Sick Economies. Jonathan Gil Harris
daintie fare, gorgious buildings, and sumptuous apparel.”19 This diagnosis sets the tone for much of Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses, in which individuals’ venal appetites for exotic luxury goods are seen as the cause of economic as much as moral pathology. But even as he pathologizes the foreign, Stubbes firmly locates both the causes and the remedies for England’s ills within England itself, or more specifically, within English people’s desires. Thus is the moral discourse of commonwealth aligned with a humoral discourse of internal balance and self-restraint.
By contrast, Starkey’s occasional attempts to understand national economic pathology as a systemic rather than moral problem are more fully realized in the important treatise A Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England (1581), which Henry William Spiegel has characterized as proleptically “tinged by the preconceptions of the mercantilists.” This treatise is of uncertain authorship; long attributed to the politican John Hales, the evidence would suggest instead the hand of Sir Thomas Smith.20 A statesman and professor of law at Cambridge, Smith was also the author of a historical treatise on the value of Roman money, and many of the concerns in the latter work find fuller elaboration in the Discourse. Smith seeks to lend economic thought a prestige that it had not hitherto enjoyed, declaring it a branch of “Philosophy Moral.”21 At times, Smith’s brand of moral philosophy can sound like Stubbes’s. Warning against the appetitive sins of conspicuous consumption, he reminds his readers that “excesses [of clothing and food] were used in Rome a little before the decline of the Empire, so as wise men have thought it the occasion of the decay thereof.… I pray God this realm may beware by that example, especially London, the head of this empire” (82). Yet by theorizing the role of money in a nation’s economic fortunes, Smith frequently suggests amoral explanations of the problems wrought by the growth of international commerce.
Written like Starkey’s treatise in dialogue form, Smith’s analysis pits a Doctor against a variety of characters, each of whom have somewhat different notions of the body politic’s ills and their etiologies. The Knight, sympathetic to the Doctor, argues:
hereunto we have searched the very sores and griefs that every man feels, so to try out the causes of them; and the causes once known, the remedy of them might soon be apparent.… we have thus much proceeded as to the finding out of the griefs—which as far as I perceive stands in these points: viz., dearth of all things though there be scarcity of nothing, desolation of counties by enclosures, desolation of towns for lack of occupation and crafts. (32)
As this passage suggests, Smith is less inclined than either Stubbes or Starkey to locate the English economy’s pathologies in moral or appetitive problems. It is instead systemic “sores and griefs” that occupy his attention. The most important of these, the Doctor goes on to argue, is the overvaluation of English currency, which has led to terrible inflation (“dearth,” a term that in the above passage means dearness rather than scarcity). This diagnosis, however, involves a strange medley of moral blame and systemic analysis. When the Doctor attributes inflation to “the debasing or rather corrupting of our coin and treasure” (69), he sees this “sore” as partly the result of individual greed: money loses value because covetous people selfishly clip coins. On the other hand, Smith also presents the devaluation of English coin as the consequence of global commerce, including the flooding of European markets with American gold and silver (149). This more systemic brand of analysis is evident also in his claim that “we have devised a way for strangers not only to buy our gold and silver for brass and to exhaust this realm of treasure but also to buy our chief commodities in manner for naught” (69).
In the process, Smith comes very close to articulating the mercantilist theory of the balance of trade with other nations. Indeed, unlike Starkey, Smith rejects the notion of the self-sufficient nation: it was only “in such a country as Utopia” that one could “imagine” there to be “no traffic with any other outward country” (105). But for Smith as for Starkey, there remains confusion over the causes of economic pathology; it is sometimes the product of venal sin, sometimes the consequence of systemic economic problems. By calling for judicious fiscal “remedies” implemented and policed by the national sovereign (Starkey, 142; Smith, 95), however, both writers anticipate not only the mercantilist discourse of national English economy but also its distinctively pathological register.
Comedy of Eros
A mercantilist paradigm of national economy was not yet coherently available to Shakespeare in the early 1590s, of course. But he did have access to the two very different, medicalized notions of moral and systemic economic pathology that preceded it. The ambivalences that characterize Starkey’s and Smith’s conceptions of economic ills and their causes resonate with the questions raised by The Comedy of Errors concerning the nature and consequences of international trade. As we have seen, the framing story of Egeon entails conflicted conceptions of transnational commerce. Is it healthy or is it pathological? Does it fall into the orbit of individual and domestic moral economy, or is it the bedrock of amoral systemic economy? The play’s main plot also poses such questions. Like the economic literature of the sixteenth century, it does so by means of a sustained embodiment and pathologization of notions of commerce. And like Starkey’s treatise in particular, the main plot embodies commerce in two very different ways: it makes visible both the appetitive bodies of individual merchants or consumers and the global trading bodies constituted by nation-states. In the process, Shakespeare reproduces two radically different paradigms of pathology.
First, like Starkey, Shakespeare employs throughout The Comedy of Errors a broadly Galenic conception of physiology, according to which unchecked appetite leads to incontinence, humoral disarray, and sickness.22 Dromio of Syracuse, for example, remarks that his master needs to avoid dry food to suppress his tendency to choler (2.2.61–62). With greater medical rigor, the Abbess attributes the Ephesian Antipholus’s frenzy to “unquiet meals,” which “make ill digestion; / Thereof the raging fire of fever bred, / And what’s a fever but a fit of madness?” (5.1.74–76). Nell the kitchen-wench, that “mountain of mad flesh” (4.4.154), represents the play’s most over-the-top incarnation of pathological appetite. Predating the copiously perspiring pig-wench Ursula of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair by some twenty years, her unrestrainedly sweaty desire for Dromio is characterized as a species of grotesque incontinence: “She sweats; a man may go over shoes in the grime for it” (3.2.103–4). Each of these remarks stigmatizes not appetite, however, but its excess. As Michael Schoenfeldt has reminded us in his invaluable study of early modern physiology, moderation rather than repudiation of appetite was the basis of Galenic moral economy.23 If the discourse of appetite in The Comedy of Errors embodies any notion of economy, then, it would appear to be at the level of the individual, (im)moral subject rather than of the amoral nation.
Shakespeare nevertheless attends to the issue of the individual appetite in a fashion that serves to foreground the links between domestic pathology and national economy. Adriana’s observation about the transgressive “love that drew” Antipholus “oft from home” invokes national as well as domestic “homes,” inasmuch as the referent of her remark—unknown to her, of course—is just as much her seafaring Syracusian brother-in-law as her wayward Ephesian husband. In fact, “home” is a particularly charged and slippery word throughout the play. It acquires importance in the first act not just because of Egeon’s own diagnosis of his turpitude in straying from his Syracusian “home” in pursuit of goods but also because of Solinus’s question to him: “why thou departedest from thy native home?” (1.1.29). As we have seen, departure from domestic and “native” homes is for Egeon the basis of both successful commerce and familial grief. This tension recurs in Adriana and Luciana’s first scene. While Luciana insists that men’s “business still lies out o’door” (2.1.11), Adriana bewails her husband’s absence from “home.” His extradomestic “business” quickly begins to acquire associations of adulterous appetite: “unruly deer, he breaks the pale and feeds from home” (2.1.99–100). The alignment of commercial and sexual appetite is continued throughout the main plot. When Luciana says of Antipholus of Syracuse that he “swore … he was a stranger here,” Adriana replies, thinking that her sister is speaking of her husband, “true he swore, though yet forsworn he were” (4.2.9–10). Adriana’s quibble carries a lot of signifying