Scholars working on early modern representations of the environment quickly tend to turn exclusively to William Shakespeare as a primary source text for Renaissance ecohistoricism. And yet even agrarian historian Joan Thirsk notes that despite the canonical status of what has come to be referred to as the “green plays,”[1] the body of Shakespeare’s work does not take overt interest in the functions of the natural world as compared to many of his contemporaries.[2] On the other hand, Ben Jonson’s work represents an explicit investment in the natural world and human interactions with it as a poetic subject—“To Penshurst” and “Inviting a Friend to Supper” being obvious examples.[3] The leverage of a Ben Jonson drama lies not in the characters but in the exchanges that occur among them, which results in a rich and diverse panoramic ecology of characterization. Characters aren’t distinguished by sweeping soliloquies in order to demonstrate interiority, personal growth, or struggle, and so often get critiqued for a lack of depth.[4] This is not only a structural misreading of Jonson’s method of character construction but also a misidentification of the location of dramatic tensions. Rather than developing plots driven by individuals, Jonson’s dramas emphasize social systems of exchange as their focus in an attempt to theorize the abstract concept of the financial marketplace as part of the Jacobean London ecology. Both plots from The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614) are constructed around one of two kinds of ephemeral economy: that of the three-day specialty marketplace and the plague-driven system of cons. These experimental ecologies, with their direct investment in organic processes and strictly limited by time, present a dynamic comparison on which to test an environmentally informed model of representation.

My intent is to begin to sketch a climate-informed image of the seventeenth-century economy where organic goods determined the base rate of exchange, not the monarch. I argue that these plays work to satirize two unsustainable types of ephemeral economies as representations of the symbiotic relationship between consumers and producers. As Robert Markley explains, “for the dematerialization of the natural world into abstract systems to occur, however, nature must be reinvented continually,” which is reflected by subsidies and other financial models introduced by James I in an effort to develop a sustainable economy.[5] The play event presents itself as an ephemeral and contained economy, and playgoers shaped the content of the theatre industry with their twopenny admissions fee. Applying a historically ecocritical mode and model to these experimental dramas reveals early modern representations of the increasingly complex financial systems, as well as subjectivity in the marketplace as shaped by environmental conditions. In these cases, the status of the criminal is examined and brought to represent both positive and negative contribution to maintaining social systems.

These two plays use the marketplace system as a model of representation that engaged with sustainability discourse of the period, a discourse that was beginning to distinguish between the fiscal and environmental in such terms. These reverberations between content and context are what E. M. W. Tillyard referred to as the corresponding planes[6] —the epistemological structure that helped to shape early modern habits of mind as well as systems of dramatic metaphor. Tillyard’s work is some of the first in English early modern studies to address the environment’s relationship to literature in a critical rather than pastoral mode. That school of thought is finding resurgence in the discipline under the mantle of ecocritical studies. Gabriel Egan’s Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism and Robert Watson’s Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance are the two critical pillars supporting the discussion.[7] Both respond to the present critical aversions to representations of “wholeness” that, as Egan rightly argues, is “characterized as a rejection of the desire for unity and a celebration of the dispersed, the indefinite, the self-contradictory, the de-centered.”[8] This rejection of representations of naturalized wholeness is part of the reason for Tillyard’s falling out of favor; scholars are wary of the traps of oversimplification or inaccessibility that has come to trouble literary historicism.

However, understanding the environment in scientific terms as a network of complex systems similarly substantiates the productivity of addressing literary representations of nature. Three models for understanding early modern literature in terms of natural systems, as ecology, have come to the fore. First, Tillyard’s corresponding planes comprise those between man (the microcosm) and the cosmos (the macrocosm): “the idea of man summing up the universe in himself had a strong hold on the imagination of the Elizabethans.”[9] In other words, the forces that govern the experience of the individual are also writ large in the universe—man is the metaphor for the world. Second, Egan develops this idea further, providing a much-needed update by applying modern ecology and systems theory to “human manifestations of natural order.”[10] Scientifically inflected modeling concepts are extremely useful in analyzing narrative structure, such as feedback loops. Feedback loops help literary critics identify the connection of an outcome or an event to the original conditions of a system as it moves towards or away from dynamic equilibrium. Third, Watson proposes a contrasting method that circumvents modeling and instead applies ideologies of nostalgia and affect to consider late Renaissance desires “to view things-in-themselves as the primary object of knowledge” constrained by the formulation that “civilization is to nature as perception is to reality.”[11] What manifests from these methods are a need to apply an understanding of natural systems to works of this period, and to develop a model of representation that accommodates this metaphoric microcosm/macrocosm formulation.

Typologies of Waste and Positive Feedback

By the end of 1610, James I had been ruler of England for three years and was already in debt. In a speech to Parliament in 1609 (in part to request financial aid) he promised that the “vastnesse of my expence is past, which I vsed the first two or three yeeres after my comming hither,” and admitted “at my first comming here, partly ignorance of this State (which no man can acquire but by time and experience) and partly the forme of my comming being so honourable and miraculous, enforeced me to extend my liberaltie so much the more at the beginning.”[12] This speech functioned as one of many tools James and his treasurer Robert Cecil deployed to counteract the financial mismanagement rhetoric being aimed at the new government. Other such tools included the reinstatement of a gifting policy to establish political loyalties, expanding monopolies, and the selling off of Crown lands. All of these strategies, but particularly the last, made it logistically more difficult for the King to subsist himself, having given away all of his methods to procure food and other necessities for his expanding household. Considering that the typical yearly intake by Elizabeth I had been approximately £250,000 from taxes and other revenue, James’ debt is shocking: “No matter how much the Crown sold off, by 1608 the royal debt was £1,400,000 and rising by £140,000 per annum. By 1610, Cecil had reduced the debt to £300,000 and the deficit to £46,000, but had reached the limits of what sales and other methods of raising revenue could do.”[13] These unsustainable financial practices quickly subjected the new government to much public criticism, particularly targeting his mismanagement and misunderstanding of the English finance system.

At the heart of the political rhetoric of the moment was the concern for sustainable government practices, not only in the environmentally inflected sense of the term—conserving resources to maintain an economical balance—but also in terms of fiscal practice, understanding the King’s purse to be a finite one. James seemed to promise “not to liue in any wastefull sort hereafter” and to find a sustainable method of governance.[14] The King was beginning to realize that the clearly warranted accusations of wasteful spending were becoming a publicity nightmare: “my Reputation laboureth as well as my Purse.”[15] In a final major effort to secure funding, Cecil attempted to broker a Great Contract with Parliament that essentially sold most of James’ inherited feudal rights for an annual fee of approximately £300,000.[16] Negotiations presented in 1610 failed by 1614. Melissa Aaron notes that credit was used by the general populace to sustain families during this period as prices rose and wages fell, mitigated by London’s gradual drain on England’s resources and the insecurity regarding the monarchy’s solvency.[17] However, this pooling of national resources in London allowed for new, niche economies to flourish, particularly in the entertainment sector that privileged the King’s Men as the monarch’s theatre company of choice. In May of 1603, soon after his ascension, James named the Chamberlain’s Men as under official royal purview. Immediately therefore, the city experienced another terrible bout of plague. However, the company, now under the auspices of the King, received a subsidy of £30 to ensure that they would keep their theatres closed to help mitigate the spread of disease.[18] James’ investment in theatre industry does not demonstrate a revised fiscal policy emphasizing resource restraint, but rather a continuance of previous practice.

As we will see, this particular speech made by James conflates rhetorics of fiscal and environmental sustainability. The early modern experience was couched by what I will call “ephemeral economies,” meaning explicitly temporary marketplaces whose transient nature set the limitations and inflations of value on the goods and services within its circulation. One such example of an ephemeral economy were the recurring bouts of plague in London, which offered James yet more opportunities to demonstrate his poor fiscal policy, but also provided Jonson with the inspiration and a setting for his play, The Alchemist. The play opened in 1610 at Blackfriars, a theatre technically within the city limits in a neighborhood to which initial seasonal plague outbreaks were commonly attributed. Jeremy Face is a butler to the gentleman Lovewit, who has left London for the country: “while there dies one a week / O’the plague, he’s safe from thinking toward London.”[19] Blackfriars enjoyed a special status under the Crown that allowed the King’s Men to keep a playhouse within the city walls, but the neighborhood’s jurisdictional specificity also causes Face to incorrectly predict the return of Lovewit:

SUBTLE You said he would not come
While there died one a week within the liberties.
FACE No, ‘twas within the walls.[20]

Returning to Tillyard’s microcosmic/macrocosmic correspondences, the death rate of the plague and the province of the Crown—over London and the King’s Men—shape both the constraints of the plot and the historical context of initial performances of The Alchemist.[21]

Those being conned and those enacting cons incite a positive feedback loop within the ephemeral economy constructed by the context of plague. In scientific terms, a positive feedback loop is a system of exchanges where changes, such as an increase in a certain kind of resource, accelerates or amplifies the overall system and pushes it further from equilibrium. In classical economics, positive feedback loops typically result from price inflation of a particular commodity—what we today like to refer to as a “bubble”—which causes boom and bust cycles. As a climatic example, increases in flooding and precipitation in the early seventeenth century lead to excessive insect breeding, which helps to account for the increasing rate of plague outbreaks and subsequent death rate.[22] In Jacobean London, where the elite have fled the city for the safety of the countryside, a new economic system takes hold where there is a buildup of social wastes: waste goods like broken cutlery made of cheap base metals, an excess of members of the lower classes who cannot afford to leave the city, and an excess of death and the dead. This ephemeral economy hinges on characters’ ability to adapt these elements of waste into saleable goods and re-inject them into the fictional marketplace.

This excess of goods of inflated value in the marketplace increases the rate of exchanges, whereby cons become doubly or triply inflected and the plague economy becomes increasingly unstable. A con artist is one who can see the potential value in a waste product or person. Sir Epicure Mammon is a knight who has hoarded bits of broken and unusable cutlery and base metals to be turned to gold by a philosopher’s stone and then sold in the market for an increased price.

MAMMON This night I’ll change
All that is metal in my house to gold,
And early in the morning will I send
To all the plumbers and the pewterers,
And buy their tin and lead up, and to Lothbury
For all the copper.[23]

His plan depends on Subtle’s successfully crafting a philosopher’s stone, but what is never clear is whether Subtle actually believes he can make the stone, or whether his knowledge of the trappings and language of alchemy are simply part of the con. Ironically, Mammon’s goal is to create more waste and consume in excess with his projected income increase.

MAMMON The tongues of carps, dormice and camels heels,
Boiled i’the spirit of Sol and dissolved pearl,
(Aspicius’ diet ’gainst the epilepsy)
And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber,
Headed with diamond and carbuncle.
My footboy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons,
Knots, godwits, lampreys; I myself will have
The beards of barbells served instead of salads,
Oiled mushrooms, and the swelling unctuous paps
Of a fat pregnant sow newly cut off,
Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce,
For which I’ll say unto my cook, “There’s gold;
Go forth, and be a knight.”[24]

By boiling starvation foods such as mice in a sauce made of pearls, Mammon intends to enact a similar kind of alchemy on his own food in order to give it increased value. The salmon are to be cut into strips while still alive, and the killed pregnant sow’s breasts to be cut off, invariably killing her unborn piglets, to flavor the mushroom sauce with mother’s milk (thought to prevent disease). This rhetorical alchemy is also performed on people such as his servants: by feeding them rare delicacies they too will immediately be turned into knights. The violence of the food preparation—turning the common into the rare and valuable—reflects not only his status as a knight, whose position does not productively contribute to society on a daily basis, but also the waste of such excess that will be consumed and immediately forgotten.

People as well as objects act as waste products that can be adapted to represent an inflated value within the plague ephemeral economy, and Face’s character is best suited to uncover these hidden potentials. Realizing that Lovewit’s empty house could be put to better use while the owner is away, Face finds Subtle starving on the streets and repurposes the failed alchemist’s scientific vocabulary to generate a hub of con activity. Note, however, that the play opens with a fight between them as Face reminds Subtle of the sorry state in which he was found:

FACE At Pie Corner,
Taking your meal of steam in from cooks’ stalls,
Where, like the father of hunger, you did walk
Piteously costive, with your pinched-horn nose
And your complexion of Roman wash,
Stuck full of black and melancholic works…
When you went pinned up in the several rags…
That scarce would cover your no-buttocks…
When all your alchemy and your algebra,
Your minerals, vegetals, and animals,
Your conjuring, cozening, and your dozen trades
Could not relieve your corpse, with so much linen
Would make you tinder but to see a fire,
I ga’ you count’nance, credit for your coals,
Your stills, your glasses, your materials,
Built you a furnace, drew you customers,
Advanced all your black arts; lent you, beside
A house to practice in—[25]

From the start, the strain in the play is not on individuals as they move toward a common resolution, but rather on the symbiosis of criminality. This reorients our focus on the success of the “venture tripartite”[26] —Face, Subtle, and the housemaid, Doll—rather than their individual inputs to the con system. Subtle’s response to Face to conclude the fight is one of acquiescence to the necessity of codependence: “Why, as you please; my venture follows yours.”[27] Face, aside from his butler duties, orchestrates the networking and brings in clients. Subtle then conducts the sales pitch, dazzling the client with catalogs of alchemical scientific language in order to cajole a down payment.[28] Once this is procured, Doll is then introduced to present a secondary object of desire fueled by the body rather than greed. Either by masking, a bed-trick, or simple pick-pocketing does she wring the client dry. Each figure serves a function in order to produce the double con and consume the results of real value (i.e. coin money) and similarly become both producers and consumers. The clients buy into the idea of a product’s properties, not its literal production value, and so grossly overpay for the good that is dependent on the status of the ephemeral economy in play. But they never receive the good or service, and so the inflation is not substantiated and resources for which the market accommodates do not enter into the system, making it increasingly unstable. The “venture tripartite” members are producers of ideas but also the only real material consumers in the play.

The success of these cons depends on “the dupe,” someone who attributes and then pays an inflated price for a waste or unproductive object, which, particular to this case, is also an item that does not sustain its value in the normal London economy. Yet those who have been conned present the market with their individual demand as consumers, allowing Face and his cohorts to respond as producers with less-than-honest supply. For example, Face’s law clerk, Dapper, wishes to procure a familiar spirit to help him cheat at the races. Dapper is looking for an act of alchemy to be performed on himself in order to transform his habit of gambling away his cash into a habit of generating a fortune by the same task. His turn to magical aid suggests that Dapper isn’t a very good gambler to begin with:

FACE My lawyer’s clerk I lighted on last night
In Holborn, at the Dagger. He would have
(I told you of him) a familiar
To rifle with at horses and win cups.[29]

By suggesting that Dapper is a favorite of the Fairy Queen, Face and Subtle don’t actually have to create anything but mystique, dressing up Doll in the dark to convince Dapper that he is blessed and destined to win. Subtle responds that if it were possible to make a man so lucky at the races in reality, the entire system would collapse.[30] It is at this moment that Subtle seems to gesture toward the larger consequences of the unstable con economy in which the threesome is operating. Here he promotes an idea of systemic balance: there must be both winners and some losers, all in moderation, in order for a financially criminal system to survive. Perhaps it is only the alchemist himself who realizes that the current economic conditions from which he is benefitting from present a rare yet unsustainable opportunity.

In fact, this system of cons lasts only so long as there are dupes willing to spend the cash to fuel it and the upper classes remain absent. Abel Drugger, the grocer, is the ideal mark for Face and Subtle, because he supplies not only cash but also valuable goods for services tendered. Drugger pays an inflated price in goods for services that provide him peace of mind amidst the continuing plague. The disease ecology of the plague shapes the con/waste/death economy of London by providing a market constraint, or perhaps substituting a restraint to replace that represented by the upper echelon of society that has vacated the city in the hopes of escaping illness. Drugger’s requests are simple in comparison to the other clients’: he simply wants to know where the best place would be to put the door and shelves of his new establishment in order to get the best business:

DRUGGER And I would know, by art, sir, of Your Worship:
Which way I should make my door, by necromancy,
And where my shelves, and which should be for boxes
And which for pots. I would be glad to thrive, sir.
And I was wished to Your Worship by a gentleman,
One Captain Face, that says you know men’s planets,
And their good angels, and their bad.[31]

However, despite his modest desires, Drugger couches his request in terms of deceit, suggesting that even the most basic types of retail are a kind of con. Subtle understands precisely what his customer wants: not an answer as to where the most logical placement of a door or shelf is, but a display that suggests that Drugger’s business is supernaturally ordained to survive. He responds in like terms, reflecting the nature of Drugger’s request with flashy rhetoric that invokes phrenology, palm reading[32] and the application of horoscopes:[33]

SUBTLE In metroposcopy, which I do work by—
A certain star i’the forehead, which you see not.
Your chestnut- or your olive-colored face
Does never fail, and your long ear doth promise.
I knew’t by certain spots too, in his teeth,
And on the nail of his mercurial finger…[34]
Beneath your threshold bury me a lodestone
To draw in gallants, that wear spurs. The rest,
They’ll seem to follow…
And, on your stall a puppet with a vice
And a court focus, to call city dames.
Your shall deal much with minerals.[35]

Essentially Drugger is paying for the illusion of stability, revealing one of the rare moments where the gravity of the ongoing plague is reflected in the play’s dialogue. There exists a void of representation: the tragedy and despair that results from high concentrations of death is otherwise elided, except in terms of contextual explanation. By “consuming” a sense of stability, Abel doesn’t actually subtract any goods from the system, but continues to fuel it with gifts of tobacco, damask cloth, and even a Spanish disguise. These goods are then used by Doll, Subtle, and Face to concoct elaborate schemes in order to steal from their clients repeatedly, in essence enacting differing levels of coning according to the different types of mercantilism. The sense of repeated use without return to the marketplace, represented by the nested and multiple cons, threatens to trend the ephemeral economy towards collapse.

At first glance, the threesome’s ability to steal from the same client time and again would suggest a sustainable and ingenious method of theft. However, if we return to the theory of the positive feedback loop, this increase in exchanges from the same source makes the system more volatile and less stable. The producer/consumer identities of Jonson’s characters begin to blur as the cons become more complex wherein the success of a con depends on the codependence of the victim rather than the grifter. These con identities are fluid also in that what we would come to think of as mutually exclusive positions in the system can actually be held at the same time. One can be simultaneously a producer and a consumer. For example, the Puritan priests Ananias and Tribulation are in the process of being coned into bric-a-brac (which is really Mammon’s, brought to be transformed by the stone[36] ) as long as it has come from widows and orphans—the dregs and wastes of society—to be turned by the philosopher’s stone into gold. They are also complicit in a Dutch money-laundering scheme:

SUBTLE If the holy purse
Should with this draft fall low, and that the Saints
Do need a present sum, I have a trick
To melt the pewter you shall buy now instantly,
And with a tincture make you as good Dutch dollars
As any are in Holland.[37]

It becomes increasingly unclear who is being conned by whom. In the end, neither Mammon nor the Puritans will get the stock of base metal goods they have both paid for. This also contributes the plague economy as maintaining an ephemeral economy: eventual the “venture tripartite” will run out of dupes when it eventually becomes clear that those prospective, yet nonexistent, goods are never re-injected into the marketplace.

This complicating of producer/consumer dynamics amplifies when it is applied not only to goods but also to people. I am referring here to Dame Pliant, the teenage widow who in the span of one act is thrust into three marriage scenarios. Note that unlike Subtle, Pliant is not an individual that represents a kind of waste figure. Rather, she is an authorized commodity that maintains a stable value, literally and figuratively, which is not dependent on or changed by the ephemeral economy of the plague. Surly, disguised in the Spanish costume intended to allow Drugger to marry Pliant, offers her his hand in marriage in exchange for him revealing the conning he has discovered going on in the house to her:

SURLY Where I might have wronged your honor, and have not,
I claim some interest in your love. You are,
They say, a widow, rich, and I am a bachelor,
Worth naught. Your fortunes may make me a man,
As mine ha’ preserved you a woman.[38]

Basically, he is claiming that Pliant owes him her hand (and wealth) in marriage because he did not attempt to rape her. Instead, Face trades her to his master Lovewit so that he might be spared and left able to keep his job as Jeremy the Butler. Truly this is Face’s last successful con of the play: by using information about his master—namely that he loves a good jest by virtue of his name—he adapts to those desires and cajoles leniency in exchange for one final clever trick that results in a monetary payoff as well. As a widow, Dame Pliant would have absorbed any of her deceased husband’s wealth, which would then belong to her next husband upon remarriage.

The system spins out of control and begins to breakdown as cons themselves become too dependent on other cons. As Face describes it to Subtle, “the credit of our house too is engaged.”[39] The one constraining factor keeping the chaos contained is the plague context: once the plague outbreak ends and Lovewit returns from the country, the balance between classes is restored, followed by systemic equilibrium as the ephemeral economy dissolves. In terms of systems theory, Lovewit acts as a loop counter: a force that interrupts the cycle of exchanges in the plague economy before the point of collapse. In an act of comedic justice, Face is conned by his partners. In order to break their bond with “this o’erweening rascal, / This peremptory Face…To deceive him / Is no deceit, but justice, that would break / Such an inextricable tie as ours was,”[40] Subtle and Doll take the money and flee away together in the opposite direction than Face has planned. The con artists are characterized as birds flying the coop, gesturing not only to the fleeting nature of the niche market they had created but the impossibility of their clients’ ability to recoup their losses:

MAMMON The whole nest are fled!
LOVEWIT What sort of birds were they?
MAMMON A kind of choughs,
Or thievish daws, sir, that have picked my purse
Of eightscore and ten pounds within these five weeks,
Beside my first materials, and my goods,
That lie I’the cellar, which I am glad they ha’ left.
I may have home yet.
LOVEWIT Think you so, sir?[41]

It is odd that Lovewit, who has not operated within the plague ephemeral economy but whose wealth allowed for it, garners all of the profitable goods (including Dame Pliant) at the play’s end. This gestures to the complicity of the removed wealthy classes in the creation of this criminal economy, provided for only by the context of their absence. The play’s criticism of the permeating financial role of the upper classes seems to be engaging too with the mismanagement rhetoric surrounding James’s taxation theory and unsustainable methods of balancing market forces.[42] The play’s resolution results from a complicating and destabilizing of these producer/consumer identities, tested in a kind of theoretical financial vacuum of the plague marketplace fueled by positive feedback. Jonson returns to this idea of financial feedback loops again in Bartholomew Fair, this time as a representational framework to test the productivity of criminality in the marketplace.

Criminality in the Negative Feedback Loop

In the 1609 speech to Parliament, James responded directly and indirectly to the popular mismanagement rhetoric lodged against him. The arch of the speech trades on sustainability rhetorics of the period, both in terms of financial practice of the king’s household and well as the management of hunting resources and natural forests. It concludes with a call to action against deforestation practices that had become prominent across England. His argument is framed in terms of sustainability, drawing Parliament’s attention to the importance of maintaining English forests for the sake of the kingdom’s economy:

The maintenance of woods is a thing so necessary for this Kingdome, as it cannot stand, nor be a Kingdome without it: For it concernes you both in your Esse, Bene esse, and in pleasures. Your Esse: for without it you want the vse of one of the most necessarie Elements (which is Fire and fewell to dresse your meate with; for neither can the people liue in these colde Countries, if they want fire altogether, nor yet can you dresse your meate without it; and I thinke you will ill liue like the Cannibals vpon raw flesh: for the education of this people is farre from that. As to your bene esse; The decay of woods will necesarily bring the decay of Shipping, which both is the security of this Kingdome; since God hath by nature made the Sea to bee the wall of this Iland.[43]

This kind of sustainability rhetoric suggests an underlying change in James’s approach to finance that promotes financial stability in terms of negative feedback. A negative feedback loop is a system whose output counteracts changes to the input, which results in a stabilizing of the system (for example, a zero-sum economy). Government programs are a form of negative feedback that work to dampen fluctuations in the national marketplace, such as subsidizing farmers or theatre companies during plague outbreaks. Negative feedback trends toward systemic equilibrium, the opposite of positive feedback. The representation of English woods as decaying and requiring external protection demonstrates the expanding domain of government to include maintaining the natural world and underscores its finitude. What is significant here is not the specificity of the issue of deforestation, but the shift in ideological focus it represents.

Despite this recognition of a widening responsibility of government and the eventual detrimental impact of national interests on the environment, James reveals his own misunderstanding of their source. While he recommends creating a law to preserve the forests, James’s delineation of how this law will affect the different classes in fact counteracts the law’s intended balancing effects:

Ye haue reason therefore to prouide a good Law vpon this Subiect…you haue giuen leaue to euery man how poore a Farmour that euer hee bee, to take and destroy them in his owne ground how he list. But I pray you, how can the Game bee maintained, if Gentlemen that haue great Lordships shall breed and preserue them there, and so soone as euer they shall bit flie ouer the hedge and light in a poore fellowes Close, they shall all be destroyed? Surely I know no remedie for perseruing the Game that breedes in my grounds…And by your Lawe against stealing of Deere or Conies…shall bee vnderstood to bee vsed against them that steale the Game in the night…And if the Game be not preserued, you can eate no Venison. As for Partridge and Phesant, I doe not denie that Gentlemen should haue their sport, and specially vpon their owne ground. But first I doe not thinke such Game and pleasures should be free to base people.[44]

Laws protecting game and the forests are rendered inoperable because they cannot be applied to the upper classes, only to the lower classes, which are entitled to only certain kinds of rights and pleasures.[45] The deforestation during this period was in part due to the increased amounts of livestock being brought to London as a response to the resource sink that is indicative of cities, as well as the increase in poaching in response to food scares.[46] It is important to consider that Jonson was writing Bartholomew Fair in the context of the “recurring food shortages” that “persisted alongside courageous endeavors to remedy the situation by improving the food supply through overseas trade, increasing home-grown produce, especially dairy foods, vegetables and fruit, and farming more efficiently with the help of enclosure, the draining of fenland, and the use of new crop rotations.”[47] The premise of Bartholomew Fair, then, is contingent on both London-oriented and national issues of food production, consumption, and changing government mediation methods in the marketplace.[48]

Supply-and-demand principals did not solely determine seventeenth-century food industries. Rather, they were also dramatically influenced by the identity politics of culture and consumption. Some of James’s earliest subsidy experiments were “national measures to improve the supply of wheat and barley for bread” from 1607 until 1610 as a response to the Midland Revolt.[49] Even at this national level it is important to think of food and methods of food preparation as cultural expressions of their consuming groups. For example, as Richard Wilk points out in an article on early modern extractive economies, the gendering of consumption is part of the environmental impact of the food system.[50] Early moderns’ relationship with food was intimately connected to their role in society, and even the pickpocket—a social position not typically associated with productive fiscal input—is represented by Jonson as having a necessary and stabilizing market force for the food industry.

While we do not traditionally consider the criminal in positive terms, Bartholomew Fair presents us with a panorama of criminal types and explores their contributions to the negative feedback loop of the three-day market with which playgoers would be very familiar. The annual Bartholomew Fair began as a late medieval cloth market and expanded over time until the early nineteenth century. It was held in the London suburb of Smithfield, the same neighborhood where the aforementioned Hope Theatre was located as a site for a variety of entertainments such as plays, dumb shows, puppetry, animal baiting, and seasonal or religious festivals—what Jonathan Haynes understands as a representation of the “erosion of the carnival tradition” for Jonson.[51] In a similar vein, Michael Bristol helps explain the relationship between these kinds of activities, arguing that markets and theatre were different types of “popular festive form” that “celebrates and briefly actualizes a collective desire for a freer and more abundant way of life.”[52] The criminal presents “social conflict” as a “salutary force, which conserves the diffuse, implicit authority of the local community and, equally, contributes to the tradition of mutual and reciprocal responsibility for sustaining collective subsistence.”[53] To crystallize Bristol’s claim in the terms of Jonson’s work: within the ephemeral context of the market fair, criminals contribute negative feedback to the financial and social ecology in order for the positive social work of festivity to take place.

At the center of the criminal network of Jonson’s version of Bartholomew Fair is Ursula, a large, garrulous woman who sells fresh roasted pork, the “she-bear” by name. For the movement of the play, the importance of her role is similar to Face’s in that she connects potential clients with suppliers of unique and specific goods—a central node in this network of thieves. That her stall is next to Mooncalf’s, the tapster, presents her with opportunities to ply his clients with food to supplement their drink, and also to recommend her patrons to do the inverse. She also works closely with Edgeworth, a notorious pickpocket, and Nightingale, a sheet-music seller, to coordinate more efficient pick-pocketing methods and share those profits at the end of the fair.

EDGEWORTH and i’your singing you must use your hawk’s eye
nimbly, and fly the purse to a mark still—where tis worn
and o’which side—that you may gi’ me the sign with your
beak, or hang your head that way i’the tune.[54]

Initially, Ursula, afraid of being taken to the Piepowders summary court—the fair’s version of a judicial system, which convened if necessary at the end of the event—is cautious of the plan and accuses another less-successful cutpurse “for cutting halfpenny purses or stealing little penny / dogs out o’the fair.”[55] Criminality changes the value of goods in dramatic ways because thieves are not participating in the traditional exchange economy—it is not a zero-sum game for them. They will thieve until they run out of those to take from, seemingly disrupting the fair’s pure free-market system by virtue of its ephemerality. Counter to this assumption, Jonson represents criminality as doing just the opposite, and their productive, stabilizing contribution to the fair’s financial ecosystem becomes ineffectual once the restraints of law are introduced.

Ursula is essential to understanding how the feedback system in the play operates to expose the plasticity of producer-consumer identity. She is a central node that mediates a variety of sanctioned and unauthorized exchanges. Ursula represents both an animalism reflected in her need for instant gratification that theft can provide,[56] and also participates in the traditional economy of the fair with her pig stall. She is but one among many hawkers at the fair, and her sales pitch sounds very similar to the pear-seller, or Joan Trash’s marketing of gingerbread:

URSULA Five shillings a pig is my price, at least; if it be a sow-pig,
sixpence more; if she be a great-bellied wife, and long for’t,
sixpence more for that.[57]

This passage echoes Mammon in The Alchemist that presents a rhetorical representation of the kind of value inflation that occurs in the context of ephemeral economies. While for Mammon the violence of the sow’s preparation reflexively demonstrates the knight’s unproductive status in society, in this context it works differently. Under normal circumstances a pregnant sow would not have been killed on the premise of waste. All of her unborn offspring would be killed as well, stemming the farmer’s ability to increase and replace his stock. Because the fair operates outside the traditional legal framework of the London court system—not to mention the traditional daily social constraints—this wasteful method of food preparation is marketed instead as a delicacy and priced to reflect this new value claim. In essence, criminality is condoned by the marketplace—that is, by the purchasers, who confirm the inflation by paying for this rare food product that represents conspicuous waste and consumption.

By magnifying the component of waste in conspicuous consumption, the play experiments with the idea of unchecked criminality as an equivalent market force that comes to bear on consumer identities. There is an ongoing conflation of identity and financial status in especially in the upper class characters, causing producer-consumer identities to become less stable and even making it easier for producers and consumers to trade places entirely. “Social structure is the authorized and legitimated system of categories, roles and consciously recognized social imperatives that ordinarily provide order and coherence in the day-to-day experience of each member of the community,” which is displaced by this conflation based on relationships to materiality.[58] Ursula is at once a producer and preparer of pork, as well as a contributor to the pickpockets and other scheme networks (she eventually fulfills the role of whoremaster as well). She is paid in cash, but also in tobacco and other food goods for these services, fulfilling the position of consumer in a system based on credit, not bartering. This identity destabilization is true not only for the lower classes and hawkers of the fair but also for the group of gentlemen and women who go slumming there.

The character most useful for illustrating the play’s representation of negative feedback is Bartholomew Cokes, the exorbitantly wealthy simpleton who can’t help but throw his money at any trinket, toy, or sweet that he sees. He is to be married to the ward Grace Wellborn he had recently purchased, for all intents and purposes, by the end of the day. Note that in the year this play was first performed, the King’s treasurer tripled the selling price of wardships in another unsustainable attempt to increase the royal household income without having to beg and plead Parliament.[59] Throughout the play, Grace, who trades hands several times, acts more as a commodity than as an individual, saying very little and expressing personal agency even less. Cokes enters the play as an unchecked consumer with infinite funds at his disposal, and his first purchase is of a person, Grace. However, Cokes also become a commodity on which the thieves constantly draw. Instead of blaming the individuals that make up the fair marketplace, he blames the system:

COKES Would I might lose my doublet, and hose, too, as I am
an honest man and never stir, if I think there be anything
but thieving and cozening i’this whole fair. Barthol’mew
Fair, quoth he! An ever any Barthol’mew had that luck in’t
that I have had, I’ll be martyred for him, and in Smithfield,
too. I ha’ paid for my pears. A rot on ‘em! I’ll keep ‘em no
longer. (Throws away his pears.) You were choke-pears to
me; I had been better ha’ gone to mumchance for you, I
wusse. Methinks the fair should not have used me thus, an
‘twere but for my name’s sake. I would not ha’ used a dog
o’the name so.[60]

This represents an intense display of corresponding references to the context of the drama. The stripping of Cokes’ clothes comically mimics the martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, his and the fair’s namesake. The saint is typically represented in art as being skinned alive, often depicted as holding his suit of skin on his arm like a robe.[61] Smithfield, too, was a notorious site for burning Protestant martyrs under the short rule of Mary Tudor half a century earlier. This collision of correspondences encompassing the character of Cokes identifies him as a metaphorical representation of the fair culture and its fuel source. Despite his anger at the system—at the fair itself rather than the individuals that make up the fair atmosphere—Cokes is complicit in the system.

Once he entered the marketplace, Cokes becomes a physical embodiment of a negative feedback loop. Ursula signals to the pickpockets that he is carrying two large purses, he is robbed multiple times, even to the point where his clothes are stolen and he is unable to recognize himself. Once even his clothes are gone, he no longer presents a source of income for the pickpockets or even the lawful hawkers. Cokes is literally taken for all he is worth, and thus the pickpockets are out of business. To Troubleall, a justice of peace who has gone mad, Cokes asks:

COKES Friend, do you know who I am, or where I lie? I do not
myself, I’ll be sworn. Do but carry me home, and I’ll please
thee; I ha’ money enough there. I ha’ lost myself, and my
cloak and my hat, and my fine sword, and my sister, and
Numps, and Mistress Grace (a gentlewoman that I should
ha’ married) and a cutwork handkerchief she ga’ me, and
two purses today. And my bargain o’hobbyhorses and gin-
gerbread, which grieves me worst of all.[62]

Without his wealth Cokes cannot afford to pay others to fulfill his needs, such as remembering where he lives which seems to compromise his own sense of self. This interruption in self-recognition is mapped onto others, as well. His servant, Numps, his betrothed, and his sister are all lumped together in a list of material goods that complicates and reveals their true value claim to him. Beyond the productive input in the marketplace, this suggests that criminality is also reflected as a socially productive device of revelation, pointing up the relationship between one’s personal identity and contribution to the social marketplace ecology.

Where as act four heralds a series of breakdowns in identity, act five finally introduces a new market force intent on re-establishing those traditional social places. Justice Overdo has been in disguise throughout the play, observing and misattributing criminals for their betters. By finally unmasking himself Overdo introduces law into the free market of the fair as a counterweight to its unchecked criminality, not realizing the criminality itself functions as a force for equilibrium in this particular ephemeral economy. As a Piepowders justice, Overdo intends to “take enormity by the forehead / and brand it, for I have discovered enough,”[63] seeking to reveal and mark individuals for what they are not who they are, or how they contribute to the fair as a codependent system. Overdo’s preamble to the big reveal foreshadows inaccuracies that are dependent on a one-sided understanding of their more complex, dual roles in the fair:

OVERDO Hearken unto my labors, and but
observe of my discoveries; and compare Hercules with me, if
thou dar’st, of old, or Columbus, Magellan, or our country-
man Drake of later times. Stand forth, you weeds of enor-
mity and spread![64]

Overdo compares himself to a series of men who have been treated by history as equal parts criminal and heroic based on variable representations of others, including Sir Francis Drake who was considered both a national hero and an international pirate. Overdo is here attempting to find victimizations caused by the fair, but what does it mean that everyone is both a perpetrator and a victim, all complicit and subject to crime? By his insistence on the binary of criminal and victim, the negative feedback loop cannot be sustained, and both the fair and play must come to an end without a system of exchanges to fuel them.

Concluding Thoughts

An ecocritical approach to early modern literature can profit significantly from addressing drama formally in terms of systems theory—that is, we should think about plays as systems rather than only as linear narratives. It has been Tiffany Sterns’ mission to reorient our understanding of drama as co-produced and malleable, that plays were constructed of discreet scenes as moveable and replaceable depending on the performance space and context, and contingent on reactions between characters.[65] Aaron’s work on the theatre industry supports these ideas as indicative of a period and genre where there were no one-man shows on the public stage, and the King’s Men moved toward increasing larger casts and opulence for the public theatre borrowed from court performances. Jonson’s consideration and exposing of the frailty of exchanges networks as a principle engages with these industry issues like another set of correspondences, especially if we consider metatheatrics as a predominant stylistic indicator of early modern drama. In this light, these texts engage with the contemporaneous rhetorics and financial government criticism as an understated display of metatheatrics—an acknowledgement in his theatre company’s contribution to and complicitness in the King’s criticism of pleasure expenditures. If the latest work in the field conceives of Jacobean theatre as a commonplace ephemeral niche economy, it suggests also that understanding plays formally and narratively in terms of systems theory presents a fruitful method for further exploration.

I have argued that a productive consideration of these plays is as two explorations of criminality as a kind of input to a social system. These two plays use the marketplace system as a model of representation that engaged with sustainability discourse of the period, a discourse that was beginning to distinguish between the fiscal and environmental in such terms. In Bartholomew Fair, the financial system of a seasonal market fair is rendered inoperable without criminality as a source of negative feedback to maintain systemic equilibrium. Inversely, for The Alchemist, Jonson examines the interdependence of the early modern class structure, a structure threatened by criminality as a source for positive feedback. By comparatively assessing these works in terms of positive and negative feedback loops, we are presented with a new framework for understanding how early moderns understood their social ecology by using financial markets as a representational model.[66] Literary modeling need not, however, remain solely in the realm of abstractions, rather it can work adjacent to applications of close reading, mutually informing our understanding of texts and their contexts.