Abstract
It seems clear that the men and women of early modern London would have had their attention drawn to the homology between idolatry and commodity fetishism as they engaged in such ordinary activities as going to the theater. The antitheatrical controversy was a good deal more accessible, and its practical implications were much clearer, to ordinary people than was the academic quarrel between scholasticism and empiricism. But the argument over the theaters remained nevertheless a public debate. In this chapter, by contrast, I propose to study the effects of the decline of natural teleology on the private sphere. In his widely influential History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault challenges the “repressive hypothesis” that claims that the seventeenth century inaugurated an age of sexual conservatism: By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism:
it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. … A principle of explanation emerges after the fact: if sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. At a time when labor capacity was being systematically exploited, how could this capacity be allowed to dissipate itself in pleasurable pursuits, except in those—reduced to a minimum—that enabled it to reproduce itself?
3
Usury kills the child in the womb And breaks short the young man’s courting Usury brings age into youth; it lies between the bride and the bridegroom Usury is against Nature’s increase. —Ezra Pound, Canto LI 1
Can the grand enemie erect up any yoke-fellow to match with Idolatrie, but only Usurie. … Doe [usurers] not cherish Idlenesse in their Debtors, by lending to all idle uses? And doe they not maintayne themselves by Usurie in idlenesse; yea with the abuse of those Talents which God hath lent them for honest employment … —Anon, Usurie Araigned and Condemned (1625) 2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Ezra Pound, Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1986), 250.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol.1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 5–6.
In 1601, Gerard de Malynes lays the blame for the worrying growth in social mobility at usury’s door: “But let this monster be destroyed, and every man will return unto his quietness, and live within his bounds and calling, using such trade as he ought to do.” St. George for England (1610), cit. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937), 140.
Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 37.
The most comprehensive treatment of this debate is Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
See also R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds., Tudor Economic Documents (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951), 2:133–75; 3:305–404.
Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 19.
Hugh Hilarie, The Resurrection of the Masse (1554), retrieved from Chadwick-Healey’s Literature On Line, available 5/1/01: http://lion.chadwick.com/home.cgi?source=config2.cfg.
Bartholomew Traheron, A Warning to England to Repent (1558), 12.
John Weemse, A Traetise of the Foure Degenerate Sonnes (London, 1636), 202. Weemse also opines that “Idolatrie is … a viler sin then the sin of Sodome.… It is a sin like unto beastialitie, when a man lyes with a beast” (245).
John Bale, Comedy Concernynge Thre Lawes, ed. Peter Happe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), 525.
Thomas Bancroft, “216. Money, a fruitfull commodity,” from Two bookes of epigrammes and epitaphs (1639), retrieved from Chadwick-Healey’s Literature On Line, available 5/1/01: http://lion.chadwick.com/home.cgi?source=config2.cfg.
In similar fashion, as R. H. Tawney reminds us, “The typical usurer was apt, indeed, to outrage not one, but all, of the decencies of social intercourse.” (Religion and the Rise of Capitalism [Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1962], 161). Recent studies also emphasize the inclusivity of the term “sodomy” during the Renaissance. In Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), Jonathan Goldberg proposes that sodomy is “a relational term, a measure whose geometry we do not know, whose (a)symmetries we are to explore” (xv).
Alan Bray notes that in the Renaissance sodomy “was also a political and a religious crime,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 41,
and Gregory Bredbeck sees the word as “defining the unacceptable,” in Sodomy and Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 10.
Stephen Orgel goes so far as to say that “Charges of sodomy always occur in relation to other kinds of subversion; the activity has no independent existence in the Renaissance mind…,” “Nobody’s Perfect: or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women,” Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture, ed. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum and Michael Moon (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 20.
See also Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
and Will Fisher: “Queer Money,” ELH 66, no.1 (1999), 1–23.
Thomas Aquinas, On the Sentences 4.33.1.3, cit. John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 236–7.
A relic of this struggle is the word “bugger,” long a popular term for “sodomite,” which derives from “Bulgar” and originally referred to the Bogomil heretics of south-eastern Europe. Up to the Renaissance, the term designated a wider range of perversion than the sexual. Derrick Sherman Bailey remarks on “the extent to which bougre and herite were actually identified in medieval thought,” Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1975), 136;
while David E. Greenberg tells how “interesttakers were sometimes called bougres that is, heretics. Probably because the urban patriciate engaged in both practices, and because heretics were already believed to favor sodomy, usury and sodomy also became linked in the popular mind…,” The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 295. See also Bailey, Homosexuality, 141.
Cit. Jonathan Goldberg ed., Reclaiming Sodom (New York: Routledge, 1994), 46. The OED notes a dialect usage of “lomber” meaning “to idle,” and cites a reference from 1678: “sick o’th’ Lombard feaver, or of the idles.” The painter Sodoma was a native of Lombardy.
Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London, 1598), 322.
Ben Jonson, Epigrams and the Forest, ed. Richard Dutton (Manchester: Fyfield, 1984), 46.
Unless otherwise specified, quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from G. Blakemore Evans ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
See Michael Chorost, “Biological Finance in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens,” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 349–370.
See E. Pearlman, “Shakespeare, Freud, and the Two Usuries,” English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972): 217–236.
Erasmus, An Epistle, in Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553; reprint New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), 26.
Ibid., 28
Quotations from the Sonnets are from Stephen Booth, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
Cit. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society, 110. This is the interpretation favored by John B. Mishco, who aims to “demonstrate that the first seventeen sonnets of the sequence radically denounce traditional condemnations of usury.” Mishco concedes that the Sonnets frequently seem disparaging of usury, and that in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare appears to offer an orthodox denunciation of money-lending. He is therefore led to conclude that “Shakespeare’s economic thinking is itself contradictory” (“‘That Use Is Not Forbidden Usury’: Shakespeare’s Procreation Sonnets and the Problem of Usury,” in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by David G. Allen and Robert A. White [London: Associated University Presses, 1995], 266). However, Mishco takes no account of the sodomy theme, which significantly complicates his reading of the Sonnets. I argue that this apparent contradiction disappears if we keep in mind the close association—or rather the homology—;of usury with sodomy in the sixteenth-century mind.
Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie (London, 1612), 65.
As Aquinas puts it: The Jews were forbidden to take usury from their brethren, i.e., from other Jews. By this we are given to understand that to take usury from any man is simply evil, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbor and brother, especially in the state of the Gospel, whereto all are called. Cit. Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: from Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), 14. Sander expressed it thus in Shakespeare’s lifetime: “The catnall Jewes had certain infidels to their enemies: whom as they might kil, so might they oppresse hem with usurie. But now seing everie man is both our neighbor, and our brother: we may not take usurie of any man at al” (A Briefe Treatise, 7).
See Martin D. Yaffe, Shylock and the Jewish Question (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
See also Odd Langholm, The Aristotelian Analysis of Usury (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1984), 18–19. By the seventeenth century, however, Christian moralists were often prepared to relax this prohibition. Writing on the way to Massachusetts in 1630, John Winthrop equates “justice” with “Commerce,” and he differentiates both from “mercy”: Quest. What rule must wee observe in lending? Ans. Thou must observe whether thy brother hath present or probable or possible means of repaying thee, if there be none of those, thou must give him according to his necessity, rather then lend him as he requires; if he hath present means of repaying thee, thou art to look at him not as an act of mercy, but by way of Commerce, wherein thou arte to walk by the rule of justice; but if his means of repaying thee be only probable or possible, then is hee an object of thy mercy, thou must lend him, though there be danger of losing it, Deut. 15. 7. If any of thy brethren be poore &c., thou shalt lend him sufficient. (A Modell of Christian Charity, 1630).
See T. S. Eliot’s remark regarding Donne’s “The Extasie”: “the ‘begetting’ of ‘pictures’ is a figure which violates nature” (The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnball Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933, ed. Ronald Schuchard (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 110).
See also Thomas M. Greene’s observation that the Sonnets’ claims for the power of linguistic over sexual reproduction “tend to appear in the couplets…[which] tend to lack the energy of the negative vision in the twelve lines that precede them. The final affirmation in its flaccidity tends to refute itself…” (“Pitiful Thrivers: Failed Husbandry in the Sonnets,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, edited by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman [New York: Metheun, 1985], 234).
For an extended discussion of Shakespeare’s treatment of idolatry in A Winter’s Tale see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology and Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, edited by J. H. Clapham and Eileen Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), 4:450, 4:490–1.
Marc Shell, “The Wether and the Ewe: Verbal Usury in The Merchant of Venice,” The Kenyon Review 1, no.4, (fall 1979), 65–92.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981) 2:330–1.
Copyright information
© 2001 David Hawkes
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hawkes, D. (2001). Sodomy, Usury, and The Narrative of Shakespeare’S Sonnets . In: Idols of the Marketplace. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312292690_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312292690_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38715-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-312-29269-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)