Of "Barren Islands" and "Cursèd Gold": Worth, Value, and Womanhood in The Sea Voyage

This essay takes up the two original plot lines of The Sea Voyage: one involves a group of pseudo-Amazons, formerly Portuguese women, now gone native on an abandoned island; the other concerns a pile of gold, also abandoned on the island. Both, it would seem, have little use value, removed as they are from the circuits of exchange and intercourse that govern the civilized world. Thus both are at the center of a larger crisis of meaning that forms the subject of the play—a crisis that can be resolved only through the timely intervention of male venturers. In its dramatization of this crisis, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's island romance appears to emerge from and engage with a very particular set of economic debates from the 1620s concerning English overseas trade and its renegotiation of the terms of worth, valuation, and exchange in the domestic realm. Its island logic, borne out by the crises of its people and materials, derives from questions about metal—its intrinsic value and its exchange value—which had become especially fraught during the 1620s in the wake of the developing East India trade.