Anxiety Toward Foreign Commodities in the Plague Era: Economic Pathology in Volpone, or The Fox

Abstract

Abstract: During the 16th and 17th centuries, Britain witnessed the frequent outbreaks of plague and the rapid increase in international trade. Pathology and economics became “interconstitutive domains of discourse” in early modern England, disease was imagined as something originating externally like foreign commodities and circulating between individual bodies and the political bodies of the nation. Judging from the discourse, which claimed that financial crises were triggered by international trade, one may discover that in Volpone, or The Fox, Ben Johnson employs the interlude of Transmigration to hint at the circulation of merchandise and present the implication of the economic ethics with a murky narrative of the foreign drugs’ curing but poisoning effects on human bodies. In response to the statements on economics at that time, this play connects various imported medicines with the diseases of individual bodies and political bodies. And it implies that only by monitoring the circulation of merchandise before its entry through the harbor effectively can the custom ensure the health of the kingdom. All this shows the anxiety toward the imported merchandise in England during the pre-business era.

Key words: Volpone, or The Fox, Ben Jonson, plague, body, foreign commodity, economic pathology

Tao Jiusheng. Anxiety Toward Foreign Commodities in the Plague Era: Economic Pathology in Volpone, or The Fox[J]. Foreign Literature Studies, 2019, 41(2): 39-50.

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