Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England by Jonathan Gil Harris (review)

REVIEWS 228 new world into the traditions of the old. But whereas once monetary expenditure on the funeral was a means of acquiring benefit created by some other ideology (honor, charity, piety) it was becoming a end in itself; consumption was tending to become its own justification” (232). Religious confession was not as major a factor in these changes as one might expect. Although religion was often a point of contention, especially in Paris where the cemetery of the Innocents became a symbol of Catholic civic identity vis-à-vis the Huguenots, many people sought to uphold a sense continuity and tradition in funeral rites. “Rituals of death and burial seem to have retained an important place in this changing society, and it may be that this was due to those characteristics—flexibility, adaptability, an absence of doctrinal absolutism —that allowed them to survive fundamental challenges to their theological rationale at the Reformation” (274). An example of this adaptation was the rise in night burials in post-Reformation England. Previously thought dishonorable, they became fashionable for a while because of their aesthetic quality, with the torches, candles, and lights that were no longer part of the service in the church. Vanessa Harding has assembled an impressive amount of primary and secondary research into this very interesting and very readable book. By looking at the subject of death, which was far more ubiquitous in early modern Paris and London than in a large city today, she provides new insights other issues such as urbanization, secularization, and the beginnings of consumer culture. ERIC JOHNSON, History, UCLA Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press 2004) 263 pp. Depicted on the cover of Jonathan Gil Harris’s book Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England is a syphilis patient receiving an herbal cure while an artisan manufactures the treatment. These images foreground disease and mercantilism which, with drama, form the three main topics of the work. Because the book is organized into discretely focused chapters, this review will detail how the individual foci support the author’s central claims. One such claim states that pathology and economy were “interconstitutive domains of discourse” (3) in early modern England. Opening the book with an overview of early modern mercantile discourses including the work of the “four Ms,” Gerard Malynes, Thomas Milles, Edward Misselden and Thoman Mun, Harris establishes his intent to analyze mercantilism as a discursive, rather than ideological or economic system. Chapter 1 then provides an overview of pathological discourse that most importantly details the shift from Galenic humoralism to an understanding of disease as originating externally. This section also introduces what Harris observes as the “double helix” of mercantilism and pathology as it functions within representative early modern dramatic and mercantilist works of England such as Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Chapter 2 explores syphilis and trade in the specific context of Thomas Starkey, Thomas Smith, and The Comedy of Errors. Noting frequent references to syphilis in Shakespeare’s later works, as well as the critical suggestion that Shakespeare contracted the pox around the turn of the century, Harris questions REVIEWS 229 the presence of the disease in an early “sunnier” play such as The Comedy of Errors. He proceeds to offer a different reading of the drama that situates its incorporation of disease within a broad array of discourses that grew along with international commerce in the sixteenth century. At times employing microscopically close analyses of text, Harris ultimately argues in this chapter that syphilis offered Shakespeare a vocabulary with which to mediate moral and economic anxieties as well as conflicting understandings of trade. Shakespeare ’s language, Harris argues, echoes that of “protomercantilist” (25) sixteenth century writers such as Starkey and Smith. Usury and taint constitute the focus of chapter 3, as do Gerard Malynes’s Saint George for England Allegorically Described, the anonymous Dutch Church Libel of 1593, and again Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Commencing with the pathological etymology of ‘taint’—infection, essentially— this section shows how both taint and usury are terms appropriated by early mercantilist discourse to “recode the old crime of usury as a new...