Sick Economies. Jonathan Gil Harris
be contracted by “receiving the breath of such as are infected, and by sitting on the priuie after them, & sometimes by treading bare-footed on the spettle of those which haue been long corrupted.”31
These accounts of the disease’s contagiousness, which owe more to Hippocratic miasma theory than to humoral medicine, were accompanied by something of a crisis in the Galenic establishment. Even the usually indomitable Andrew Boorde was forced to conclude that his beloved Galenic authorities were incapable of shedding much light on syphilis: “The Grecians can nat tell what the sicknes doth meane wherfore they do set no name for this disease for it did come but lately into Spayne & Fraunce and so to vs.”32 Notably, Boorde’s account of this new disease’s transnational migrations resonates with the customary early modern names for syphilis. Sixteenth-century syphilographers were repeatedly fascinated by how the various national names for the disease chronicled its epidemic spread across national as well as corporeal borders. Ruy Diaz de Isla remarked in his Tractado Contra El Mal Serpentino (published in 1539):
The French called it the Disease of Naples. And the Italians and Neapolitans, as they had never been acquainted with such a disease, called it the French Disease. From that time on as it continued to spread, they gave it a name, each one according to his opinion as to how the disease had its origin. In Castilia they call it Bubes, and in Portugal the Castilian Disease, and in Portuguese India they call it the Portuguese Disease.33
In England, syphilis was dubbed the Spanish sickness, the French pox, or the Neapolitan disease; as on the Continent, therefore, the pox in all its nomenclatural guises was overwhelmingly understood to originate elsewhere, to reside in and be transmitted by foreign bodies that had infiltrated bodies politic and natural.
The perception of the foreign provenance of syphilis and of its transmission from nation to nation coincided with the emergence of radically new etiologies of disease in general. As I noted in Chapter 1, the Veronese physician Girolamo Fracastoro—who gave syphilis its name—proposed a new, ontological model of disease as a seed transmitted over a distance from body to body. Fracastoro developed this model to explain the plague, not the pox, for which he was inclined to regard astrological influences as primarily responsible.34 Nevertheless, his understanding of disease as a determinate foreign particle rather than a state of imbalance found a number of significant counterparts in the corpus of sixteenth-century English literature on syphilis. Writing of the illness in 1596, for example, the surgeon William Clowes offers what looks uncannily like a microbiological account of infection: “the disease is taken by externall meanes … Any outward part being once infected, the disease immediately entreth into the blood, and so creepeth on like a canker from part to part.” Still, even Clowes could fall back on a residual religious, appetitive description of the illness when he needed to; elsewhere in the same treatise, he writes, “I pray God quickly deliuer vs from it, and to remoue from vs that filthy sinne that breedeth it, that nurseth it, that disperseth it.”35
As Clowes’s vacillation makes clear, syphilis tended to be regarded as neither a univocally appetitive nor a univocally invasive disorder, but both simultaneously. Its bivalent etiology is evident in the The Comedy of Errors’s references to the pox, many of which conflate residual Galenic and emergent ontological understandings of the disease. Take, for example, Dromio’s quibble about the syphilitic nature of prostitutes: “It is written, they appear to men like angels of light; light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn; ergo, light wenches will burn” (4.3.53–55). The colloquialism “burn,” widespread in Elizabethan England, implies not only a humoral conception of syphilitic infection—recall von Hutten’s remarks about “burnt blood”—but also an invasive one. This pathological bivalence is enabled by the grammatical confusion embedded in the verb, which can be read both intransitively (light wenches will burn in and of themselves) and transitively (light wenches will burn others).36 The indeterminacy of “burn” finds a striking counterpart in Luciana’s question to her brother-in-law: “Shall … / Even in the spring of love, thy love-springs rot?” (3.2.2–3). Again, if read intransitively, “rot” works to demonize the excessive appetite; if read transitively, it draws attention to the communicable nature of Antipholus’s condition. In similar fashion, Adriana’s remarks about her own afflictions suggest that she considers them to stem simultaneously from syphilitic appetite and external contagion:
I am possessed with an adulterate blot;
My blood is mingled with the crime of lust;
For if we two be one, and thou play false,
I do digest the poison of thy flesh,
Being strumpeted by thy contagion. (2.2.139–43)
The tension between appetitive “crime of lust” and communicable “contagion” is developed in her subsequent speech concerning the relationship between husband and wife. Here she enlarges on a standard metaphor in unexpected fashion:
Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,
Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,
Makes me with thy strength to communicate.
If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,
Usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss,
Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion
Infect thy sap and live on thy confusion. (2.2.173–79)
The gendered images of host and dependent work highly ambivalently here. The “stronger state” of the husband-elm makes the tree the source of the wife-vine’s welfare; yet when the vine is “usurped” by other creepers, the elm is no longer the patriarchal origin of health but the vulnerable victim of contagious disease. Terms like “intrusion” and “infection” anticipate the discourse of contagious foreign bodies even as they work to pathologize the Ephesian Antipholus’s appetitive “confusion.”
In The Comedy of Errors, syphilitic pathology mediates the bivalent depredations of not just sexual activity, however, but commerce too. To understand how, one needs to consider the metaphorical uses to which syphilis was put in early modern nonmedical literature. Given its ready associations with prostitution, which was repeatedly lambasted for depleting men’s pockets as well as health, the disease’s commercial connotations were unavoidable. Hence in Measure for Measure, Lucio’s quibbles about prostitution insistently link sexual and commercial trade:
LUCIO
Behold, behold, where Madam Mitigation comes! I have purchased as many diseases under her roof as come to—
2ND GENTLEMAN
To what, I pray?
LUCIO
Judge.
2ND GENTLEMAN
To three thousand dolours a year.
1ST GENTLEMAN
Ay, and more.
LUCIO
A French crown more. (1.2.41–47)
Lucio’s monetary puns on the symptoms of and names for syphilis (“dolours/dollars,” “French crown”) figure the disease as a form of wealth that paradoxically entails a simultaneous depreciation of bodily and financial resources. This recalls Dromio of Syracuse’s pathological vision of Spain acquiring American “rubies” and “carbuncles,” which deplete rather than augment its treasure. Lucio’s association of venereal and financial illness is also a feature of the cony-catching literature of the 1590s which, as Martine Van Elk has suggested, provides an important set of co-texts for The Comedy of Errors.37 In A Disputation Between a Hee and a Shee Conny Catcher (1592), Robert Greene links the effects of visiting prostitutes not just to the pox’s wasting of the body but also to the loss of wealth. The harlot’s customers, he argues, “fish for diseases, sicknesse, sores incurable, vlcers bursting out of their ioyntes, and slat rhumes, which by the humor of that villainie, lept from Naples into Fraunce and from Fraunce