“Not Every Man has the Luck to go to Corinth”: Accruing Exotic Capital in The Jew of Malta and Volpone

Abstract

Early modern England’s “national economy,” according to Jonathan Gil Harris, “engages the ‘foreign’ in [an] often aggressively self-protective and even xenophobic fashion” (109). Harris is not alone in this claim— a number of recent studies have suggested that sixteenth-century England’s expanding foreign trade generated anxiety about a host of issues, including the loss of the nation’s supply of bullion, the influx of foreign luxury goods and immigrants, the dangers of open ports, the concentration of wealth among private merchants and the possibility of moral decay.¹ Such readings attribute the source of anxiety to a fundamental dissolution of social bonds and national boundaries occasioned by mercantile trade—unmoored from traditional ways of relating, the story goes, the English shored up their sense of national identity by pathologizing the foreign and displaying xenophobia. In this light, Barabas’s opening monologue in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1592), which serves as my epigraph to this chapter, might be read as a greedy cataloguing, by a villainous and wealthy Jew, of the profits to be had in Mediterranean trade.

But now how stands the wind? Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill? Ha! to the east? yes. See how stand the vanes— East and by south: why, then, I hope my ships I sent for Egypt and the bordering isles Are gotten up by Nilus’ winding banks; Mine argosy from Alexandria, Loaden with spice and silks, now under sail, Are smoothly gliding down by Candy-shore To Malta, through our Mediterranean sea

—Marlowe, The Jew of Malta