippa’s ‘volume of great bulke’, ‘conteyning about 200 leaues in a close letter’, he had ‘by deviding ye

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Chaff from ye Corne, and ye shells from ye kernells, reduced into less then 20 such leaues, and could (if it were lawfull to send nature abroad naked and without hir veyle) contract them almost into 20 lynes’.49 Translation and extraction were stages in the process of ­knowledge-making that determined the practitioner’s focus. In extracts from Lib.1, Cap.6 (on water), Platt retained Agrippa’s exempla from Genesis, Thales of Miletus, Hesiod, and Pliny, but omitted incorporations of Ovid, biblical accounts of miracles with water, and descriptions of springs, rivers, and wondrous changes in climate by ancient geographers and physicians. Though Platt often revelled in poetic digressions, his rhetorical aim here was to present the text as an alchemical extraction of essential points of practice regarding the perceived function of water as a transforming agent of plenty. As Platt attempted different rhetorical approaches to exegesis, he placed after the translated text a ‘Touchstone of Alchimie partlie drawne from the minerall, & partlie from the Animal & Vegetable stone’ explaining material meanings of terms like aqua caelestis, aqua vitae, stomach of the ostrich, and ‘inward fire of nature’.50 Without this exegetical touchstone, alchemists could not practice: ‘I haue (in ye loue I beare to true learning) after the end of ys Epitome set downe some voces artis with the twoe hidden fiers of nature as a touchstone to trie ye one and as a Coment to expand ye other’.51 The repetition of ‘trial’ and ‘commentary’, bearing upon each other, also demonstrated a fundamental problem of articulation in alchemical discourse, where spiritual forces were thought to act invisibly on material things. When these forces came into contact with identifiable material objects like herbs or metals, the objects themselves were transformed through contact and assimilation, acquiring a similarly indescribable quality. Key active agents in alchemical transformation were described through metaphorical decknamen (basilisk, fiery dragon, devouring lion, toad, ostrich), or their actions. The ‘inward fier of nature’ enriched ground, gardens, and orchards by heavenly influences, without the help of soil, marl, or compost. It helped to grow Indian plants, make all vegetables prosper, preserve herbal extracts, and improve the taste of wine. While English translation expedited transitions across different realms of knowledge and networks, its manner of textual recovery also generated a vernacular English alchemical language, which could be reinforced through competitive engagement with ­contemporary European alchemists.

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Debate and Dialogue Platt’s sharply polemical ‘censure’ of Joseph Duchesne, called Quercetanus, a leading figure in the rival French school of Paracelsian alchemists, suggests the development of a nascent national alchemical discourse.52 In the first decade of the seventeenth century, as the Parisian debates between Galenic and Paracelsian medicine gathered momentum, Duchesne criticised dogmatic Galenists, but professed a moderate, medically applied Paracelsianism.53 Platt noted, he ‘vtterly distasts’ the preparations of Quercetanus and his followers, first, because their practice consisted of ‘manual’ distillations, sublimations, calcinations, and fermentations, ‘wherin they doe many times satisfie the letter, but not the meaning of the philosophers’. Second, although Platt commended them as learned ‘Theorists’ (owing to their ‘liuely anatomie of man yt litle world’), he did not think their practical discourse ‘doth any way answeare their theorie’.54 Though industrious scholars, they did not possess the ‘excellency of spirit’ to mediate between theory and practice, or connect form and matter. Platt approved of Duchesne’s poetic cosmology in Le Grand Miroir du Monde (1587, 1593) which saw the sympathetic action of heavens, stars, angels, and oceans in relation to the human microcosm55; but he quoted Palingenius (‘Sed pauces tanto dignantur munere Diui’)56 to demonstrate that the ability to manipulate celestial influences was a divine gift. Much of Platt’s criticism was about alchemical procedure. Quercetanus and his followers emphasised alchemical divisions rather than conjunctions, which ‘greatly impaire yt trinitie of Sal, Sulphur and mercurie, which they seeke earnestly to establish’. True quintessence ‘in ye nature of a lightening doth soddenlie passe through and pierce the bodie’: Quercitanus described many quintessences but ‘none performing ys admirable effect’; his silence on the ‘fires of nature’57 suggested he was a great scholar ‘by reading’ but not a ‘true and sound filius artis’. There could be no worse insult: Duchesne was a mere reader, neither an artist, nor a divinely elected alchemical adept. Further distancing Duchesne from the tradition of ‘true and sound’ knowledge, Platt queried his definition of saltpetre as that ‘salt of ye earth which the philosophers meane’. Platt argued, the ‘true salt of ye earth’ was drawn from ‘a kind of heavenly earth’ which had received infinite impressions and virtues from the influence of ‘all these aethereall lights of the firmament’ and was within a degree or two from a ‘Caelum terrae’.58 The conflict between Duchesne and Platt hinged

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on the issue of articulation as much as quality of knowledge. Platt had developed a language that shifted deftly, defining material practices in immaterial terms, and vice versa. He noted that the philosophical ‘salt of ye earth’ and the ‘ordinary, base & Corroding’ saltpetre were as different as ‘drosse and gold’, because saltpetre was made from the ‘most filthie and excrementall ordure and vrine of men and beasts’. Platt had seen the ‘earth-moles yt worke therin’ to refuse no manner of ‘muddie or feculent water’ in extracting saltpetre, whose taste was sharp and consumption dangerous. Another distinction was temporal. The divine transmutation of ‘salt’, linked to cosmic momentum, was perfected with a year’s ‘revolution of the heavens’, while the formation of saltpetre did not require long workmanship—Platt knew Peter works in England ‘to afford 200 weightes weekely’. He thus distinguished between his own practical experiments to create artificial nitre beds, watered with urine, to generate saltpetre more swiftly and reduce dependence on natural nitre deposits, and his experiments with soil types which relied on a philosophical understanding of transmutation.59 Duchesne seemed flawed in his understanding of the relationship between form and matter: calcination could not, as he apparently claimed, destroy the ‘formes and shapes’ of simples entirely.60 The ‘forme and figure of netles’ were seen in their ‘icy lee’, and the form and colour of rose leaves ‘in their proper saltes’. To theoretically admit the destruction of form was to destroy the basis of alchemical practice founded on conjunction, assimilation, and sympathetic correspondence related to a Neo-Platonic belief in essential forms.61 Platt compared the manual alchemists (to which group he insisted Duchesne belonged)62 with the Galenists, who, he claimed, were unable to identify the fixed and most beneficial substance of plants, and ended up producing foul concoctions later sweetened with other ingredients.63 The ‘distillers of the new fashion’ were only slightly better, as they ‘by their often iterations, diuisions, purifactions, and vnperfect Coniunctions, bring matter with great paines taking to an end more pure then perfect’.64 Neither understood that divine form was stronger than material essence. While Platt maintained the distinction between ‘manual’ and ‘natural’ alchemists through a language of ecological empathy with the natural world, Quercitanus ‘roareth with a prick shaft at terra foliata philosophorum one of ye greatest and most secret words of art’.65 Platt’s compilation of ‘Questions in philosophie’, and the tendency to begin receipts with ‘quaere’, indicated that experiments were debates and debates a form of practical trial in Platt’s intellectual milieu.66

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The quaere form of describing experimental hypotheses was imported from legal drafting where it was used to mark an argument subject to verification. As alchemical knowledge was exchanged within coteries, it acquired different formal structures, often open-ended and malleable. The humanist dialogue offered a useful framework for alchemical debate. Platt’s dialogue, addressed to a fellow practitioner (apparently of higher rank, but his name is concealed), recorded a conversation on ‘those poyntes of Philosophie that we latlye conferred vppon touchinge the Eliexir or Medecyne of the Philosophers stonne’. Platt adopted the voice of an alchemical adept imparting knowledge, through conversation and in written catechetical dialogue. The instructional method disseminated knowledge ‘approved and Ratefied bothe by Infallible naturall reasons, and allso by the aucthoritie of the Philosophers’. The reader’s ‘judgement and oppynion therin allready conceaved shalbe surely settled and established’, and his mind ‘the better moved and stirred vp to preferre the practises wherby’, both he and the instructor would ‘be made the partakers of this Celestiall benefitt’. Scholastic and humanist approaches to auctoritas were merged; multiple voices and intellectual positions were presented, and Platt’s role as instructor was established regardless of social rank.67 The 28 questions and their answers, backed by Platt’s reading and interpretation, were rationally ordered. The opening query, ‘Fyrst shewe me in what thinge, of what thing, or by what thinge is the medecyne or multiplicacion of metttalls to be made’, was followed by related queries on the nature of metallic transmutation, leading to the philosophical query (marked with Platt’s symbol used to denote prioritised experiments in his notebooks) ‘What is that prima materia or firste matter of metalls’. Gathering authors in consent, Platt replied: ‘Argentum vivum that is to say Quicksilver as Albertus, Arnoldus, Aristotle, Phithagoras, Treverensis, Gebar, Paracelsus, Turba Philosophiorum and all the Philosopheres with one consente and without variance doe verefie’. The collation exercise of MS 2195 thus informed the dialogue, and, rather than Scholastic disputatio, the m ­ anner of debate and investigation inter pares was adopted to facilitate this knowledge exchange. Platt inhabited a network and knowledge market fostered by manuscript circulation and print publication, and the censure of Quercetanus may have been intended for publication to argue the superiority of the national tradition of alchemy Platt constructed and placed himself in: the English were the true filius artis, not the French, and were thus better

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equipped to compete in a world market of alchemical products, remedies, and practices. Duchesne was established with key European alchemical patrons like Moritz of Hesse-Kassell, whom Platt tried to approach through his own courtly connections.68 The dialogue appears to be for a coterie audience who also had an economic value for Platt since he earned income from teaching alchemy. His self-fashioning as a teacher depended on demonstrating that alchemical interpretation was a continuous process, and in this respect, he was aided by alchemy’s instabilities of meaning and procedure.

Philosophy and Practice An outcome of such debates was Platt’s continuously repurposed treatise ‘A Theorique of H.P. vppon the vegetable and animall stone’, with three sections on ‘practice’ which aimed to find a compound of lead and a suitable solvent to form the basis of a variety of remedies for agriculture, horticulture, and animal and human health.69 This modified the traditional alchemical search for ‘sericon’, prima materia of the ‘vegetable stone’ or the alchemical healing elixir. The material identity of sericon, as Rampling shows, altered radically from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.70 Its pseudo-Lullian definition (lead dissolved in the ‘resolutive menstruum’ of highly rectified spirit of wine) was queried by Ripley, who reformulated sericon as calcined lead oxide (litharge) dissolved in distilled vinegar. Sixteenth-century markets stimulated experimentation with dissolving lead salts in wine and tartar-based solvents. Red lead was easily obtained from apothecaries and adapted to the use of vegetable solvents or mineral acids. Stronger solvents made the process applicable to metallic transmutation (the mineral stone) rather than medicinal (the vegetable and animal stone). Some experiments utilised verdigris (copper acetate) rather than red lead, the former used for green pigment and the latter for red by craftsmen.71 Platt’s own experiments with ornamental colours used both.72 Practitioners increasingly left the choice of metal and solvent open. Eventually, Paracelsian remedies using compounds of natural antimonial sulphide and vegetable solvents, such as wine, v­ inegar, and tartar, became the norm and decknamen for materials and processes of making the ‘vegetable stone’ were transformed. Platt’s practice illustrates the blurring of both approaches, and their articulation, as he looked back to Riplean or pseudo-Lullian practices, while simultaneously

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experimenting with antimonian practices of key figures in contemporary antimony debates, like Alexander von Suchten.73 Platt thus drew together the Lull–Ripley tradition of transmutational alchemy and theology couched in figurative terms and images, seen in his collations from the copiously circulating Riplean and ­ pseudoLullian corpus, and his engagement with the Riplean line of adepts, Norton and Charnock; the experimental tradition of Paracelsian medical alchemy, where Platt positioned himself competitively against the French Paracelsians; and the Agrippean humanist occult tradition, blending Neo-Platonic and Hermetic thought. The aim of his ‘vegetable work’ was two-fold: agricultural and medical. He perceived agricultural improvement as a kind of medical alchemy, aimed at the ‘fructification’ of the earth and the ‘regeneration’ of man and other living creatures. Platt’s language gave soil a quality of animation, linking it through plants to animals and man in a chain of ‘sympathetic’ spiritual and physiological connections. Arcane elements of Agrippean philosophy were glossed in practical Paracelsian terms, infusing the treatise with the informal marginalia of experimental notebooks, and reverting to a philosophical mode when Platt addressed Neo-Platonic ideas.74 Platt’s vision of correspondences combined expositions of Paracelsian signatures, Ficino’s ‘soul’ as ‘media rerum’, and Agrippa’s stellar influences. Each plant or animal had, thought Platt, a designated star or signature which it drew upon with the help of the alchemical adept. An extract Platt collected from Ficino’s De Vita noted the potential of matter to ‘draw a particular gift from the Idea [singulare munus ab ideae trahes], through the seminal reason of the Soul’.75 Ficino’s intermediary ‘soul’ constructed ‘baits’ (escas) to tie itself to the material world, and yet, attracted ‘gifts from the ensouled world and from the living stars [animatique mundi munera stellarumque viventium]’.76 In his notes on Ficino,77 Platt cross-referenced this passage with an extract from his translation of Agrippa (No. 13 in Platt)78 whose modified ­Neo-Platonism identified the spiritum mundi (‘spirit of ye world’) with the ‘quintessence’, which is ‘verie requisite as a meane by which the heavenlie soules may bee knit & combined with the grosser bodies & may also confer most admirable gifts vppon them [mirificas dotes largiantur]’.79 Platt’s translation of Agrippa was almost an echo of Ficino. Agrippa’s quintessence operated by correspondence: by this spirit, ‘all hidden properties are infused into hearbes, stones, mettalls & living creatures by ye sun, by the ☽, by ye planets, & by the stars yt are aboue planets’.80

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To utilise the spirit from the human realm, one must identify the material whose quintessence would more ‘reddily engender their owne like’.81 From studying antimonian compounds, Platt was probably aware that the star was the natural signature of antimony, which crystallised into a stellate pattern, perhaps suggesting its particular affinity with celestial bodies and heightened ability to draw to itself celestial virtues.82 The power of literalism in such analogies stands out in a receipt that proposed, following Ficino,83 a special affinity between the sun, ‘the hart of Man’, and ‘the Topaze which is the minium of the ☉’.84 Consuming a topaz exposed to the sun, excreting it, exposing and consuming it again was considered a healthy regime, predicated upon a direct flow of ‘sympathy’ between the human heart, the sun, and the topaz, and the function of the human stomach as an alembic to process the c­elestial influence the topaz imbibed through its affinity with and exposure to sunlight. The stomach as analogy for the alembic was standard in alchemical decknamen, but here, the stomach actually was the vessel for alchemical transformation, literalising rather than symbolising sympathy between macrocosm and microcosm. When Platt applied subtle modulations of Paracelsian, Neo-Platonic, occult, and recent ‘antimonian’ alchemy in practice, reinforcing the philosophical notion of sympathy between mankind, natural world, and cosmos, he returned to the Lullian notion of using aqua caelestis (spirit of wine) as a solvent, but experimented with other solvents, setting out separate processes for fertilising and medicine. For physick, after lead was imbibed in glass pans with aqua caelestis, it stood 3 days to ‘attract from the heavens’, and was then digested in a gentle balneo or the sun.85 The receipts noted variations: use of canvas covers (designed and sold by Platt’s shop) for outdoor experiments; effects of steeping lead in the spirit of herbs or stronger alcoholic spirits like aqua vitae; and using tartar instead of wine.86 For fertilising, Platt adapted this procedure to use ashes and soot imbibed in water to steep the seeds of plants, wondering whether the ‘salt of ashes from the peterhowses’ could be ‘the vegetable salt somuch comended by Master Bernard Palissy’, with some of whose agricultural ideas Platt disagreed, as he did with Quercetanus.87 Directly linking alchemical reading and thought with the work of natural philosophers like Palissy, Platt observed: ‘quintessence will convert each thing (though raw and vnripe) into the nature of a quintessence, converting also himself into the nature of that wherewith he is stellified’.88 Transmutation thus mutually affected the transformed material and the

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transforming agent. Receipt 27 advised different additives like honey, sugar, musk, and ambergris, ‘digesting them together in structhione & so proceeding philosophically’, with the query, ‘qre if amber, iett, pearle, corall &c may not bee opened this way to worck owt their arcanum or quint essence’. The treatise broadened to discuss animal parts,89 planting and grafting to produce larger fruit or defy the seasons, or circumvent limitations of local climate and topography,90 and other areas of agricultural and household practice, such as distilling flowers.91 Agriculture and horticulture were elaborately discussed in Platt’s Diuerse sorts of soyle (1594) and Floraes Paradise (1608), and household stillroom utilities in Delights for Ladies (1602). The manuscript treatise shows these popular published receipts had an alchemical core, which Platt developed into more accessible pragmatic forms. The final section extended the process from ‘vegetable’ to ‘animal’ work (use of human and animal parts).92 Rulandus’ dictionary defined ‘lapis animalis’ (animal stone) as human blood, where ‘stone’ referred to fixed, non-evaporating matter.93 In such experiments, the ‘perfect philosophical ♄ [lead]’, imbibed with the ☿ (volatile spirit) of the ‘harte and stones’ (probably decknamen for flesh and blood, or fixed matter derived thereof) of beasts, were mashed together, placed ‘in struthione’ for six days, and infused with the spirit of wine for twenty-four hours. Different animal types suited different purposes: ‘lusty rams’ for aphrodisiacs, deer and stags for a tonic, and indeed human flesh and blood—the mercurial spirit of ‘lustie, younge, and helthfull men’ was ‘most excellent’, said Platt, ‘and so of their other partes which may easilie be had in war’. In the margin, he noted this was why ‘cannibals feeding vppon men’ were ‘very strong and lustie’.94 In the rather gruesome context of the ­medical remedy of mumia, produced from the bodies of executed prisoners, criminals, and soldiers, it was not just dead bodies that were needed, but freshly dead ones. Platt tried to gloss the explicit reminder of c­ annibalism as pragmatic evidence of the benefits of mumia, in an attempt to elide the moral anxieties common in the period. The treatise ended with a receipt for using the ‘mumia of man’, whose caelum was drawn by the same process as the vegetable work. The medicine could be applied to swellings, aches, gout, and tumours. As the macabre tenor of his experiments surfaced, the spectre of secrecy returned to haunt Platt, aggravated by conflicts in his own sources. Agrippa firmly denounced mumia as poor medical practice, while Ficino recommended the liquor of a young man’s blood as a better

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restorative than milk.95 Gesner, Brunswick, della Porta, and other practitioners recommended distilling human blood.96 Platt believed in the power of various bodily quintessences, but in a more material sense, merging Paracelsian notions of extracting human vitality and Ficino’s transanimation. Thus, it was not the flesh of man that was consumed but a quasi-divine spirit, which persisted for a time in the dead body and was captured in the true adept’s medicament. This allowed the infusion of moralised Protestant exegesis into such receipts.

Poetry, Secrecy, and Self-fashioning The author’s self-fashioning, poised between revelation and concealment, was part of his moralised exegesis. A cluster of 80 receipts ­followed Platt’s treatise, opening with a drafted oath ‘to be ministred vppon the discouery of that great secret of Mumia in Man’, taken by Platt in May 1605.97 The enlightened adept undertook not to disclose ‘either by worde of mowth, wrighting or any other meanes whatsoeuer’ to ‘any person or persons whatsoeuer’ revelations ‘either concerning phisick, restauration or renouation of any substaunce that is in man, & which you know not already’. Disclosure required the master’s ‘especiall consent in wrighting vnder his hand’. After the master’s death, receipts could be disclosed to ‘such a one of whome by long and sufficient proof, you are fully satisfied in your Conscience to be a fit man’. The adept’s fitness was judged by ‘his secresie, worthines and vpright and godlie cariage of himself to be made a filius Artis’. The oath’s legal language and rhetoric of morality and godliness were carefully constructed. Legalistic documentation of knowledge exchange protected specialised knowledge. Secrecy in alchemical discourse was not merely a trope repeated by generations of alchemists; like ciphers and metaphors, it played into the way the business of alchemy was conducted, and helped preserve trade secrets. Since writing was part of practice, a ‘true son of art’ attended to modes of composition, balancing concealment with ­disclosure in ‘plain terms’, through his legal and humanist training. Theoretical and practical exegesis in Platt’s alchemical corpus culminated in a poem.98 Re-writing alchemical practice as poetry was a stage in the art, signifying the achievement of the status of an adept who could now train his own ‘filius artis’. The poem’s preface was addressed to the ‘trew chimicall Reader’—the kind of active reader Platt himself was— who would go on to become a ‘trew adopted Son’. This Christianised

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motif of alchemical election emphasised that true adepts were recipients of divine grace. Patterns of amelioration at the heart of alchemical experiments, proceeding from gross to pure matter through successive stages, were enacted in study and writing. The opening lines of the prefatory poem asserted the exclusivity of spiritual election through its epanaphora: No ey so quicke but dazeleth at our Arte No witt so sharp whose edge is not rebated No science heere giues light enough to learne And Pallas with her Muses all are mated.99

Throughout the poem, secrecy emphasised the deficiencies of fallen mortal understanding: For colde or durst the pen of mortall wight The secretes of this secrete arte vnfolde, Saturnus age longe since had wheelde abowt, And made our Tropheis all of massiue gold. Yet Nature hath her trew adopted Sons Though seldom seene, nor caring to confer With Vulgare Wittes, which to vaineglorious endes Their lines and Labours whollie do refer.100

Knowledge was sin; yet it was also productive, profitable, and good. To address this familiar Protestant paradox, Christian and alchemical ‘elects’—the ‘trew adopted Sons’—merged, set apart from ‘vulgare wittes’. Human ‘labour’ had to align with good, not ‘vaineglorious’, ends. In the preface to Agrippa, Platt had merged alchemical and Biblical exegesis, glossing Romans 8:22 (‘for we know yt euery Creature growneth with vs also and travaileth in paine together vnto this present’) to ally Christ, who ‘Washed and Cleansed ye soules of many’, to ‘true’ alchemists, whose work was not just akin to divine processes of Creation and salvation but a continuation of them.101 Finding truth in alchemy was a rhetorical obsession. His preface was addressed to ‘the trew children of Hermes’ Schoole’, and his experiments bred ‘in vulcano veritas’, as the title page inscription in another manuscript claimed, subverting the familiar Classical proverb.102 Christian motifs intertwined with Classical ones as Platt invoked the Muses to suggest that alchemy was the amalgamation of all arts (‘Pallas

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with her Muses all are mated’), also modifying marriage and sexual metaphors traditionally used to express alchemical processes. Process and language were allied in alchemy’s treatment of time, and the Classical myth of the ages expressed alchemical patterns of progress from lead to gold, where time was a transmuting agent. Alchemical art reinforced this through its naming of substances and key stages of transmutation. The point was asserted structurally with Platt’s rendition of Creation, the first point in a temporal continuum, as alchemy (f. 120r).103 Although the poem was structured like a prose treatise, each chapter addressing a stage in practice, descriptions in rhyming verse were highly condensed, using symbols and metaphors from which the practice could be read. This functioned as an aide-memoire for a practitioner, a distillation of the essence of the art.104 The last few lines of the preface summed up the content of chapters addressing preparation, proportions, vessels, equipment, fire, colours, and projection—reiterating that poetic composition was alchemy.105 The first chapter (f. 120r-v) began with Creation. God ‘drew’ heaven, earth, and creatures from Chaos, ‘a rude unformed masse’. Man must seek the ‘Microcosmos’ within Chaotic matter, and alchemical operations would ‘turne the wheele of our celestial skies’. Human and divine exercised mutual influence, giving the alchemist the capacity to affect celestial motions and draw upon celestial matter. While the poem gradually narrowed the reader’s focus on details of process, it maintained a dual vision, shifting between the macrocosm and microcosm. The metallic ore with which the creation of the stone began was the ‘Adam metalline’, carrying ‘Eve’ in its rib. The decknamen of the sun, moon, and stars for metals, kept the celestial sphere in view; and the green lion, the alchemical tree of gold, and the conjunction of man and wife, decknamen for alchemical processes, drew the reader’s gaze inwards, into the alembic where transmutation occurred. An overflowing alembic was seen in cosmic and Biblical terms: ‘Shall I with Noaths flood thee terrefie / Least it surround the earth within thie glas’.106 Numerical coding explained proportions: ‘One, two, three, fowre, which makes iust 10 in all, / Is that which all the Sophies in their bookes / Do count the nomber philosophicall’.107 Poetic diction and ciphers, first, enabled a condensed description of alchemical principles (balancing opposites and uniting fixed and volatile matter); second, introduced moral inflections into descriptions of process (‘incestuous broode’; ‘lawles luste doth strive to mend their state’); and, third, ensured the reader’s imagination of the celestial

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sphere remained active when the focus narrowed to practical details. Movement between elevated and mundane, hidden and visible, expansive and narrow, mirrored the alchemical process of reduction to an essence, which nevertheless had wide, universal efficacy. The dual vision was sustained by extended metaphors in the manner of Classical epics. After descriptions of preparing a ‘perfect Mercurie’ (volatile spirit), the rhetoric suddenly shifted to a poetic register, evoking the opus alchymicum as an epic battle where ‘thantimonian Horne / For fierie Phoebus must prepared bee’.108 The rising sun and battle cry portrayed the alchemist as an epic hero, invoking Jupiter’s aid. When extending the war metaphor, Platt hastened to add, alchemy was a ‘work of peace’, ‘Yet Mars himself must breathe his whottest fume / On Venus tender corps’.109 The decknamen took on nuanced, fluid meanings appropriate to this context. Here, Venus was not the ‘whore’ or impure substance she often signified, but the receptive substance (argent vive) united with Mars, the hot and dry active substance (sulphur), in the chymical wedding. The union occurred in the alchemist’s ‘egg’, or vessel closed with Jupiter’s assistance, where the stone underwent transmutation. Usually, Jupiter, the fire of nature, symbolised philosophical sublimation (‘golden shower’) within the vessel.110 Platt regarded it as a drying ‘fire’, operating through the corrosive strong water he recommended adding. Sexual and war imagery were thus amalgamated; the opposites of active and passive, dry and moist, aggressive and receptive were united, as the very metaphor of epic battle was manoeuvred to demonstrate that alchemy was a ‘work of peace’ and reconciliation. Alchemical literary strategies were thus not simply mnemonic devices, and nor were they propelled by the desire to capture the book market, although both of these functions existed. Their integration with alchemy’s epistemological aims is understood by observing authors’ literary practices in conjunction with their experiments. Poetry was not an aesthetic embellishment. It was characterised by the same dualities as alchemical processes, positioned between clarity, concision, formal precision, on the one hand, and elusiveness and formative malleability, on the other. Literary strategies supported doctrinal reinterpretation and philosophical manipulations, and poetic discourse, far from being an obstacle to practical understanding, as often argued, was a facilitator of alchemical discourse.111 The latter’s pragmatic goals and simultaneous creation of a prisca theologia and a prisca sapientia, drawing on Classical and Christian myths and traditions, were crucially aligned through poetry. Instead of

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providing a strategy for ‘disknowledge’, an epistemological manoeuvre brought on by a late-humanist ‘crisis of confidence’,112 the production of alchemical literature added depth and balanced the conjunction of sources. This active engagement with the fissures and ambivalences of the late-humanist knowledge economy increased the confidence and dexterity of contemporary knowledge-makers.

Notes













1. British Library, Sloane Collection, MS 2212, ff. 19r–21v. All further manuscript references, unless otherwise stated, are to Platt’s works in the Sloane Collection, British Library. See also Hugh Platt, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (London: Peter Short, 1594), p. 23. Further references to this work will use the abbreviation JH. 2.  Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 15. 3. MS 2212, f. 19r. 4. Calid, The Booke of the Secrets of Alchimie (1597), in Roger Bacon, The Mirror of Alchimy, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 121. See also, George Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie (1591), in Theatrum chemicum Britannicum. Facs. (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967), p. 179. Platt probably accessed the work of ‘Calid’ (usually identified with the Egyptian prince and alchemist Khalid Ibn Yazid, d.704) via Roger Bacon’s (or pseudo-Bacon’s) Mirror of alchimy (1597), to which was appended The Booke of the Secrets of Alchimie, attributed to Khalid. 5. See MSS 2194, ff. 48–57; 2203, ff. 92–98. 6. Platt translated Paracelsus’ Book of the Spirits of the Planets (MS 2194, ff. 58–69). See also Paracelsus, De Spiritibus Planetarum sive Metallorum (Basle: Peter Perna, 1570), pp. 72–80. On Rupescissa, see Moran, Distilling Knowledge, pp. 17–18. 7. Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 63–75, 205–10; Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 22–26. 8. Hugh Platt, Delightes for Ladies, to Adorne Their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distilatories (London: Peter Short, 1602), section 2, nos 14, 17, 22. Further references to this work will use the abbreviation Delights. JH, pp. 22–23.

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9. MS 2195, f. 15r; MS 2216, ff. 188v–89r. 10. MSS 2209, 2210. 11. MS 2172, f. 18r-v. 12. MSS 2172, ff. 28r–29v; 2170, ff. 66r–88v. 13. MS 2170, f. 88v. 14. On mundane applications of medical alchemy, see esp. Harkness, The Jewel House; Bruce T. Moran, ‘Focus: Alchemy and the History of Science’, Isis, 102 (2011): 300–4; Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998); Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners 1550–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 15. Nearly all of Platt’s corpus contains some alchemy; mainly the following manuscripts are used here since they concentrate on alchemical preparations and theories: MSS 2203 (abridgement of Norton’s Ordinall, ff. 91–97); 2194 (translation of Paracelsus’ On Planets, ff. 58–69, copy of Charnock’s Breviary, ff. 48–56, Platt’s alchemical dialogue, ff. 29–45); 2195 (Platt’s alchemical receipts, collations, and poetic treatise); 2246 (Platt’s alchemical theories and treatises, Latin extracts from Agrippa’s De occultis, ff. 31–49); 2223 (Platt’s censure of Quercitanus, ff. 18–24, Latin extracts from Agrippa’s De occultis, ff. 1–17, translation of extracts from Agrippa, ff. 25–47); 2172 (letter to Thomas Elkinton, and reply, ff. 28–29); 2203 (letter to unnamed addressee, f. 112); 2209, 2210 (medical receipts and records); 2212 (alchemical receipts). 16. Ayesha Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 75–78. 17. Ibid. 18. Gareth Roberts, The Languages of Alchemy, Centre for the Book Fellowship Lectures (London: The British Library, 1997), p. 5. 19. MS 2223, f. 57r. 20. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2012), ll. 1435–39 (p. 386).

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229

21. Nicholas Flamel, Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures (London: Thomas Walkley, 1624), pp. 65–66. 22. Ripley, The Compound of Alchymie, p. 374. 23. Ibid., p. 127. 24. MS 2223, ff. 48–52. 25. Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, ed. J.B. Steane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 2.3.182–98. 26. MS 2212, ff. 24v–25r. 27. Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, p. 15. 28. MS 2212, f. 24v. 29. Ibid. 30. Charles Goodall, The Royal College of Physicians of London, founded and established by law as appears by letters patents, acts of Parliament, adjudged cases, &c. (London: M. Flesher for Walter Kettilby, 1684), pp. 351–52. 31.  Thomas Nashe, ‘Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem’, in Works of Thomas Nashe: Volume 4, ed. A.B. Grosart (s.l.: Printed for Private Circulation, 1883–84). 32. Piero Camporesi, The Land of Hunger, trans. Tania Croft-Murray, Claire Foley, and Shayne Mitchell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 121; Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty, pp. 161–63. 33. Thomas Norton, ‘The Ordinal of Alchemy’, in The Hermetic Museum, ed. Arthur Edward Waite (London: J. Elliot and Co., 1893), pp. 42, 59–64. 34. MS 2246, f. 53r. 35. MS 2170, ff. 8r–17v. 36. Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty, p. 77. 37. MS 2170, f. 8v. 38. Ibid., f. 17v. 39.  Jennifer Rampling, ‘Transmuting Sericon: Alchemy as “Practical Exegesis” in Early Modern England’, Osiris, 29 (2014): 19–34 (p. 19). 40. Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 46; Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2002). 41. MS 2170, f. 24v. 42.  MS 2195, f. 1v. Platt referenced: Thomas Norton’s Ordinall, George Ripley’s Canon and Twelve Gates, Bernardus Comes Trevisanus, Dionisius Zacharias, Roger Bacon’s Speculum Alchimiae, Gerhard Dorn’s Congeries Paracelsicae, ‘Way to Blisse’, Palingenius, Arnald of Villanova’s Rosarius, Calid (Khalid ibn Yazid), Villanova (listed separately), Turba Philosophorum, Clangor Buccinae (in Artis auriferiae, 1593), Scala Philosophorum,

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Geber (Abu Mūsā Jābir ibn Hayyān), Ramon Lull, Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), Rex Aros (from Mary the Prophetess), Filius Hamuel (Muhammad ibn Umail Al-Tamimi), Rosinus (in Artis auriferiae), Pythagoras, Salmanazar, Almadir, Hermes Trismegistus, Hortulanus, Anaxagoras, Albugazal, Alphidius, ’Numen lumen’, Richardus Anglicus, Albertus Magnus, Menabdes, John Pontanus, Valerandus, Thomas Charnock’s Breviary, ‘Questions & answeres’ (MS 2194, ff. 29–47), ‘Helias Artista’, Jodocus Greverus, Alanus, Phiares, Hugh Platt, Aurora Consurgens, Senior, Paracelsus, Rasis (Abūbakr Mohammad-e Zakariyyā-i Rāzī), Morien. 43.  In alchemical tradition, catalogues constructed a history of alchemy based on trajectories of master–student relations, e.g. from Villanova to Lull, Ripley to Charnock. See Roberts, The Languages of Alchemy (London: The British Library, 1997), pp. 17–18. See also Elias Ashmole, Theatrum chemicum Britannicum (1652). Facsim (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967), p. 440. 44. MS 2195, f. 2r. 45. Ibid., f. 2v. 46. Ibid., ff. 4r–118r. 47. William Cooper’s Catalogue of chimicall bookes shows the increased publication of alchemical books in the 1590s. See William Cooper, Catalogue of Chimicall Bookes (London, 1673, 1675, 1688): A Verified Edition, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York: Garland, 1987); John Ferguson, ‘Some English Alchemical Books’, Journal of the Alchemical Society, 2 (1913–14): 1–16; and Lauren Kassell, ‘Secrets Revealed: Alchemical Books in Early Modern England’, History of Science, 49:1 (2011): 61–A38. 48. Latin extracts from Agrippa: MS 2223 (ff. 1r–17v), duplicated in MS 2246 (ff. 31v–49v); English translations: MS 2223, ff. 30r–47r, titled ‘An Abstracte or Epitome of a large & theoricall Discoorse vppon the Animal and Vegetable stone, gathered owte of the three bookes de occulta Philosophia, written by yt greate Scholler Corn. Agrippa’. 49. MS 2223, ff. 25r–29v. 50. Ibid., ff. 48r–52v. 51. Ibid., f. 29r–v. 52.  MS 2223, ff. 18r–24v. See also ‘E Quercitano Selectiora’, MS 2223, ff. 53r–56v. 53.  Allen G. Debus, The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 53–57; Hiro Hirai, ‘The ­World-Spirit and Quintessence in the Chymical Philosophy of Joseph Du Chesne’, in Chymia: Science and Nature in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Miguel Lopez-Perez (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), pp. 247–61; and Joseph Duchesne, Ad Jacobi Auberti […]

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brevis responsio. Repr. in Theatrum chemicum, 6 vols (Strasburg: Lazarus Zetzner, 1659–1661), II, 151. 54. For Duchesne, three creative principles (salt, sulphur, mercury) linked the divine realm, heavens, and earth, mirroring the union of spirit, soul, and body. He defined ‘quintessence’ to emphasise medical, rather than metallic, transmutation. See Hirai, ‘The World-Spirit and Quintessence in the Chymical Philosophy of Joseph Du Chesne’; Moran, Distilling Knowledge, pp. 86–87. 55. Duchesne’s Paracelsian cosmology used the story of Creation in Genesis to represent God as an alchemist who performed a series of chymical separations to create the universe. See Joseph Duchesne, The Practise of Chymicall and Hermeticall Physicke (London: Thomas Creede, 1605), chapter 12. 56. Taken from MS 2194, ff. 9v–10r, ‘Palingenius in Lapidem Philosophorum enisque studiosos’. 57. Duchesne, following Paracelsus, denied fire was an element, attributing instead a fiery nature to the caelum/firmament. See Hirai, ‘The ­World-Spirit and Quintessence in the Chymical Philosophy of Joseph Du Chesne’, p. 254. 58. Compare JH, pp. 38–49. 59. Ibid., pp. 40–41. 60.  Platt misunderstands (wilfully, perhaps) Duchesne’s views on double nature—the idea that formal bodies (elements, principles, and seeds) were also material. See Hirai, ‘The World-Spirit and Quintessence in the Chymical Philosophy of Joseph Du Chesne’, p. 253. 61. Platt’s discomfort seems to be with two variations in Duchesne’s philosophy: the postulation of a composite ‘Quartessence’ into which the three principles were compacted; and the related idea that influences of astral seeds (semina) could not be separately captured through alchemical procedure, but via the composite ‘Quartessence’. 62. Duchesne, however, distinguished himself from the ‘operateurs and artisans’ who only used their hands without due attention to natural principles and causes. See Joseph Duchesne, Le Grand Miroir du Monde (Lyon: B. Honorat, 1593), pp. 529, 532. 63.  Platt also wanted to distance himself from the Galenist attacks on Paracelsian medicine, and on Duchesne by Riolan in 1603. Riolan was countered by Duchesne in 1604. 64. MS 2223, ff. 18r–24v. 65. Ibid. 66. MS 2194, ff. 29r–47v. 67. See John F. Tinkler, ‘Humanism and Dialogue’, Parergon, 6 (1988): 197–214 (p. 204).

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68.  Bruce T. Moran, ‘Privilege, Communication, and Chemistry: The Hermetic-Alchemical Circle of Moritz of Hessen-Kassel’, Ambix, 32 (1985): 110–26 (p. 116); Didier Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2007), p. 238; and Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty, pp. 72–73. 69. Gareth Roberts, The Mirror of Alchemy: Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 65–66; Robert Halleux, Les textes alchimiques. In Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental. Facsim. 33. (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), p. 73. Platt ­follows the norm of internal divisions into theorica and practica, e.g. Lull’s Testament and Villanova’s Rosarium. The ‘theory’ section has three drafts: MS 2246, ff. 1v–10v, MS 2223, ff. 57r–59v, MS 2246, ff. 53r–59v. The first two parts of ‘practice’ are on ‘vegetable work’ (MS 2246, ff. 11v–25v) and the third on ‘animal stone’ (ff. 27r–30v). 70. Rampling, ‘Transmuting Sericon’. 71. Robert Tittler, Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 93; Jo Kirby, Susie Nash, and Joanna Cannon, ed. Trade in Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700 (London: Archetype Publications, 2010), pp. 339–41; and ‘Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking’, in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, ed. Ursula Klein and Emma Spary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 29–49. 72. MS 2189, ff. 92–106. 73. See Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance. 74. MS 2246, f. 19v. 75. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life [De vita libri tres], ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998), lib. 3, cap. 1, pp. 242–43. 76. Ibid., pp. 244–45. 77. MS 2246, ff. 50r–52r. 78. Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne: Johann Soter, 1533), lib. 1, cap. 14, p. 23. 79. MS 2223, ff. 4v–5r (Latin), ff. 34r–35r (English). 80. Ibid., ff. 34v–35r. 81. Ibid., f. 35r. 82. MS 2246, ff. 92r–98v. See also Alexander von Suchten, De secretis antimonii liber unus (Strasburg: Christian Müllers Erben, 1570); Alexander von Suchten, Tractatus secundus de antimonio vulgari. In von Suchten, Mysteria gemina antimonii (Leipzig: Jacob Apels, 1604).

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83. Ficino, Three Books on Life, lib. 3, cap, 14, pp. 310–11. 84. MS 2246, f. 30r. 85. MS 2246, ff. 11v–12r. 86. Ibid., ff. 13v–14v. 87. Ibid., ff.19v–20r; JH, pp. 39–40. 88. MS 2246, f. 15r–v. 89. Ibid., f. 15v. 90. Ibid., ff. 16v–17r. 91. Ibid., ff. 17v, 25r–v. 92. MS 2246, ff. 27r–30v. 93. Martin Ruland, Lexicon alchemiae (Frankfurt: Z. Palthenius, 1612), p. 189. 94. MS 2246, f. 29v. 95. Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum declamatio inuectiua, ex postrema Authoris recognitione (Cologne: T. Baum, 1575), cap. 84; Ficino, Three Books on Life, lib.2, cap. 11, pp. 196–97. 96. Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires, pp. 204–5. 97. MS 2246, ff. 60r–91r. 98. MS 2195, ff. 119r–23v. 99. MS 2195, f. 119r. 100. Ibid. 101. MS 2223, ff. 25r–29v. 102. MS 2216, f. 2r. 103. MS 2216, f. 120r. 104. Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance, p. 64; Robert M. Schuler, Alchemical Poetry 1575–1700: From Previously Unpublished Manuscripts (New York: Garland, 1995), p. xxxv. 105. MS 2216, f. 119r–v. 106. Ibid., f. 121r. 107. Ibid., f. 120r. 108. Ibid., f. 120v. 109. Ibid. 110. Michael Maier, Atalanta fugiens, ed. H.M.E. de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 1969), p. 181. 111. Kahn, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance. 112. Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

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Print Agrippa, Cornelius, De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne: Johann Soter, 1533). ———, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum declamatio inuectiua, ex postrema Authoris recognitione (Cologne: T. Baum, 1575). Ashmole, Elias, ed., Theatrum chemicum Britannicum. Facsim (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967). Bacon, Roger, The Mirror of Alchimy, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York: Garland, 1992). Brunswick/Brunschwygk, Hieronymus, The vertuose Boke of Distyllacyon, trans. L. Andrew. Facsim. 532. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1973). Calid, The Booke of the Secrets of Alchimie, in Roger Bacon, The Mirror of Alchimy, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York: Garland, 1992). Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2012. Cooper, William, Catalogue of chimicall bookes (London, 1673, 1675, 1688): A Verified Edition, ed. Stanton J. Linden (New York: Garland, 1987). della Porta, Giambattista, Magiae naturalis libri vinginti (Frankfurt: Heirs of A. Wechel, 1584). Duchesne, Joseph [Quercetanus], Le Grand Miroir du Monde (Lyon: B. Honorat, 1587, 1593). ———, Ad veritatem hermeticae medicinae ex Hippocratis veterumque decretis ac therapeusi (Paris: Abraham Saugrain, 1604). ———, The practise of chymicall and hermeticall physicke (London: Thomas Creede, 1605). ———, Ad Jacobi Auberti […] brevis responsio. Repr. in Theatrum chemicum, 6 vols (Strasburg: Lazarus Zetzner, 1659–1661). Ficino, Marsilio, Three Books on Life [De vita libri tres], ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998). Flamel, Nicholas, Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures (London: Thomas Walkley, 1624). Gesner, Conrad, The Treasure of Evonymus, trans. Peter Morwyng (London: John Day, 1559, 1565).

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———, New Jewell of Health, trans. George Baker (London: Henrie Denham, 1576). Goodall, Charles, The Royal College of Physicians of London, Founded and Established by Law as Appears by Letters Patents, Acts of Parliament, Adjudged Cases, &c. (London: M. Flesher for Walter Kettilby, 1684). Jonson, Ben, The Alchemist, ed. J.B. Steane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). Lull, Raymond [Pseudo-Lull], Testamentum alchemico attribuito a Raimondo Lullo: Edizione del testo latino e catalano dal manoscritto Oxford, Corpus Christi College, 244, ed. Michela Pereira and Barbara Spaggiari. Millennio medievale 14. Testi 6 (Florence: SISMEL, 1999). Maier, Michael, Atalanta fugiens, ed. H.M.E. de Jong (Leiden: Brill, 1969). Nashe, Thomas, Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, in Works of Thomas Nashe, Volume 4, ed. A.B. Grosart (s.l.: Printed for Private Circulation, 1883–84). Norton, Thomas, ‘The Ordinal of Alchemy’, in The Hermetic Museum, ed. Arthur Edward Waite (London: James Elliot and Co., 1893). Palissy, Bernard, Discours Admirables (Paris: Martin le Jeune, 1580). ———, Admirable Discourses, trans. Aurèle La Rocque (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957). Paracelsus, De Spiritibus Planetarum sive Metallorum (Basle: Peter Perna, 1570). Paracelsus, The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings, ed. Arthur Edward Waite, 2 vols (London: James Elliott and Co., 1894). Platt, Hugh, The Jewell House of Art and Nature (London: Peter Short, 1594). ———, Diuerse sorts of soyle (London: Peter Short, 1594). ———, Delightes for Ladies, to adorne Their Persons, Tables, Closets, and Distilatories (London: Peter Short, 1602). ———, Floraes Paradise beautified and adorned with sundry sorts of delicate fruites and flowers, by the industrious labour of H.P. Knight (London: H. Lownes for William Leake, 1608); Reprinted as The Garden of Eden (London, 1652, 1653, 1654, 1655, 1659, 1660, 1675). Riolan, Jean, Apologia pro Hippocratis et Galeni medicina adv. Quercetani librum, De priscorum philosophorum verae medicinae materia (Paris: ex officina Plantiniana, apud Hadrianum Perier, 1603). Ripley, George, ‘The Compound of Alchymie (1591)’, in Theatrum chemicum Britannicum. Facs. (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967). Ruland, Martin, Lexicon alchemiae (Frankfurt: Z. Palthenius, 1612). Villanova, Arnaldi, ‘Rosarium philosophorum’, in Bibliotheca Chemica Curiosa, Volume 1, ed. J.J. Manget (Geneva: Chouet, 1702). von Suchten, Alexander, De secretis antimonii liber unus (Strassburg: Christian Müllers Erben, 1570). ———, ‘Tractatus secundus de antimonio vulgari’, in Mysteria gemina antimonii (Leipzig: In vorlegung Jacob Apels, 1604).

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Secondary Camporesi, Piero, The Land of Hunger, trans. Tania Croft-Murray, Claire Foley, and Shayne Mitchell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). Cook, Harold J., Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Debus, Allen G., The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Eggert, Katherine, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Ferguson, John, ‘Some English Alchemical Books’, Journal of the Alchemical Society, 2 (1913–14): 1–16. Halleux, Robert, Les textes alchimiques, in Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 33 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979). Harkness, Deborah, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Hirai, Hiro, ‘The World-Spirit and Quintessence in the Chymical Philosophy of Joseph Du Chesne’, in Chymia: Science and Nature in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Miguel Lopez-Perez (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010), pp. 247–61. Kahn, Didier, Alchimie et paracelsisme en France à la fin de la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2007). ———, ‘Alchemical Poetry in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: A Preliminary Survey and Synthesis. Part II—Synthesis’, Ambix, 58:1 (2011): 62–77. Kassell, Lauren, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ———, ‘Secrets Revealed: Alchemical Books in Early Modern England’, History of Science, 49:1 (2011): 61-A38. Kirby, Jo, Susie Nash, and Joanna Cannon, ed., Trade in Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700 (London: Archetype Publications, 2010). Moran, Bruce T., ‘Privilege, Communication, and Chemistry: The ­HermeticAlchemical Circle of Moritz of Hessen-Kassel’, Ambix, 32 (1985): 110–26. ———, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). ———, ‘Focus: Alchemy and the History of Science’, Isis, 102 (2011): 300–4. Mukherjee, Ayesha, Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2015).

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Newman, William R., and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Nummedal, Tara, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Pelling, Margaret, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1998). ———, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians, and Irregular Practitioners 1550–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Rampling, Jennifer, ‘Transmuting Sericon: Alchemy as “Practical Exegesis” in Early Modern England’, Osiris, 29 (2014): 19–34. Roberts, Gareth, The Mirror of Alchemy: Alchemical Ideas and Images in Manuscripts and Books from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). ———, The Languages of Alchemy. Centre for the Book Fellowship Lectures (London: The British Library, 1997). Schuler, Robert M., Alchemical Poetry 1575–1700: From Previously Unpublished Manuscripts (New York: Garland, 1995). Smith, Pamela H., The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). ———, ‘Vermilion, Mercury, Blood, and Lizards: Matter and Meaning in Metalworking’, in Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and Laboratory, ed. Ursula Klein and Emma Spary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 29–49. Smith, Pamela H., and Paula Findlen, Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2002). Sugg, Richard, Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (London: Routledge, 2011). Tinkler, John F, ‘Humanism and Dialogue’, Parergon, 6 (1988): 197–214. Tittler, Robert, Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Freedom from Debt: The Economies of The Tempest Paul Yachnin

If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify ­relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than as by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. –David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years1 [A]ll my lifetime [I have] held debt to be as a union or conjunction of the heavens with the earth, and the whole cement whereby the race of mankind is kept together; yea, of such virtue and efficacy that, I say, the whole progeny of Adam would very suddenly perish without it […] I repute it to be the great soul of the universe, which, according to the opinion of the Academics, vivifieth all manner of things. –François Rabelais, ‘How Panurge praiseth the debtors and borrowers’, Gargantua and Pantagruel2

At the end of The Tempest, all the characters, whose stories we have just seen unfold into a complex narrative network, gather themselves and begin to leave the stage. They are to spend the night before their P. Yachnin (*)  McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_11

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departure back to Italy in Prospero’s “poor cell,” there to hear the story of his life on the island.3 As they are leaving the stage, Prospero hangs back for a moment to say good-bye to Ariel: “My Ariel, chick, / […] to the elements / Be free, and fare thee well” (5.1.316–18). A moment after they all exit, Prospero comes back to speak the Epilogue. He speaks at once as the character Prospero and as the actor playing Prospero (likely Richard Burbage when the play was first performed). The place he is in is also double—both the island of the play world and the stage in the playhouse. Listen to his strangely doubled voice as, for the first time, he speaks directly to the playgoers:                      Now ’tis true I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got, And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell, But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. (321–31)

The conceit is charming. If the playgoers do not applaud, the spell woven by their active (and playful) belief in the fiction of the play will not be broken, and Burbage will be compelled to remain as the character Prospero and compelled to remain on “this bare island.” The clapping and shouting of the playgoers will break the spell they have created in concert with the actors and return the actor playing Prospero to himself as actor. By their applause, the audience will do for the actor what the actor as Prospero has just done for Ariel—release him from his “bands” (the word means “bonds”) and set him free. The difference between the two moments is of great significance. Prospero just lets Ariel go (the spirit’s time of service is completed, his tasks are done). By contrast, the playgoers release the actor playing Prospero by participating with him and his fellow actors in the c­ ollective practices of theater. They do their job, which is judging and giving voice to their judgment. Burbage steps right out of character when he tells them that his “project […] was to please,” which was not Prospero’s project but rather was what Burbage and his fellows had undertaken to

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do. If they have been successful in the eyes of the audience, the audience will clap and shout their approval. The language of the speech, especially the emphasis on hands and winds, recollects the first scene of the play, where the mariners labored together “yarely,” their hands skillful on the ropes and the sails, to save the ship from the storm. In what follows, I want to consider these lines as an epitome of Shakespeare’s thinking in The Tempest about the character of human freedom. I will also bring Hamlet briefly into the discussion. Where modern philosophy tends to limit the understanding of freedom to the binary of “freedom from” and “freedom to”—negative freedom and positive freedom—Shakespeare develops a strongly communitarian idea of “freedom with.” Ariel, a non-human, can launch into absolute, “elemental” liberty simply by leaving his position of service to Prospero. In contrast to Ariel’s “freedom from,” Prospero’s “release” is necessarily processive and collective, something he does with the members of the audience. As we will see, Shakespeare’s thinking here is anticipatory of Hannah Arendt’s focus on freedom and public life—freedom as something that can be achieved only with the active company of others. The idea of “freedom with” is deepened in the seven and a half lines that end the performance of the play. Having stepped out of Prospero’s character when he said that his project was to please, the actor ­re-enters the role fully and sombrely at the end. He repeats what he said at the start of the Epilogue about how he now no longer has his magical powers, but he then shifts his vocabulary, asking the playgoers, not for applause, but rather for prayer. He underlines the communitarian character of liberation by insisting on the reciprocal, freedom-making power of prayer:                               Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free. (331–38)

Prospero’s description of what “prayer” does—it pierces, it assaults— sounds weirdly aggressive to a modern ear, but it is well in line with

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biblical language and with other early modern descriptions of prayer. George Herbert called prayer an “Engine against th’ Almighty,” which is the same as saying that prayer is an assault on the divine.4 The Geneva Bible, the version Shakespeare knew best, says that Christ on the cross was “pierced” by the soldier’s spear (John 19:34, Revelation 1:7), that Christ was “pierced” by all humankind; but we also find, in Luke (2:35), that the souls of sinners (those that did the piercing in the first place) are themselves pierced by the sword so “that the thoughts of many hearts may be opened.”5 I focus on the historically specific meaning of the language in these lines, especially the meaning of “pierce,” in order to suggest how the word turns back toward those who are praying. Prospero is not recommending the sheer outward power of prayer, as if prayer were an arrow shot into the heart of Grace. It is only because the words he enjoins the audience to speak in prayer also pierce their own hearts that their prayers are able to penetrate “Mercy itself.” In Prospero’s view, prayer becomes an instrument of “freedom with” because it is an acknowledgment of sinfulness shared with others and with God—a public piercing and opening of many hearts. In addition to considering how Shakespeare develops a communitarian philosophy of freedom in the play, I want also to think through how such freedom necessarily operates within an economy, or rather within a set of three intersecting economies. The first economy involves the trade in material goods, including human beings enslaved and thereby reduced to the status of commodities. The second is the trade in artistic and intellectual goods, including plays like The Tempest. The third is a social economy where the exchange of goods and services is inseparable from forms of interpersonal obligation and indebtedness. One feature of any economy is debt. David Graeber’s remarkable work on the history of debt is important here. His account of debt as the sublime instrument of social and political domination (sketched in the quotation at the start of this chapter) is important for understanding the relations of power in the play and also for understanding the role the play has had in the history of colonialist domination. But Graeber’s ideas about debt are by no means monocular. While debt is for him the central instrument of domination, he also discusses how debt enables people to live together and to flourish. Consider, for example, how Prospero’s “release” leaves him in debt to the audience members, whose applause has broken the spell of the play. The connection between debt and human freedom is the point of Rabelais’ only partly tongue-in-cheek

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encomium to debt (quoted at the start of this chapter), a passage that indeed Graeber quotes approvingly. “[W]hat he says is true,” Graeber comments, “A world without debt would revert to primordial chaos, a war of all against all; no one would feel the slightest responsibility for one another.”6 The complex role of debt in society and politics, interpersonal relations, literary and cultural history, and human flourishing and freedom has led me to write the title of this chapter with a double meaning in mind. “Freedom from debt” usually means the freedom we achieve by clearing our indebtedness. That is what Ariel gains when, through his service, he pays off the debt which Prospero claims for having once freed him from imprisonment in a pine tree. Ariel’s debt-bound service to Prospero is more an extension of imprisonment than an actual release. So the freedom Ariel finally achieves helps us grasp the urgency of the primary meaning of the phrase, “freedom from debt.” But to reflect on debt as an instrument (following Rabelais) of ­community-building, and to conceive (following Shakespeare) of freedom as “freedom with” is to begin to grasp another meaning of the phrase, “freedom from debt.” Human freedom, in this view, is itself built upon the debts we owe, whether for favors, services, things of value, or money, or the debt we owe to Nature (or to our parents) for having created us in the first place. In Shakespeare’s culture (and indeed in most pre-modern cultures), the distillate of the multiple forms of debt is the debt to God, the divine creditor who created humankind and who suffered death to expiate the sins of his wayward creatures and to save them from damnation. Such debts to Nature, parents, or God can never be repaid since they are equal to, or in the case of a debt to a divine redeemer, exceed the total worth of the debtor. “The primary meaning of ‘redemption,’” Graeber says, “is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying off a debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God’s own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction.”7 In view of the more-than-human scale of what is owed, we can see how freedom issues from the active acknowledgment of indebtedness, which amounts to an appeal for forgiveness of debt. The key form of appeal—the one, as we have seen, that Prospero calls on—is prayer, which “pierces so that it assaults / Mercy itself, and frees all faults.”

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In his chapter, Torrance Kirby brings forward how the two key terms of the present volume push against each other. “Exchange” belongs in a fundamentally transactional domain. It depends on a logic of commensurability. “‘Change’ or transformation,” Kirby says, “in the context of sixteenth-century religious culture is frequently construed in a discourse of conversion” (183–205). Conversion, understood in religious terms, belongs of course to a transformational rather than a transactional domain of human living. But as both Graeber and Kirby note, the domains of change and exchange are tightly and complexly intertwined. That insight applies also, as we will see, to the economies, at least the first two economies, of The Tempest.

The Economies of The Tempest The Tempest begins within the tightly constrained space of a ship facing destruction in a howling storm. It ends, as we have seen, in a space that is both a “bare island” and a playhouse, in which an actor asks to be released from the constraints of his theatrical role. As small and constricted as these spaces are, the early modern ship, like the one that seems to suffer destruction at the start of the play, and the playhouse, in which the scenes of wreck and recovery unfold, were in fact driving engines of what were becoming two intersecting and increasingly globalized economies. The first of these involved the production, procurement, and trade in material goods, including precious metals, fish, fur, fabric, and many agricultural products, and also human beings who, through enslavement, had been reduced to saleable commodities. The second developed a globalized trade in literature (broadly defined), art, music, and ideas. The two economies intersected, of course, because works of art and intellect do not travel through the ether, but rather move in physical, crafted or manufactured, and saleable forms, and because the trade in material goods and human beings influenced and was influenced by the shape, content, and modes of publication and performance, and by the reception of all kinds of works of art and intellect.8 In his perspective-changing chapter in this volume, Adam Zucker describes how, in Philip Massinger’s play The Renegado (1623), the Ottoman princess Donusa is drawn irresistibly toward the local marketplace, where luxury goods from all over the world are put on sale (91–111). The lure of the merchants’ “strange commodities,” Zucker tells us, is the first

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step in a sexualized conversion narrative that will see Donusa baptized, married to a Christian, and sent on her way to a better life in Italy. The marketplace of Tunis, a center of globalized trade in ­high-end goods (including porcelain tableware, crystal glasses, Corinthian plate, and even a painting by Michelangelo) is Massinger’s inset figure of his own trade in bookish knowledge, including his avid reading of Cervantes, and the transformation of Spanish and other kinds of literary goods into marketable entertainment in the London playhouses. The economies of material commodities and literary performance emerge here as interanimating, changeful networks of exchange. Over time, the first economy grew into the international trade in slaves and sugar, among other commodities. In the 100 or so years leading up to the first performance of The Tempest in 1611, the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English were developing projects of conquest and colonization in the Americas. The probable trigger for Shakespeare’s writing of The Tempest was the disappearance and presumed loss of an English ship in 1609 as well as the news, which came to England the following year, that its crew had miraculously survived.9 That ship, the Sea Venture, bound for the tiny English settlement in Jamestown, was one of a growing fleet that brought English colonists to the Americas and brought American commodities to England. In Shakespeare’s time, the English colonization and exploitation of the resources and peoples of the Americas were still in an infant stage, especially in contrast to the Spanish colonialist project; but it was nevertheless controversial enough for Shakespeare to bring it onto his stage.10 Early in the play, the Italian servant Trinculo recalls how English people were fascinated by exotic monsters, strange beasts, and “Indians,” and how they were willing to lay out good money to see such spectacles: What have we here—a man or a fish?—dead or alive? A fish, he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fish-like smell; a kind of not-of-the-newest ­poor-John. A strange fish! Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday-fool there but would give a piece of silver. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian”. (2.2.31–32)

The capture and display of Amerindians was a small specialty area within the nascent slave trade.11 But Trinculo’s remarks, because they are in a play, draw the “savage and deformed slave” (the words for Caliban in

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the dramatis personae) out from the trade in human beings into the second economy—the transnational and transhistorical production and consumption of works of art and intellect. Repeatedly called “slave” by Prospero (and treated as a slave by him, Miranda, and the two Italian servants), and in spite of the island setting being in the Mediterranean, Caliban’s presence in the play brought before the 1611 audience the ongoing debate about the humanity of the Amerindians. Shakespeare could not have written the play without the many travel narratives that circulated, usually in translation, in England, including the manuscript “True Reportory of the Wracke” by William Strachey.12 He could not have mined so deeply into the question of slavery without the 1583 English translation of Bartolomé de las Casas’ The Spanish colonie, or Briefe chronicle of the acts and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies or John Florio’s translation of the Essayes of Montaigne (1603). De las Casas argued against thinkers such as Juan Ginés de Sepulveda, a theologian who used Aristotle’s idea of the “natural slave” to justify Spanish domination of the Amerindians.13 Shakespeare stages the argument between the two Spanish thinkers. He does not resolve it, but makes it play out in the action around Caliban, whose conduct and speech sometimes and from certain angles seems naturally slavish, sometimes stoutly rebellious, and at other moments and from other viewpoints like a man merely playing a slavish part for his own advantage. The play’s engagement with Montaigne, especially his essay “Of the Caniballes,” is even more significant for the play and for its entry into the international intellectual and artistic economy. In some respects, the character of Caliban amounts to a rebuttal of Montaigne’s argument for the natural dignity and goodness of the cannibals; in other ways, including Caliban’s love of beauty and remarkable capacity for poetic speech, he echoes Montaigne’s praise of the misnamed “savages” and extends Montaigne’s sharp critique of the supposedly ­ “civilized” Europeans. The extraordinarily various and competing afterlives of Caliban and of the play itself, enabled by the original intertextual dialogism of Shakespeare’s text, illustrate well the productivity of the intellectual economy.14 From John Dryden and John Davenant’s conservative-minded The Enchanted Island (1667) to Aimé Césaire’s revolutionary Une Tempête (1969), as well as in thousands of other theatrical and cinematic enactments and adaptations, poetic and novelistic versions, paintings, comics, works of orchestral, operatic, and popular music, critical works that stay mostly inside the borders of the academy,

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and boundary-crossing works such as Octave Mannoni’s Psychologie de la Colonization (1950), the play has helped create a storehouse of new works of art and intellect and has incited and supported a vast money-making and socially creative network of producers and consumers.15 The play itself provides an idealized epitome of this economy by way of the backchat of the two villains, Sebastian and Antonio. The two men are mocking Gonzalo, but their jokes suggest, first, how musical art can create a civic world and, second, how the island can give birth to a new archipelago of enchanted islands: Antonio: His word is more than the miraculous harp.16 Sebastian: He hath raised the wall and houses too. Antonio: What impossible matter will he make easy next? Sebastian: I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple. Antonio: And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands. (2.1.85–91)

The metaphors of the miraculous harp, the fatherly gift of an apple, and the seeds of the apple sprouting into new islands conjure a world of boundless, costless, debtless plenty. Of course, the joking villains know better; after all, they are conspiring against their fellow castaways for political sovereignty and the riches that accompany rule. The playgoers watching the scene knew better than to be naïve about the costs of culture since they were required to pay for the theatrical and musical entertainment. Shakespeare himself must have had a solidly worldly understanding about the costs of art since his company had invested considerably in the upmarket Blackfriars playhouse, which was one of the venues where the play was staged; and it invested also in the staging of the play itself, especially for the fireworks, fabulous costumes, extra performers, and the two specially commissioned songs by the royal lutenist Robert Johnson.17 Unlike the paradise of Stephano’s imagination (‘This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing’—3.2.142–43), the playhouse was a place where literary, theatrical, and musical art cost real money, both to produce and to enjoy. In addition to the international trade in goods and human beings and the expanding trade in works of art and intellect, there is a third economy, a social economy, represented in the play. Familiar to us from everyday life and present throughout Shakespeare’s works, it involves

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the exchange of goods and services in ways almost never separate from how indebtedness creates and sustains relations of power. This is what Graeber has in mind when he tells us “that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than as by reframing them in the language of debt.” Prospero freed Ariel from the pine tree in which the witch Sycorax had imprisoned him, but Prospero’s liberation of the spirit (whom he calls his “slave”, and whom he also seems to love) was no act of pure charity; rather, he freed the spirit from physical restraint only to bind him to service by virtue of his indebtedness to his master’s magic art (backed up by threats of physical coercion). It is a mixture of the fear of punishment, the promise of freedom, and the seemingly intrinsic rightness of the debtor’s submission to the creditor that causes the elementally free Ariel to beg Prospero’s pardon: “Pardon, master. / I will be correspondent to command / And do my spiriting gently” (1.2.296–98). Debt is foundational for many of the relationships in the play. From what we are told, Prospero’s first contact with Caliban amounted to an affectionate and free exchange of mostly practical knowledge. Caliban showed Prospero “all the qualities o’ th’ isle, / barren place and fertile— / The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place, and fertile” (1.2.337–38); Prospero taught Caliban language (a program which Miranda continued), petted him, and gave him water flavored with berries. Both Prospero and Miranda characterize the sudden change in Caliban’s situation from familial to carceral as a punishment for his attempted rape of Miranda and as a preventative against future attacks. But Caliban’s act of sexual aggression was merely the trigger that shifted the relationship from something free, open, and loving to a form of debt slavery. Against Caliban’s claim that Prospero owes him the island since he took it unlawfully from him, Prospero holds that Caliban is his possession (“This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine”—5.1.275–76), and he seems to believe without question that Caliban owes him a lifetime of service on account of the attempted violation of his daughter’s honor. It is as if Caliban were the wayward human being and Prospero the creator, but a divine creator and creditor unwilling to forgive the debt of his creature’s sin. Ferdinand and Miranda play, not surprisingly, with the language of service and slavery in their courtship of each other (3.1.63–67, 83–86), transforming by their poetic speech the debt and slavery suffered by

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Caliban and Ariel into the freely chosen commitment that people sometimes make to each other (like the original friendship of Prospero and Caliban). But the sweetness of their loving bonds only highlights the harshness of the bonds that hold the other characters, including the present ruler of Milan, Prospero’s treacherous brother Antonio, who, strangely, has been transformed into an ad hoc courtier of the King of Naples as well as his perpetual debtor in recompense for the King’s support of his, Antonio’s, usurpation of Prospero (2.1.290–2). Shakespeare’s various representations of debt and domination in The Tempest connect with the larger world that was coming into being. Graeber comments that modernity is built upon kinds of debt slavery, including slavery that is misrecognized as labor undertaken toward release from indebtedness: It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been o ­ rganized primarily around free labor. The conquest of the Americas began with mass enslavement, then gradually settled into various forms of debt peonage, African slavery, and “indentured service”—that is, the use of contract labor, workers who had received cash in advance and were thus bound for five-, seven-, or ten-year terms to pay it back. Needless to say, indentured servants were recruited largely from among people who were already debtors. In the 1600s, there were at times almost as many white debtors as African slaves working in southern plantations, and legally they were at first in almost the same situation, since, in the beginning, plantation societies were working within a European legal tradition that assumed slavery did not exist. Even Africans in the Carolinas were first classified as contract laborers. (loc 7212–18)

Given its keen interest in how debt works as an instrument of power and given Shakespeare’s ascendancy into the global literary canon, The Tempest has emerged as a world-text that can be summoned in various ways against the early modern and modern regimes of colonialist domination and debt slavery. In 1977, to take one example among many, Edward Kamau Brathwaite described the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt of 1831–1832, which contributed substantially to the British abolition of slavery, in terms from The Tempest, with Prospero as the slave owner and Caliban as the rebel slave.18 There are, however, two strong counter-currents that gravely complicate the anti-colonialist use of the play. One is that the play has

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sometimes been used in support of racist and colonialist policies. There have indeed been strong arguments made over at least the last forty years for the deep racism of the play.19 Given Prospero’s description of Caliban as his “thing of darkness” and as his slave, it was not hard for Dryden and Davenant, in their 1667 adaptation, The Enchanted Island, to add a “blobber lips” (3.3.12) sister for Caliban and a comic emphasis on cannibalism, and thereby to adjust the play even more directly toward a demonstration of the supposed inferiority of people of color.20 A second counter-current has to do with Shakespeare’s own global prominence. His works are not under copyright, so artists can make whatever use of them they wish and can do so without having to pay a cent. But that his works have passed in this respect out of a money economy does not mean that they are entirely cost-free. Writers who choose to adapt The Tempest in order to make their discursive or literary case against European colonialism find themselves in debt to the most influential and most revered of European artists. The Cuban poet and intellectual Roberto Fernández Retamar grapples directly with his indebtedness in an essay he wrote in 1971: Right now […] as I am discussing with those colonizers, how else can I do it except in one of their languages, which is now also our language, and with so many of their conceptual tools which are now also our conceptual tools? This is precisely the extraordinary outcry which we read in a work by perhaps the most extraordinary writer of fiction who ever existed. In The Tempest, William Shakespeare’s last play, the deformed Caliban enslaved, robbed of his island, and taught the language by Prospero rebukes him thus: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t/ Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language!”21

The problem, as Retamar recognizes, is that the literary debt to Shakespeare, which writers take on in order to access the beauty, brilliance, authority, and global reach of Shakespeare’s works, undermines their own authority and liberty. What kind of freedom can a writer like Retamar achieve (he himself asks—and remember that his indebtedness accrues even though he is writing in Spanish) when the language and modes of thought he must trade in are owned by and owed to those who fashioned the colonialist economies that have determined his subjection? “To speak,” Franz Fanon has famously said, “means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”22

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Freedom from Debt There is more than one way forward toward an understanding of the character of the freedom that Retamar and others can achieve in the face of their debt to Shakespeare and to the intellectual and artistic storehouse that he embodies. Homi Bhaba, to consider one important approach, argues that no culture is plenitudinous or originary, and that therefore (always bearing in mind just how deeply engrained are the notions of Western cultural plenitude and originality) writing like Retamar’s, and Shakespeare’s writing too, unfold in what Bhaba calls “the third space” of hybridity, which is a space that escapes the determinations of history since “[t]he third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom.”23 While Bhaba’s deconstructive rethinking of history and culture is valuable for the way it envisions new possibilities of reading, writing, and thinking, “the third space” remains an idealization of the conditions of possibility rather than an account of how writers like Retamar—always and necessarily indebted within a globalized economy of art and ideas, an economy with its roots in Western culture—are nevertheless able to achieve a level of credit that allows them to speak their minds authoritatively and freely. To understand how they are able to gather that kind of credit, let us consider first what freedom is for human beings and, second, how debt can be an instrument of human freedom. We will bear in mind that humans are creatures fundamentally unlike natural spirits—a spirit like Ariel, for example—that can simply fly away from all those relationships with others and vanish like air into air (“to the elements be free”). As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, modern philosophy has focused on “freedom from” and “freedom to.” The most influential modern discussion is Isaiah Berlin’s 1969 essay, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” which develops an account of “negative liberty” and “positive liberty” and which focuses on individual or collective agency and the obstacles or constraints that might impede such agents from doing what they want to do.24 The binary problematic attendant on the question, “what is freedom?” is dominant within recent as well as less recent thinking. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the binary like this: Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this

252  P. YACHNIN negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting—or the fact of acting—in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.25

These are not two halves of the phenomenon of freedom, not something like two pieces that could be fitted together, like a dovetailed joint, into a perfect whole. They are rather two opposed ways of thinking about freedom. They are irreconcilable except for the ground they share, which is that freedom, however you look at it, involves individuals or groups who find their freedom in opposition to others or to the obstacles created by others (negative liberty) or who find freedom without regard to others (positive liberty—every man or woman or group on his or her or their own). Hannah Arendt as well as Shakespeare suggest another way of understanding freedom—not as something against others or unconcerned with them, but rather as something that can be achieved only with others. I do not mean that Arendt and Shakespeare think that freedom can be accomplished only in groups; that would land them back in the camp of positive liberty. Their “freedom-with” idea is communitarian rather than collectivist. By way of a critique of the tradition of “inner freedom” and an insistence that freedom must always be manifested as action in the world, Arendt develops a strong case for freedom existing only in the sphere of the political—the only space, because it is there where we are vis-à-vis others, where our freedom can be realized: …in spite of the great influence the concept of an inner, non-political freedom has exerted upon the tradition of thought, it seems safe to say that man would know nothing of inner freedom if he had not first experienced a condition of being free as a worldly tangible reality. We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves. Before it became an attribute of thought or a quality of the will, freedom was understood to be the free man’s status, which enabled him to move, to get away from home, to go out into the world and meet other people in word and deed. This freedom clearly was preceded by liberation: in order to be free, man must have liberated himself from the necessities of life. But that status of freedom did not follow automatically upon the act of liberation. Freedom needed, in addition to mere liberation, the company of other men who were in the same state,

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and it needed a common public space to meet them—a politically organized world, in other words, into which each of the free men could insert himself by word and deed.26

In her masterpiece, The Human Condition (1959), Arendt expanded her ideas about the public character of humanity beyond a particular interest in the question of freedom. We become human beings, she argues, only by “appearing” (a term of art for her) before others and entering into the human world of speaking and acting. This human world, moreover, is in fact the space of freedom because it is not governed, as the natural world is, by necessity27: Through [speech and action], men distinguish themselves instead of being merely distinct; they are modes in which human beings appear to each other, not indeed as physical objects, but qua men. This appearance, as distinguished from mere bodily existence, rests on initiative, but it is an initiative from which no human being can refrain and still be human.28

Shakespeare’s thinking about freedom, publicity (in the basic sense, “the quality of being public”), and humanity amounts to a critical anticipation of Arendt. It is critical because Shakespeare takes more into account than Arendt does how actions and words are regularly misunderstood in highly prejudicial ways in the public sphere. In Hamlet most famously, Shakespeare brings before our eyes human beings in their struggle to be human and free (Hamlet especially, but Ophelia also). As in Arendt, freedom lifts us above the strict determinations that govern all natural phenomena; that kind of human-making freedom must be realized with others in speech and action; and inward, private freedom is an illusion that derives from our real experience of freedom in the public sphere. From the start of the play (“Stand and unfold yourself,” Francisco says) through Hamlet’s obsessive, troubled linking of speech and action (“It is not, nor it cannot come to good, / But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue”—1.2.158–59) to his final wish that Horatio stay alive in order to tell his, Hamlet’s, story to “th’ yet unknowing world” (5.2.379), the play builds a case for “freedom with.” Hamlet cannot simply walk away from Elsinore and all the living and the dead that populate Denmark, nor can he (though he might have done so) organize a collectivity of justice-seeking rebels from among the soldiers on the battlements. He chooses not to mount a rebellion because

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his action of killing the king must also speak: it must be an act intelligible to all if it is to restore justice to the state and ensure the good name of the regicide. Hamlet’s freedom to do what he wants to do can only be realized with others in what Arendt calls “a common public space.” In Shakespeare’s time, of course, a common public space and the freedom it enabled would have had economic, guild-related, and more broadly political underpinnings, features that are mostly outside Arendt’s area of interest since she is a philosopher rather than a social historian or a dramatist. The marketplace in London and Shakespeare’s commercial theater were places for the free exchange of goods, services, and art and entertainment, but “free” in a complex sense since their freedom consisted in a blend of obligation and privilege. A “freeman” of one of the London livery companies like the Grocers or the Goldsmiths was entitled to pursue his trade, to set up shop, and to bind his own apprentices, but he could do none of these things until he had served a period of apprenticeship, which was usually seven years of servitude and training in his master’s shop. Shakespeare’s playhouse was a common public space nested also in a network of obligation and privilege, in part because so many members of the playing companies were also “free of” one or another of the London livery companies, and in part because Shakespeare and his fellows were formally the liveried servants of King James.29 It is hardly surprising, given his experience in the early modern economy of works of art and intellect—nothing like the “free market” in the modern sense—that Shakespeare came to understand the social and economic embedment of freedom. Moreover, as Craig Muldrew has shown, the economy Shakespeare worked in was based on an interrelationship between credit and debt. Credit, in a broader sense as recognized trustworthiness, enabled individuals and families to borrow more easily and to lend more readily.30 In Shakespeare’s world, your freedom of action (and your freedom of speech, especially if you were a literary artist) depended on your credit, an attribute not measured by a banking system’s algorithm but by experience-based judgments about your handling of debt (including your indebtedness to other literary works), as arrived at by your neighbors, your business associates, the leaders of your livery company, the King and his officials, other writers including other playwrights, or the members of your audience. Your indebtedness and your credit went hand in hand, and the degree of freedom you were able to achieve emerged from the relationship between your credit and your debt.

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Look again at Retamar’s reflections on his situation as an ­anti-colonialist writer compelled to think and speak in the language of colonialism. His dilemma is captured precisely, he says, by “the extraordinary outcry [of Caliban against his language teacher and his slave-master Prospero], which we read in a work by perhaps the most extraordinary writer of fiction who ever existed.” Retamar’s acknowledgment of his debt to Shakespeare, especially a debt to The Tempest’s precise anticipation of the harsh challenge he himself faces, underwrites rather than undermines his credit and the freedom and authority of his speech. The literary debt is not something to get free of; on the contrary, Retamar’s freedom as a maker of intellectual works is built on his acknowledged debt to other artists and intellectuals. Shakespeare does something similar when he begins his play with a terrible storm (like the storm at the start of the Aeneid) and when the first words Ferdinand speaks to Miranda, very near the play’s beginning, are “Most sure, the goddess” (1.2.424), a translation of the words Aeneas speaks to Venus (“O dea certe”) just after his shipwreck. Shakespeare’s play provides a model of the transactional debt-based liberation that writers like Retamar and Shakespeare are able to discover by virtue of their borrowings from a host of literary creditors. Traditionally, the play has been seen to turn toward a happy ending (always with critical, sombre elements) when Prospero decides definitively to forgive his brother and the rest.31 It is complicated, of course: Prospero says he will forgive Antonio, and he honours that commitment, albeit with bitterness since his brother fails to express remorse. The character of forgiveness and the liberation it promises is, however, transactional as well as conversional (conversional in the sense that forgiveness depends on an inward turning toward virtue by both the sinner and the person sinned against). Given the traditional linking of morality and economy in scriptural and other vocabularies, as well as in everyday practice, it should come as no great surprise to realize just how much of the play’s final movement turns on the interrelationship between freedom and debt. Prospero binds Antonio by freeing him from punishment. And part of Prospero’s design is to indebt his former enemy Alonso in ways that release him from his sinful act and that bind him in his new-found freedom. Prospero arranges Alonso’s punishment—the apparent death of his son—only in order to give him back his son in exchange for the return of Prospero’s dukedom. The moment of discovery of Ferdinand

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and Miranda “at chess” stages an exchange that intertwines liberation and debt for the two former enemies: My dukedom since you have given me again, I will requite you with as good a thing, At least bring forth a wonder to content ye As much as me my dukedom. (5.1.168–71)

It is, finally, worth bringing forward the curious history of Gonzalo and Prospero. Prospero praises without limit the old counsellor of his enemy Alonso, even though Gonzalo was the man in charge of the operation that night, years before, that took Prospero and his three-year-old daughter from their beds and consigned them to suffering and death in an unseaworthy boat—“[a] rotten carcase of a butt, not rigged, / Nor tackle, sail, nor mast” (1.2.146–47).32 Why does Prospero embrace his wrong-doer and seem to take pleasure in the acknowledgment of a debt to him? It seems even as if Prospero needs to invent a debt. “O good Gonzalo,” he says, “I will pay thy graces / Home in both word and deed!” (5.1.70–71). On the face of it, Gonzalo has earned the praise because he managed to find a kind of way between, on one side, loyalty to Alonso (something Prospero naturally values given his history) and, on the other, mercy to Alonso’s enemy, Prospero.33 Gonzalo’s provision of “some food […] and some fresh water” as well as “garments, linens, stuffs, and necessaries, / Which since have steaded much” (1.2. 160–65) was a drop of kindness in what was otherwise an inundation of cruelty. Prospero is nevertheless happy to take on a debt owed to Gonzalo because it can serve as the groundwork for the restoration of community and the possibility of release from the dead end of his justified rage. It remains only to point out that the gift most valued by Prospero and for which he felt most indebted, was a selection of books (his own books for that matter). Perhaps he even loves the old man Gonzalo for this singular donation:                                         so of his gentleness, Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me From mine own library with volumes that I prize above my dukedom. (1.2.165–68)

It is as if Shakespeare were projecting into his play his own situation as a debtor in the early modern economy of works of art and intellect. The

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books that make possible the magic of literary creation are necessarily the gifts of creditor cultures (in this case the works of Ovid, Vergil, de las Casas, Montaigne, and many others). The books come with strings of debt and domination attached. But the books also give a writer like Shakespeare the means toward his own artistic freedom and canonical credit. As Rabelais’ Panurge says, debt is the “soul of the universe, which […] vivifieth all manner of things.”

Notes









1. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, updated and expanded ed. (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014), loc 188. 2. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 297. 3. All quotations from The Tempest are from The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 4. Frank Kermode, in his Arden edition of The Tempest (6th ed. rev. 1961), points out Herbert’s assaultive metaphor. In his edition of The Tempest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), David Lindley quotes this perfectly illuminating parallel from An Homily of Common Prayer and Sacraments: “the prayer of them that humble themselves shall pierce through the clouds”. 5.  Geneva Bible (1599), Bible Gateway https://www.biblegateway.com/ (accessed 14 October 2019). 6. Graeber, Debt, loc 2602. 7. Ibid., loc 1651. 8. For an illuminating study of the literary market in early modern England, see Douglas Bruster, ‘The Representation Market of Early Modern England’, Renaissance Drama, 41 (2013): 1–23. 9.  For the Sea Venture and the origins of The Tempest, see my ‘Critical Introduction’, in The Tempest, Internet Shakespeare Editions, http:// internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Tmp_GenIntro/section/1.+Origins/ (accessed 14 October 2019). 10.  See Alden T. Vaughan, ‘Trinculo’s Indian: American Natives in Shakespeare’s England’, in ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme and William Sherman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 49–59. 11. See Coll Thrush, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 34–61. 12. For an excellent short account of the sources for The Tempest, see the edition by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 1999), pp. 39–47. For a

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longer, more detailed history of the origins and afterlife of the play, see Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 13. See Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, ‘Just War in the Indies (ca. 1547)’, in Early Modern Spain: A Documentary History, ed. Jon Cowans (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 58–63. 14.  See Chantal Zabus, Tempests after Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 15.  For a detailed discussion, see my ‘The Play in the World’ and ‘The Enchanted Islands of The Tempest’, http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/ doc/Tmp_GenIntro/complete/ (accessed 14 October 2019). 16. This alludes to Amphion’s harp, which miraculously built the walls of Thebes. 17. For more about the playing company’s investments and business expectations at this juncture, see Andrew Gurr, ‘The Tempest’s Tempest at Blackfriars’, Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989): 91–102. 18.  Edward Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Caliban, Ariel, and Unprospero in the Conflict of Creolization: A Study of the Slave Revolt in Jamaica in 1831– 32’, in Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, ed. Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), pp. 41–62. Cited in Vaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban, p. 157. 19. For a still persuasive account of the involvement of the play in racist language and thinking, see Paul Brown, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 48–71. 20.  The Enchanted Island, in The Works of John Dryden: Volume 10, ed. Maximillian E. Nozak and George R. Guffey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 1–103. 21. Roberto Fernández Retamar, ‘Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’, trans. Lynn Garafola, David Arthur McMurray, and Robert Márquez, Massachusetts Review, 15 (1973–74): 7–72 (p. 11), first published in Spanish in Casa de Las Américas, 68 (Sept.–Oct., 1971): 124–51. 22. Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 17–18. 23. ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhaba’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 207–21 (p. 211). 24.  Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–72.

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25.  ‘Positive and Negative Liberty’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/ (accessed 14 October 2019). 26. Hannah Arendt, ‘What Is Freedom?’, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006; first published 1961), pp. 142–68 (pp. 146–47). 27. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 177–78. 28. Arendt, Human Condition, p. 176. 29. See David Kathman, ‘Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (2004): 1–46. 30. See Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: MacMillan, 1998), esp. pp. 123–47. 31.  For a recent, brilliant reading along these lines, see Sarah Beckwith, ‘Making Good in The Tempest’, in Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), pp. 147–72. 32. For two different readings of this under-examined element of the play, see Harry Berger, Jr., ‘“Miraculous Harp”: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969): 253–83; and my ‘Shakespeare and the Idea of Obedience: Gonzalo in The Tempest’, MOSAIC, 24 (1991): 1–18. 33. The idea is expressed precisely: “O good Gonzalo,” Prospero says, “My true preserver, and a loyal sir / To him thou follow’st” (5.1.68–70).

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah, ‘What Is Freedom?’, in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 2006; first published 1961), pp. 142–68. ———, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Beckwith, Sarah, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013). Berger, Harry, Jr., ‘“Miraculous Harp”: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest’, Shakespeare Studies, 5 (1969): 253–83. Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118–72. Bhaba, Homi, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhaba’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), pp. 207–21.

260  P. YACHNIN Bruster, Douglas, ‘The Representation Market of Early Modern England’, Renaissance Drama, 41 (2013): 1–23. Césaire, Aimé, A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1992). Fanon, Franz, Black Skins, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Graeber, David, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, updated and expanded ed. (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2014). Hulme, Peter, and William Sherman, ed. ‘The Tempest’ and Its Travels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Kastan, David Scott, ‘“The Duke of Milan/and His Brave Son”: Dynastic Politics in The Tempest’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden Vaughan (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), pp. 91–103. Kathman, David, ‘Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers: Freemen and Apprentices in the Elizabethan Theater’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 55 (2004): 1–46. Mannoni, O., Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonialism, trans. Pamela Powesland (London: Methuen, 1956). Muldrew, Craig, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: MacMillan, 1998). Retamar, Roberto Fernández, ‘Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’, Massachusetts Review, 15 (1973–74): 7–72. Rubin, Vera, and Arthur Tuden, ed., Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977). Thrush, Coll, Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Vaughan, Alden T., and Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Zabus, Chantal, Tempests after Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

Afterword: Knowledge Production, Reproduction and Shifting Borders in the Literature and Economies of the Early Modern Atlantic World Valerie Forman

In this diverse and provocative collection of essays, with its range of topics, objects of study and theoretical approaches, there is one commonality in nearly all of them: the presence of different forms and degrees of uncertainty. Uncertainty’s presence perhaps is not surprising in essays about change and exchange and its relation to forms of knowledge. But it is not just the existence of uncertainty itself that the essays address, but the epistemological and practical challenges it presents. At the collection’s center are the ways shifts in economic practices required new forms of knowledge to understand, to navigate, to plan and to engage in both everyday activities and larger projects at the local, as well as state, and even global levels. What is so powerful about the essays is how they show us how new forms of knowledge are utilized as well as the very attempts to produce those knowledges—knowledges necessary V. Forman (*)  New York University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_12

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to name, defend and conceive an emerging complex system in which goods, people and ideas are produced, circulated, distributed and even reproduced. One of the many strengths of the collection lies in showing us the varied processes through which these forms of knowledge are imagined through complex forms of representation—the content, form, production and circulation of ‘literature’ broadly defined—and through repeated engagement with material practices. This collection of essays provides us with a genealogy of ideas about change and exchange by providing a window into how early modern texts negotiated a shifting social order, both conceptually and affectively. Through that window we can begin to understand how the practices and concepts with which we now engage every day developed. These include, for example: risk, profit, investment, return; and the logics that subtend them—those of hard work (i.e. industriousness), merit (i.e. deserving) and development and productivity (i.e. improvement). The collection, then, helps to denaturalize or defamiliarize the very tenets of Western capitalism and imperialism and the knowledges they require. In this era of radical inequality (both within nations and between nations and regions) and of late capitalism’s potential to create ever more divisiveness even as it threatens to destroy the material world in which we all share, this ­collection, which invites us to think about the relationship between the ­economy and knowledge production, is very timely. One way many of the essays show knowledge production at work is through their exploration of the way that conceptual frameworks from one domain are reconfigured to negotiate the work of another. One of the domains significantly refunctioned to which these essays attend is that of the religious. In his essay, Kirby attends to this issue most explicitly, providing an account of the theological discussion of the economy of salvation. He concludes that it is not surprising that ‘the organisation of quotidian, material change and exchange should mirror the spiritual economy’ (199). A number of the essays also enable us to think about how the economics of salvation are refunctioned to accommodate or negotiate an economy in which not only profit but also the accumulation of capital for future investments, perhaps even over long distances, is central. Underlying many of these essays is a tension between debt and what some of the authors refer to as ‘wonderful’ or ‘wondrous’ exchange. Kirby reminds us that a primary source for the foundation of this logic is St. Anselm’s eleventh-century

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Why God Became Man.1 In the passage that Kirby quotes, Anselm explains how the fall of Adam and Eve, and thus mankind, produces a debt to God which in its quantity and quality is unpayable. Only Christ, as part man and part God, can substitute for man and also suffice to repay man’s debt through his sacrifice. In Anselm’s accounting, the debt to God is repaid, even overpaid, by Christ, whose life has infinite value. Thus the fall is fortunate; it produces a profit. This logic was central to conceptualizing the investment necessary for long-distance overseas trade, such that the loss of money sent out could be understood in terms of its subsequent transformation into profit. Now this logic has sedimented into common knowledge and the very definition of ‘investment’ is the outlay of money in the expectation of a profit. Common sense now tells us that money invested produces more money.2 Kirby explicitly addresses the way that the economics of salvation become secularized, and through many of the essays we can see how the relationship between debt and ‘wondrous’ or ‘wonderful’ exchange is at the heart of this secularization. In many of these essays, the economy of salvation subtends their analysis of the economic in ways that are semi-explicit: Yachnin, in his discussion of debt and freedom in The Tempest; Lajous, on the ‘wondrous exchange’ of the lottery held by Elizabeth I; Ryner, on the desire for the limitlessness of gain through the exchange of interchangeable equivalents haunted by incest; and Zucker, on affect and the widow who is doomed to gain no matter what she does or how hard she tries to dissipate, waste and relieve herself of her fortune. One way to understand the widow whose misfortune is its own opposite—she cannot lose—is as a parody of this logic in which what is sent out is transformed into gain. Belying not only everyday logic but also dramatic convention, a wealthy widow—often the target of ­prodigals—intentionally marries a prodigal gambler. Acting against her desire to experience loss, he reforms his ways. Rowley’s play turns the logic of the widow’s convention on its head even as it succumbs to the logic of the larger comic conventions of the play. But the play also parodies the very idea that makes winning a lottery or being like the winner of a lottery not only possible but an expected, everyday outcome. Might we call it the ‘lottery epistemology’, in which profitable redemption becomes a repeated everyday economic affair, one even repeated nightly at the theater, as Yachnin suggests in his reading of the relations between mercy, applause and freedom in Prospero’s epilogue?

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The essays call our attention not only to the refunctioning of the religious in the realm of the economic but also to the reverberation of the economic realm in the religious domain as the market ethic begins to apply its pressure elsewhere. The mercy that Portia requests and that some characters hope for in The Merchant of Venice is literally the forgiveness of debts. Sullivan’s reading of prayer books highlights concerns about whether it is acceptable to allow the idea of exchange to frame ideas about prayer, that is, to understand prayer as a kind of bargaining with God. In its extreme form (as she shows in her reading of Measure for Measure) that prayer/bargaining comes to have exchange value as Isabella unsuccessfully offers her prayers to bribe Angelo into not killing her brother. In contrast to the logic of the purchase of indulgences, which repay the debt to God that your sins have produced, bargaining in prayer is a form of requesting recompense from God, and then, in the extreme case, exchanging that expected recompense for something desired by another—a kind of perversion of the triangulation at the heart of Anselm’s logic and a secularization of prayer itself. It is also useful to compare the relationship this transaction has to economics with that of indulgences. The practice of indulgence is literally an economic transaction in which money is exchanged for forgiveness and redemption. The latter is an economic way of thinking, that is a form of knowledge, that rubs up against an emerging market in prayer books whose very content might include requests for material benefits. The essays highlight similar sets of issues in other forms of literature: in emblem books, in receipts for alchemical formulas, and in fake news. In every case the intervention of the market is in tension with, and has an impact on, the form and content of the writing itself. Market practices impact the circulation of goods which were often thought still to be outside of the domain of the economic. Forms of knowledge circulate creating new networks of readers and writers and, as many of these authors demonstrate, forms of debt and obligation both literary and economic. The example of bargaining through prayer provides a stepping stone in which the religious domain begins to be not only infused with, but also framed by that of the economic. In demonstrating how knowledge production is at work in the way that the religious domain begins to frame the conceptualization and ethics of the economic domain, these essays invite us to think about ways the economic domain appears to shed its conceptual and ontological status as derivative and even starts to become a conceptual frame for other domains.3 And the collection as a

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whole asks us to think about how forms of literary production negotiate the spread of the market’s ethics. A timely play for our current era—one that engages the possibility of the market becoming an ethical and conceptual framework that influences and impacts other domains—is Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Important to the volume’s concern with the literary, Coriolanus focuses on how shifting forms of exchange refunction economic epistemologies through its very emphasis on forms of representation—both literary and political. The play thus demonstrates some of the larger implications of this extension of the market’s ethics. As is well-known, Coriolanus opens with a riot, brought about by a shortage of corn (one exacerbated by hording and usury), in which mutinous citizens are ‘resolv’d rather to die than to famish’ (1.1.4–5). But the rioters cease their protests not because of the distribution of food, but because they are granted tribunes, political representatives for the common people, that is, of their own class. Strangely, this crisis, and economic problems in general, are largely absent from the rest of the play, which then centers around the politics of the selection of Coriolanus to be a consul and its tragic consequences. Hunger, however, reappears in the play’s metaphors, and the logic of the market emerges as the conceptual framework for understanding the political realm. In other words, the food riot that opens the play is resolved through the granting of tribunes (a political solution to an economic problem) and the political conflict at the play’s center is then structured by the ethics of the market. The selection of Coriolanus as consul occurs in the marketplace and this fact is crucial to the play’s representation of the process by which the citizens publicly give their assent. Coriolanus is supposed to show the citizens his wounds and, in exchange, the citizens are supposed to give him their voices. Not surprisingly, Coriolanus objects to this process: in his worldview, the citizens deserve neither to see his wounds nor to have a say in the process. ‘Better it is to die, better to starve’, he claims, ‘Than crave the hire which first we do deserve’ (2.3.113–14). He laments that he must show the ‘unaching scars’ of his wounds as if he had ‘receiv’d them for the hire / Of their breath only’ (2.2.148, 149– 50). Tomlin’s essay demonstrates convincingly how metaphor negotiates the anxiety about equivalences between moral worth and financial value. Here, Coriolanus’ language registers his anxieties about being coerced to participate in and be constituted by market ethics. Rather than secure

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his place in a world of prestige and honor, he imagines that this process would transform his military action for Rome into a retroactive hiring by the citizens. Indeed, in his formulation the wounds themselves become a kind of currency that can be counted up and exchanged in order to purchase the political voices of the citizens. Coriolanus asks, what is ‘your price a’ th’ consulship?’ (2.3.73–74); in this instance ‘price’ occupies a middle ground between the literal and the metaphoric, connecting an ethical question with an economic one. Though the process of selection does not go smoothly, the citizens do finally give their voices in support of Coriolanus, or more precisely give them away. After they assent, he disparagingly says: ‘[n]ow you have left your voices, / I have no further with you’ (2.3.172–73). The play refers to the use of voices as itself the product of an exchange—subject to and derivative of market forces. If the wounds are currency, which has been used to buy the citizens’ voices, then the voices, in turn, are themselves alienable property. While there are no commodities as such represented in the play (except the unavailable corn), what is commodified are the citizens’ voices, which like labor can be alienated from the self. The market’s mode of exchange shapes the political process, and the alienability of voices functions like the wage relation that becomes one of the defining features of industrial capitalism, creating the insurmountable gap it was supposedly intended to overcome.4 Importantly, this relation is not only analogical. Just after the citizens’ voices are exchanged and appropriated, the entry of the citizens on the stage is marked not by the stage direction ‘citizens’ (potential political agents) but ‘plebeians’. Plebeians appear when citizens’ voices are counted and then dis-counted, but the result is that their value is questionable and their efficacy is severely reduced.5 In the period, the word ‘plebeians’ started to shift from a neutral marker of a fixed place in a social hierarchy to a pejorative term for those within a category of disdain, the product of a moral economy in which an emerging work ethic can equate poverty with a lack of deserving—just one example of many of the way language shifts to negotiate the relationship between moral worth and financial value.6 Moreover, the precursor of bourgeois representative democracy the play imagines does, as Coriolanus hopes to do, ‘depopulate’ the city, by eliminating not only individual voices, but also their collective political power, manifested in the riot. By structuring the way politics is understood (as a sale of voices in a market economy), the economic forces perpetuate economic inequality precisely by giving voices that appear

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to provide the citizens with political power, thus robbing them of their ability to collectively demand economic justice. Paradoxically, as the economic domain frames that of the political with a kind of market ethic, the resulting transformation of voices into alienable equivalents depoliticizes the economic domain in which the dispossession comes to appear voluntary. This logic can be carried forward to argue that whatever economic inequalities exist, they are, given the (abstract) equality of voices, simply the result of a lack of merit. Such an analysis might allow us to reconsider not only the sale of voices, but also a similar, though seemingly inverse, practice much debated in our own time in which candidates receive large quantities of money in return for future political favors, that is, future representation. Unlike voices whose value disappears as soon as they are expended, money is understood to continue to speak. It is even protected by the First Amendment in the United States. In other words, voices become alienated and replaced by money—understood as a form of speech. The epistemologies of the market produced and continue to produce a number of contradictions and tensions. An important benefit of reading this collection of essays together is that it allows us to identify contradictions or tensions with new knowledges that play out differently in the range of works which it discusses. Particularly striking are those that relate to power itself and particularly how we understand where sources of authority and value lie. As both Ryner and Tomlin remind us, a central issue in what we now call the mercantilist’s debate was whether the price of money should be determined by royal authority or by those who were participant in the exchange of foreign currencies.7 This was both a question of the symbolic and the material. Should value be determined by the power and image of the monarch or by the value of the substance of the coin that is itself determined by market forces? Ryner’s reading holds in tension the possibility of boundless exchanges and the worry over the illusoriness of the material value waiting to be revealed. Tomlin’s reading of Edward IV also calls our attention to struggles over the ethical center and center of power as the play’s plots explore the promotion of the values of city merchants over the values of a court deemed disruptive. She highlights the undoing of the analogy in which the king is the husband of the state; in its absence the monarch’s subjects challenge not only the locus of authority but also the source of ethics. In Coriolanus, the political system itself is determined by a market ethics that manifests in structural elements of the play—both stage directions

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and speech prefixes. In Edward IV, the ethics of the city merchant challenges conventional forms of authority, as Tomlin demonstrates in her reading of the play’s mix of genres. In these examples, the market ethic and the realm of merchants challenge that of the ruling elite. In exploring these tensions, the essays also explore the way knowledge, economics, authority and moral values become intertwined in new ways. These changes often emerge in the relationship between state and non-state actors. The marketing of Elizabeth I’s lottery, central to Lajous’ essay, worked to emphasize three connected aspects of this relationship: the potential gain to be had by those who participated in it; the benefit for the realm; and lastly ‘chance’ as a risk that is borne by the state and not those who were investing in its future. According to the official advertisement, the state will receive ‘suche commoditie as may chaunce to arise thereof after the charges borne’ (Lajous, 116). Those charges perhaps include the cost to administer the lottery, but they are likely comprised primarily by the gain to be paid out to the lucky winners. Though the benefit of the commonwealth is the end goal seemingly for all, in actuality the lottery splits the benefit or ‘commodity’ between two distinct parties—the adventurers and the state—produced in opposition. The more the state pays out, the less that it is able to keep. The marketing of the lottery exploits the tension between the state and its subjects as market participants, even as the state, is appealing to the goal of profit as a good—an ethic in the making that largely emerges from the realm of the city merchants. In this volume, the ethics of new economic practices and knowledges shift the determination of what is a valid undertaking in two primary ways: first, by narrowing the notion of what is worthy to connections with profit; and, secondly, by emphasizing the importance of broadening the geographical reach. At times both happen simultaneously. Elizabeth I used the lottery to fund projects at home, but James I and VI used the lottery to fund the colonization of Virginia in 1612. I am reminded here of Michael Nerlich’s terrific work on the conceptual shift from the world of the knightly adventure to that of the commercial venture.8 Knowledge about value, too, becomes deeply intertwined with new understandings of how borders function. At home, Edward IV is represented nearly as a foreigner, an invader who crosses boundaries and disrupts the working of the social order of the city and the household. At the same time, as risk becomes something one manages, it also gets sourced out. Despite Elizabeth’s rhetoric, it is those who venture

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in the lottery, like investors in joint stock companies, who bear the risk. Sir Walter Raleigh, in his Discovery of Guiana, repeatedly references the importance of expansion by assimilating Guiana (where he hoped to find the fabled El Dorado) into England to expand England’s wealth relative to that of other European powers, in particular the Spanish. He represents his failure to find El Dorado, or indeed any great source of wealth, as a deferral of profit so that he might bring back even greater wealth for the kingdom. In order to do so, he makes use of the knowledge of Spanish success and failure with indigenous populations to derive a strategy that would prevent the indigenous inhabitants from perceiving his true intentions of exploiting a territory ‘that hath yet her Maydenhead’ and whose ‘graves have not beene opened for golde’.9 If he does not take much gold from them now, they will think that he and England have more noble intentions. His narrative is also strategic in relation to Elizabeth. In addition to representing the inhabitants as easily assimilable and their land as wealth-generating, he represents his project as a whole as compensatory for previous adventures not undertaken. Elizabeth’s grandfather rejected an offer from Columbus before he went to Spanish for funds. He thus makes use of the knowledge of all the wealth and power England, instead of Spain, could have gained in order to persuade Elizabeth to provide funds for a return voyage in the future. He concludes: …for whatsoever Prince shall possesse it, shall bee greatest, and if the king of Spayne enjoy it, he will become unresistable. Her Majesty heereby shall confirme and strengthen the opinions of al nations, as touching her great and princely actons. And where the south border of Guiana reacheth to the Dominion and Empire of the Amazones, those women shall heereby heare the name of a virgin, which is not onely able to defend her owne territories and her neighbors, but also to invade and conquere so great Empyres and so farre removed.

Raleigh’s text strategically implements new knowledges regarding the interaction of multiple geographical regions and diverse actors in a competition to dominate regions far beyond the reach previously thought possible.10 The lottery in Merchant of Venice is a good starting point for thinking about the implications of this new understanding of borders. The stakes of the lottery go well beyond the quadrangulated relationships of debt and

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credit among Antonio, Bassanio, Portia and Shylock. To gamble on the casket, as Lajous points out, is to agree to risk your potential for marriage, which means to risk producing a legitimate heir, something which would have had major political implications where future rulers were concerned. This lottery therefore has the power to interrupt the future of other lands at the same time that it sets the stage for expanding borders through the control of various forms of reproduction—the assimilation of more subjects as well as the production of heirs, issues also addressed by both Ryner’s and Yachnin’s essays. Understandings of the socio-economic power over reproduction become fundamental to notions of expansion and make the literary a particular useful space for negotiating such issues and imagining its potential. In The Tempest, for example, the shipwreck is of course only made possible because Alonso has married his daughter to the King of Tunis, perhaps a conventional or traditional arrangement made to form an alliance. Yet, as critics have noted, it also functions to quell anxiety about the threat of the Barbary states and the power of the Ottoman Empire figured in the spectral threats posed by Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, a witch from Algiers, and in her son Caliban, who had hoped to populate the island with Calibans.11 But Prospero (like Raleigh, James and Elizabeth), through a series of exchanges of mercy, redemption and exploitation of the labor of both Caliban and Ferdinand, has in mind the expansion of his borders. Through the marriage of his daughter Miranda to the son of the King of Naples, he both regains his kingdom and ensures that his ‘issue’ will be kings of Naples, a point not missed by Prospero’s ex-counselor, Gonzalo. In some sense, this is not a new insight in terms of what Prospero gains, but it does put those gains into new terms that allow us to see how new forms of knowledge subtend imperial expansion. This connection is reinforced first by Antonio and Sebastian, who mock Gonzalo’s knowledge and then his fantasy of power on the island. They joke that he imagines the island as an apple whose seeds sown in the sea will bring forth more islands.12 The second reinforcement goes by unmentioned: the near extermination of Calibans. The logic of wondrous exchange via (wondrous) reproduction (of both heirs and territory) serves to ground the imperialist and colonialist project. The need to account for the economic value of people and the possession of new lands becomes central to a range of literary narratives about the conquest of territories and the enslavement of people—both

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indigenous Amerindians and Africans—narratives that themselves circulate in new ways. A powerful example is Shakespeare’s play Othello, reconfigured off the stage in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, a work sometimes considered to be the first novel in English, and then transformed back into Southerne’s play of the same name. The story of Inkle and Yarico in which an indigenous woman from the mainland saves and then falls in love with an English sailor, only for him to sell her into slavery in Barbados, where the birth of their child marks her extraordinary reproductive capacity, has its many versions.13 What do we make of the circulation of new literary forms and narratives in which reproduction is itself central even if, or especially as, the making of alliances retreats from view? In the place of children who result from alliances or who are exchanged to produce alliances are children who are the descendants of people who were treated as commodities, both by their owners and those who buy and sell them in markets. Marriage plots are distorted and romance mutates into other forms. The tragedy of Othello results from his perceived ability to stain and taint Desdemona with his blackness. In contrast, the love of Oroonoko and his beloved Imoinda depends on their enslavement, which then turns their romance into a tragedy when that enslavement threatens to turn their ‘issue’ into someone else’s property.14 The inheritances central to comic plots, for example, in Southerne’s stage Oroonoko, include the offspring of other enslaved characters. The children of protagonists become the source of capital and the reproduction of capital for others within the narrative whose endings are far from, even segregated from, the tragedy.15 In Coriolanus voices can be bought and sold; in The Merchant of Venice offspring are conflated with wealth. These forms of alienation lay the groundwork for the exchange of people themselves to occupy and transform literary forms. These exchanges and transformations become less ‘wondrous’ over time—both because of who or what is being exchanged and the relationship to knowledge necessary to do so. New conceptualizations of profit-making expand from the wondrousness of transforming loss into profit, into specific calculations about how to take into account, in advance, the possibility for loss. Here I am beginning to move beyond the time frame of most of the essays’ subjects, but to knowledges that issue (not naturally or teleologically) from those the volume explores. This accounting is at work most profoundly and tragically in the literature and practices of the transatlantic slave trade. One of the most detailed English texts we have about plantation slavery in the seventeenth

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century is Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados. Though parts of his text read like a conventional travel narrative about potential expansion and conquest, the text depends on and makes use of radically different kinds of knowledge than does a text like Raleigh’s. In contrast to Raleigh’s grandiose and largely vague imagining of England’s future wealth and Empire, Ligon provides detailed explanations of how to build and run a profitable sugar plantation in part based on his experiences in Barbados. This account includes financial calculations and culminates in mathematical tables that load in advance the possibility of loss by accounting for and providing against all the hazards that might interfere with running a successful plantation. These include everything from disease, to slave rebellion, to the quantity of tools and clothing a plantation owner must purchase. The other side of his equation contains the near certainty of producing a grand fortune through the circulation of sugar. But the latter depends on having the proper knowledge and discipline to manage an orderly plantation. This logic underlies many of the late seventeenth-century and early e­ ighteenth-century pamphlets and letters from the colonies to London, which argue for the importance of the colonies in general and, in particular, in support of those who run the plantations. Significantly, many of these texts employ the figure of the ‘enslaved’ plantation manager, who has been reduced to a position not unlike his literal slaves by taxes and monopolies that eliminate the profits for which he has worked so diligently. The absence of free trade makes him unfree, that is, akin to slaves.16 But the profits of the slave trade itself were dependent on scrupulous calculations. In Saltwater Slavery, Smallwood exposes all of the calculations that went into maximizing the profits of the slave trade—for example, finding the minimum amount of food necessary to keep captive people alive—and their role in the processes which transformed captives into slaves, that is, persons into commodities.17 Other knowledges included how densely to pack ships with future slaves in order to take account of the likely losses which would occur during the journey, but without counter-productively increasing the mortality rate through the additional crowding. As Smallwood reminds us, our current scholarly emphasis on the numerical sources in archives limits our knowledge of the experiences of those people who were transformed into slaves, a gap that her book brilliantly fills. Also, important for us to know and remember are the significant but often overlooked knowledges of agriculture, healing, and perhaps also of war, that many different African peoples,

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who were forcibly brought to the other side of the Atlantic, carried with them. These economic calculations get taken to their extreme in the infamous case of the Zong massacre and the insurance policies of which the shipowners tried to take advantage. In 1781, the crew of the Zong, a slave ship, threw more than 130 enslaved Africans overboard in order to collect the insurance they had taken out on the slaves. The crew claimed that the ship was running low on water and that they had to throw the slaves overboard in order to save the crew and the other slaves. The slaves were considered cargo and were thus covered by insurance. The insurers refused to pay and the case went to court. At issue was whether the ship’s crew was trying to cover up that it had massacred the slaves so that they would not be considered a ‘dead loss’, which was not covered by the insurance. Though no one was charged with murder, the case was taken up by the abolitionist cause. As Ian Baucom argues, the massacre and the events surrounding it reveal the ethics of speculative capital that provide the foundation for contemporary capitalism and its ethics.18 The lottery was used by Elizabeth to raise money for public works and by James to fund the colonies; bills of exchange enabled transactions over long distances and joint stock companies enabled the pooling of money over long periods of time, while books of emblems, prayers and fake news circulated in markets that both made possible anonymity and reduced authorial control. But the next generation of financial knowledge that produced financial speculation and markets for credit itself funded imperial projects for a long time to come. Perhaps the most disturbing ‘lottery’ in England was the sale of national debt to fund the compensation of slaveowners for their property when England abolished slavery in its colonies in 1835. The £15 million of government bonds which were used to finance the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act were not paid off until 2015, which means that its investors continued to profit from slavery for nearly two centuries after its formal abolition. This is knowledge with which we must engage. As Kris Manjapra argues in his analysis of what he calls ‘necrospeculation’ ‘the search to claim or capture profit through ritualized engagement with the social figure of the dead and the killed,’ we must also acknowledge that slavery, capitalism and racial capitalism are not in the past.19 The literal bonds remained productive of value until just a few years ago and the techniques of ‘necrospeculation’ and of racialized violence remain infrastructural to socio-economic thinking.

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Perhaps thinking about where the knowledge of change and exchange takes us in the century (and centuries) after most of the literature discussed in this volume asks us to push back against the ‘wondrousness’ of exchange to think about the dispossession produced by these exchanges and the knowledges that subtend them, a suggestion that perhaps mirrors Zucker’s call for us to take the stance of ‘vexedness’ in relation to the past and our own presence (101–2, 106). Perhaps an important current project is to begin to decolonize these knowledges whose ethics provide the foundation for the intertwined inequalities and environmental crisis that we now need to confront. What questions must we ask about the relationship between freedom and debt in this context? Yachnin, in his reading of The Tempest and literary indebtedness, argues for a model of freedom that depends on debt and obligation as groundwork for the restoration of community. In her essay on our world as a place full of refugees (both human and not) without refuge, Donna Haraway reflects on the punning between kin and kind in Hamlet (1.2.65) (a play about dispossession and imagining the cost of loss), to suggest that ‘making kin and making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination and can change the story.’20 Through their defamiliarization of economic knowledges and practices, these essays invite us to think about what new forms of exchanges, literary and otherwise, we can and need to imagine.

Notes



1. Saint Anselm (1033–1109), Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man), trans. Sidney Norton Deane (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1903), Book 2, Chapter XIV, ‘How His Death Outweighs the Number and Greatness of Our Sins’. For other discussions of the economics of Anselm, see Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things’, in The Culture of Capital: Properties, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 275–92; John Parker, ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man: Shakespearean Drama as Marxian Fetish, the Fetish as Sacramental Sublime’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34:3 (2004): 643–72. 2. See my book, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), especially the introduction.

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3. A number of critics and historians have argued that the debates over economic policy in the 1620s were unique in that they focused on the economic as a separate, secular domain. Joyce Appleby, for example, claims that ‘it is the differentiation of things economic from their social context that truly distinguished the writings of the so-called mercantilist period’, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 26. 4. This alienation of voices resonates with voices used in prayer to bargain with God, though the latter voices have an exchange value that redounds to the speaker. I am not suggesting any analogical relation between God and Coriolanus, however. 5. In the First Folio, in 12 stage directions and 25 speech prefixes, the common people are referred to as ‘citizens’. In three stage directions and one speech heading they are simply ‘plebeians’; in one stage direction, ‘a rabble of plebeians’, and then later in that scene they become simply ‘rabble’: ‘Enter Brutus and Sicinius with the rabble again’ (stage direction between the start and finish of 3.1.262). The oscillating structural conditions of the play suggests a larger uncertainty about the economic and political status they represent and that of representation itself. 6. OED. On the poor and the logic of deserving as it develops in this period, see Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988); Scott Shershow, The Work and the Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005). 7. On the ‘mercantilists’, see Mark Blaug, The Early Mercantilists: Thomas Mun (1571–1641), Edward Misselden (1608–1634), Gerard de Malynes (1586–1623), Pioneers in Economics 4 (Aldershot: Elgar, 1991); Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind, Mercantilism Reimagined in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 8. Michael Nerlich, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100–1750 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Nerlich identifies the first occurrence of merchants calling themselves adventurers in England in 1443. 9. Walter Raleigh, The Discouerie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana with a Relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (Which the Spanyards Call El Dorado) and the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia, and Other Countries, with Their Riuers, Adioyning. Performed in the Yeare 1595 (London: Robert Robinson, 1596), p. 96. 10. ‘For after the first or second yeare I doubt not but to see in London a Contratation house of more receipt for Guiana, then there is now in civill [Seville] for the West indies’, Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, pp. 99–101.

276  V. FORMAN 11.  Barbara Fuchs, ‘Conquering Islands, Contextualizing the Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48:1 (1997): 45–62. 12. See Yachnin, 247. 13. The first version of this story occurs in Richard Ligon’s, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1657). I will discuss this text further below. 14. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (London: William Canning, 1688). 15.  See my ‘Constructing white privilege: Transatlantic Slavery, Reproduction, and the Segregation of the Marriage Plot in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in Routledge Companion to Sex and Gender in the Early British Colonial World, ed. Kimberly Ann Coles and Eve Keller (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 304–21. 16.  See for example, Edward Littleton, The Groans of the Plantations (London: Matthew Clark, 1689); Thomas Dalby, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies (London: Joseph Hindmarsh, 1690). 17. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Though Smallwood details this process and the ‘mathematical reasoning’ it required, the focus of her book is not on the mathematical accounting but on the experiences of the enslaved, that which requires reading a ­different archive from that of ledgers. 18. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 19. Kris Manjapra, ‘Necrospeculation: Postemancipation Finance and Black Redress’, Social Text, 37:2 (2019): 29–65. 20.  Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015): 159–65.

Select Bibliography Appleby, Joyce, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Baucom, Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Behn, Aphra, Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (London: William Canning, 1688). Blaug, Mark, ed., The Early Mercantilists: Thomas Mun (1571–1641), Edward Misselden (1608–1634), Gerard de Malynes (1586–1623), Pioneers in Economics 4 (Aldershot: Elgar, 1991). Dalby, Thomas, An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies (London: Joseph Hindmarsh, 1690).

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Forman, Valerie, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). ———, ‘Constructing White Privilege: Transatlantic Slavery, Reproduction, and the Segregation of the Marriage Plot in the Late Seventeenth Century’, in The Routledge Companion to Sex and Gender in the Early British Colonial World, ed. Kimberly Ann Coles and Eve Keller (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 304–21. Fuchs, Barbara, ‘Conquering Islands, Contextualizing the Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 48:1 (1997): 45–62. Haraway, Donna, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6 (2015): 159–65. Ligon, Richard, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1657). Littleton, Edward, The Groans of the Plantations (London: Matthew Clark, 1689). Manjapra, Kris, ‘Necrospeculation: Postemancipation Finance and Black Redress’, Social Text, 37:2 (2019): 29–65. Nerlich, Michael, Ideology of Adventure: Studies in Modern Consciousness, 1100– 1750 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Parker, John, ‘What a Piece of Work Is Man: Shakespearean Drama as Marxian Fetish, the Fetish as Sacramental Sublime’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34:3 (2004): 643–72. Raleigh, Walter, The Discouerie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (Which the Spanyards Call El Dorado) and the Provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia, and Other Countries, with Their Rivers, Adjoyning. Performed in the Yeare 1595 (London: Robert Robinson, 1596). Shershow, Scott, The Work and the Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago: 2005). Slack, Paul, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988). Smallwood, Stephanie, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Stallybrass, Peter, ‘The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things’, in The Culture of Capital: Properties, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 275–92.

Index

A Adventurers, 115–118, 122, 123, 268 Affect, 2, 3, 6–9, 12–19, 34, 36, 37, 94–102, 104–106, 121, 166, 174, 209, 212, 221, 225, 263 Affective forecasting, 94, 95, 104 Agrippa, Cornelius, 214, 215, 220, 222, 224, 232, 233 Alchemy blending of Classical and Christian myths in, 226 domestic uses of, 222 in literary imagination, 210 self-fashioning in, 219 teaching of, 209 theory and practice of, 209 trade in, 223 Alciato, Andrea, 69, 72–76, 79, 86 Allusion, 59, 72, 135, 137, 140, 142, 144, 151 Amicitia, 72 Andreae, Johann Valentin, 56–60 Anonymity, 51–53, 273 Arcana, 208

Atonement, 192, 197 Attention, 30, 31, 33, 79, 93, 96, 106, 163, 165, 210, 264, 267 B Bargaining, 29, 37, 40, 42, 149 Bills of exchange, 161–164, 273 Boccalini, Trajano, 15, 51–54, 57, 59–61 C Carnivalesque, 15, 60 Chance, 17, 39, 73, 113, 114, 116–118, 120–124, 126, 127, 212, 268 Charlatans, 54, 56, 59 City comedy, 151, 159, 169 Cognition, 12, 187, 191, 192 Commerce, 7, 8, 12, 14, 57–59, 93, 99, 100, 103–106, 135, 136, 139, 140, 143, 149, 169, 183–185, 192, 199

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. Mukherji et al. (eds.), Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2

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280  Index Commodity fetishism, 163, 164, 172, 173 Commodity form, 10, 17, 160, 161, 163, 168, 169, 171–175 Communitarianism, 12, 241, 242, 252 Concentration, 228 Consumption, 65, 103, 171, 217, 246 Conversion, 11–13, 18, 39, 99, 183–185, 187–192, 196, 197, 199, 244, 245, 255 Covenant, 184, 185, 189, 192 Credit literary forms of, 254, 255, 257 Cupiditas, 83, 196 D Debt literary forms of, 2, 13, 243, 249, 250, 255, 257, 274 social forms of, 242–243, 247–248 Deception, 58, 60, 196 Desire, 2, 7, 10, 11, 16, 33, 35, 58, 97–100, 102, 106, 121, 123, 125, 142–144, 149, 151, 159–161, 165, 168, 171–175, 184, 226, 263, 264 Device, 3, 17, 75–78, 84, 114, 118, 121, 125, 136, 140, 145, 163, 226 Distillation, 208, 209, 216, 225 Duchesne, Joseph [Quercetanus], 216, 217, 219, 230, 231 E Economy art, ideas, and, 17, 94, 106, 247, 251, 254, 256 Christian morality and, 243–244, 255 material forms of, 242, 244

Economy of salvation, 12, 183, 185, 186, 192, 197–199, 262, 263 Edward IV, 16, 133–137, 140–142, 144–146, 152–154, 267, 268 Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 114, 115, 263, 268 Emblem, 3, 15, 16, 69–80, 83–85, 141, 264, 273 Emotion, 2, 8, 17, 94–97, 101–106, 150 F Fortune, 3, 41, 83, 101, 114–116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 263, 272 Freedom communitarian idea of, 241 debt as instrument of, 242, 243, 251 G Gamester, 124, 126 Gift-giving practices, 74, 84 H Hazard, 11, 17, 84, 117, 121–126, 162, 272 Hedonic psychology, 94 Heywood, Thomas, 16, 101, 133– 138, 140–142, 144, 148, 149, 151 Homonyms, 146 Humanism, 78 Hypallage, 11, 149 I Incest, 160, 161, 165, 167–170, 174, 263

Index

  281

J Jonson, Ben, 99–101, 136, 151, 175, 210, 212

Neo-Platonism, 220 Newsletters, 51, 56 Norton, Thomas, 45, 220, 229

L Labour, 4, 32, 34, 73, 142, 143, 163, 208, 224, 249 Liberty two forms of, 251 Lottery/lots, 17, 114, 119, 121 Lucretia, 141–144 Lull, Raymond [Pseudo-Lull], 213, 219

O Oeconomia, 3, 12, 16, 18, 140–144 Oikonomia, 3, 59, 80, 83, 84, 185, 192

M Malynes, Gerard, 135, 144, 145, 149, 154, 161–164, 168 Marketplace, 7, 13, 15, 16, 51, 52, 54, 56–61, 85, 91, 94, 96, 97, 99, 100, 106, 127, 171, 175, 244, 245, 254, 265 metaphorical, 15 Mercantile exchange, 184 Merchant, 6–8, 14, 33, 35–37, 60, 84, 98, 100, 101, 113, 114, 120, 122–124, 126, 127, 160, 161, 163, 169, 175, 195, 213, 244, 264, 267–269, 271 Metanoia, 188, 190–192 Metaphor, 1, 3, 5–7, 14, 16, 34, 37, 54, 59, 60, 85, 137, 138, 140, 144, 145, 147–151, 210, 223, 225, 226, 247, 265, 266 Mumia/corpse medicine, 211, 212, 222, 223 N Nashe, Thomas, 212

P Paracelsus, 214, 218 Parnassus, 15, 51–54, 56, 57, 59–61, 64, 65 Paronomasia, 146 Penitence, 43, 188 Philosophers stone, 208, 212 ‘Plain’ speech, 137 Platt, Hugh, 13, 14, 207–224, 226 Prayer, 6, 11, 13–15, 17–19, 29–31, 33–44, 118, 241 Prevalence, 14, 36 Printer mark, 16 Probability, 17, 114, 115, 120, 127 Protestantism, 31 Providence/providential, 17, 103, 104, 106, 113, 114, 118–121, 127, 142 Puns, 137, 144, 146, 149, 151 R Racism, 250 Reason of state, 52 Repentance, 12, 99, 185, 187, 189–192 Ripley, George, 210, 213, 219, 229 Risk, 6, 14, 17, 29, 30, 34, 35, 41, 73, 78, 113, 118, 121–125, 127, 175, 262, 268–270

282  Index S Salmon, 103 Sericon, 219 Slavery, 246, 248, 249, 271–273 Sola fide, 186 Surety, 6, 17, 115, 117, 123, 126 Symbols, 76, 83, 85, 93, 210, 225 T Tacitus, 52 Theatre, 15, 16, 19, 59, 96, 100, 134, 166, 171, 175, 240, 254, 263 Theosis, 198 Trade, 4, 7, 12–14, 19, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 41, 58, 59, 73, 75, 98, 101, 135, 139, 140, 146, 164, 165, 175, 196, 207–209, 223, 242, 244, 245, 247, 250, 254, 263, 271, 272 Tragicomedy, 19, 159, 169 Trajano Boccalini, 65 Transformation, 2, 5, 9, 11, 19, 98, 101, 140, 164, 174, 183–185, 188, 191, 199, 208, 212, 215, 221, 244, 245, 263, 267, 271

U Usury, 124, 126, 135, 145, 146, 148, 265 Utopia, 53, 56–60, 74, 173, 174 V Value/valuation, 2–5, 7–10, 12, 16, 19, 42, 52, 60, 74, 75, 77, 85, 93, 103, 114–118, 121, 133– 135, 140, 144, 145, 148–151, 160–164, 166, 168, 169, 171, 194, 207, 212–214, 219, 243, 256, 263–268, 270, 273