Foreign bodies
EVERYONE knows that less wealth means poorer health. But on closer inspection, the connection in the popular imagination between money and illness looks rather more complicated. The collapse of East Asian economies in 1997 quickly became known as the "the Asian flu", whose symptoms threatened to blight "healthy" trade in the West. Cyberworms that wreak havoc on computer systems, causing local and world markets to crash, spread like viral infections. Even the etymology of the word "consumption" suggests the central role played by the body in our understanding of economics. Since disease, like money, can move in invisible and unpredictable ways between people and continents, the vocabulary of contagion, infection and epidemic aptly describes the threat posed to the marketplace, and hence to the body politic, by forces that migrate from the outside in.
Jonathan Gil Harris's Sick Economies traces the twin histories of pathology and the marketplace, and makes an important contribution to both. For centuries, the Hippocratic (and later Galenic) theory of the four humours had functioned as a satisfactory explanation of the origins of disease. Illness derived from an imbalance of the humours, and the physician's task was to restore internal equilibrium, either by redressing deficiency or purging excess. In the 16th Century, however, this system proved inadequate to explain the spread of infectious and airborne diseases. Whereas humoral theory had hinged on a system of internal regulation, illness now seemed to work its way insidiously between and into bodies. Communicable diseases and foreign commodities began to use a common vocabulary. The "Neapolitan boneache" suggested a cultural threat indistinguishable from that which obscene "Italian books", available on import, posed to the London booktrade. The "French disease" endangered the moral status quo while "French cloth" destabilised manufacturing initiatives at home. If acquiring the "Spanish pox" imperilled the moral and physical health of Englishmen, the unregulated importation of "Spanish fruit" undermined domestic productivity. The passage of pathogens mirrored the circulation of commodities between nations and, at the same time, the growth of the world economy offered new languages with which to imagine exogenous disease.
Although early modern merchants such as Gerard de Malynes, Thomas Milles, and Edward Misselden disagreed hotly about both the nature of England's economic failings and what to do about them, their writings agreed in sharing a medical vocabulary. In Harris's discussion, 16th- and early 17th-Century mercantilism illuminates not only the history of economics in general but also the history of nationhood in particular. Once new trade routes were forged to the Americas, Africa and Asia, mercantilism involved statecraft and realpolitik as well as trade and commerce. Through the figure of the stereotypical Jewish usurer, Malynes explores broader questions of national identity, registering transnational contamination as a form of "taint" with both legal and pathological connotations. Likewise, in The Canker of England's Commonwealth (1601), he invokes the creeping skin disease serpego in order to deplore the unnatural generation of wealth ex nihilo through usurers' manipulation of volatile international exchange rates. The two emergent theories of epidemiology and economics clearly informed each another, but Sick Economies reveals more than a shared vocabulary. The book also clarifies the origins of our ideas about the domestic, the foreign and the global — ideas that perhaps have always helped to stigmatise foreign infiltration, whatever form it might take.
Harris also sheds new light on why Renaissance dramatists so often used the language of disease, including syphilis and hepatitis, in order to describe commerce. He covers canonical plays like Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Merchant of Venice", and Jonson's "Volpone", but, with wonderfully surprising results, turns also to Heywood's "The Fair Maid of the West", Massinger's "The Renegado" and Middleton and Dekker's "The Roaring Girl". Building on work by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Douglas Bruster on the imbrication of London playhouses in the marketplace, he explores the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries introduced foreign bodies to the stage, and how they thought both critically and cooperatively about the place of the commercial nation within global systems of trade.
Jonathan Gil Harris is a genial companion, coaxing the reader through unfamiliar material and finding colour, humour and literary appeal in the most unlikely places. Juggling dexterously the testimonies of merchants, physicians and dramatists, he appears to relish the unexpected flash of recognition when difference evaporates between seemingly separate aspects of Renaissance culture. Sick Economies, wholeheartedly committed to the recovery of non-canonical early modern writing, shows what can happen when a keen literary intelligence is applied to non-literary texts. The result is a truly interdisciplinary and refreshingly readable book.
Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism and Disease in Shakespeare's England, Jonathan Gil Harris, University of Pennsylvania Press, p.263, $49.95. 0 8122 3773 0
KATHARINE CRAIK
@ The Times Literary Supplement
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