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Taint and Usury: Gerard Malynes, The Dutch Church Libel, The Merchant of Venice

In February 1996, the Supreme Court of Arkansas delivered an opinion on a suit brought against a property vendor by two buyers who, unable to meet the unusually high rate of interest set by the vendor, had defaulted on their payments. Weighing the matter, the Supreme Court observed: “This case presents questions about usury.” As quaintly archaic as the court’s “questions” may seem, they had a sound legal basis. Arkansas is the only state in the union to set usury limits: Amendment 60 to the Arkansas constitution asserts that the maximum rate of interest on any contract entered into shall not exceed 5 percent per annum above the Federal Reserve Discount Rate. Clarifying the state’s law before delivering its opinion, the Supreme Court wrote that “the express intent of Amendment 60 was that the taint of usury voids the agreement only to the extent of unpaid interest.”¹

If the Arkansas constitutional safeguard against usury sounds old-fashioned, the language of the Supreme Court’s opinion might seem even more so. The “taint of usury” is a formulation that has a decidedly Shakespearean ring: it resonates with The Merchant of Venice, in which the Jewish usurer Shylock brings his “plea so tainted and corrupt” against the Christian merchant Antonio (3.2.75). There is a difference, however, between the Arkansas of 1996 and the Venice of 1596. If a “taint” is now simply a moral blemish, the term possessed a much wider array of meanings for Shakespeare and his audiences. In courts of law, a “taint” was a conviction for felony; hence when Antonio pronounces himself a “tainted wether of the flock” (4.1.113), he arguably accepts what he presumes will be the Venetian court’s ruling against him.² Yet as this example demonstrates, “taint” also possessed a pathological meaning. The term could refer to an illness of animals, especially of horses, and its meaning shaded into that of “infection,” whose etymology is almost identical to one of the senses of “taint”—a staining or contamination.³ In this chapter I examine how both terms are used in the emergent mercantilist discourses of late Elizabethan England to recode the old crime of usury as a new economic phenomenon synecdochally associated with Jews: the alienability of money and identity across national borders.

I read The Merchant of Venice in relation to two other “usury” texts with which it is not normally associated: Gerard Malynes’s Saint George for England Allegorically Described (1601) and the anonymous Dutch Church Libel of 1593. Each text seems to cast its gaze in a decidedly non-Jewish direction. Malynes’s treatise criticizes, from a recognizably mercantilist perspective, the depletion of England’s bullion reserves; the Dutch Church Libel condemns London’s substantial community of migrants from the Netherlands for all manner of religious, political, and economic crimes. Yet the Jew is made to play a significant rhetorical role in each text’s vision of usury. What is voiced in both Malynes’s fable and the Dutch Church Libel is less the conventional Christian condemnation of usury as a Jewish practice of sinful commerce or unnatural breeding than a modern, mercantilist problematic of transnationality for which “the Jew” serves as a fixing yet highly unstable signifier. This might help explain why neither text is usually considered part of the canon of anti-usury literature, where the moral or scriptural interpretations of usury have tended to be privileged. As I shall show, the mercantilist problematic of usury is also central to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Malynes, the anonymous author of the Dutch Church Libel, and Shakespeare all produce the usurer as a palimpsest, within which discrete categories of national and religious identity have been fused and confused.

Notably, the language of disease mediates all three texts’ production of usury as a species of transnationality. Yet in each case the pathologies identified with usury invoke not specific foreign bodies, as was often the case with syphilis, but states of contamination (“colour,” “gangrene,” “infection,” “taint”). Such pathologies work to fashion the foreign less as a determinate thing than as a corrupted site of “Judaized” hybridity or indeterminacy by means of which the nation’s wealth is covertly expropriated. Importantly, these Jewish hybrids (whether Dutch or Iberian, Catholic or Turkish) work to displace the reader’s attention from both the textual and the historical hybridization of the non-Jewish and/or English subject. In a time of unprecedented transnational fluidity of goods, coin, and people, however, early mercantilist discourse subjected to immense pressure even as it helped generate the myth of a pure national identity. Critical attention to the mercantilist recoding of usury permits a new reading of The Merchant of Venice—a reading in which neither “usury” nor the “Jew” seems quite as fixed or as transparent as earlier criticism of the play has often assumed both of them to be.

Color: Saint George for England Allegorically Described

The importance of usury in the mercantilist lexicon is, at first glance, somewhat surprising. One of the standard views of mercantilism is that it eclipsed medieval understandings of moral economy with far more amoral conceptions of commerce. As a consequence, this view maintains, the oldest economic sin became defensible; Thomas Wilson may have published his well-known critique of usury in 1572, but early modern English state policy and literature increasingly supported the charging of interest, even if rates of more than 10 percent were frowned upon.⁴ In his essay “On Usurie,” for example, Francis Bacon enumerates its “discommodities,” but he counters these with its many advantages, recommending that interest rates be set at 5 percent. “Few have spoken of usury usefully,” he asserts in a telling pun, for it is precisely usury’s commercial usefulness that mitigates it: “there [should] bee left open a meanes to invite moneyed men to lend to merchants for the continuing and quickning of Trade.”⁵ Despite such mercantile recuperations of usury, however, the so-called mercantilist writers themselves—with the notable exception of Thomas Mun⁶—condemned the practice fiercely. And although the mercantilists’ condemnations differed from those of medieval theologians, “the Jew” remained symbolically central to their imagining of usury as a crime.

As any student of The Merchant of Venice knows, the enduring association of Jews with usury stemmed from their temporary “welcome” into medieval European cities to practice a trade that Christians regarded as sinful. For Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica, the biblical proscription against charging interest on loans to “brothers” (Deuteronomy 23: 20–21) meant that, thanks to the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood, no true believer could practice usury. But in the later Middle Ages, Europe’s merchants increasingly needed ready sources of credit for capitalist ventures at home and abroad; to accommodate them, scholastics identified in the Deuteronomic proscription an ingenious, if xenophobic, loophole—Christians could not recoup interest on loans, but Jews could do so when lending to Christians, because Jews sinfully yet conveniently regarded gentiles as “others” rather than “brothers.”⁷ This loophole was put into practice in England for only a relatively short time. But for centuries after the expulsion of Jews in 1290, English writers continued to regard “usurer” as a synonym for “Jew.” The association is especially noteworthy in early modern drama. In addition to Shylock, we find a Jewish usurer, Gerontus, in Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (c. 1584); Barabas admits to a past career in usury in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c. 1588); and the Jew Zariph lends to Sir Anthony Shirley in Wilkins, Rowley, and Day’s Travels of Three English Gentlemen (c. 1608).⁸

Critical discussions of these plays and of The Merchant of Venice tend to reference the conventional moral arguments against usury. Hence analyses of Shylock’s first scene frequently note the Deuteronomic proscriptions against charging interest on loans to “brothers.” These references are sometimes accompanied by citation of Francis Bacon’s essay on usury and, in particular, one of the several “discommodities” that Bacon identifies with the practice: “They say … that it is against nature for money to beget money; and the like” (133). Bacon glances here at another customary condemnation of usury. In his influential treatise “De Moneta,” the fourteenth-century French theologian Nicholas Oresme had argued that “it is monstrous and unnatural that an unfruitful thing should bear, that a thing specifically sterile, such as money, should bear fruit and multiply of itself.”⁹ This argument about unnatural reproduction was arguably the dominant discourse about usury in the Reformation. Luther was particularly pithy on the matter: “Money is sterile.”¹⁰

Yet as Marc Shell and other readers have noted, such theological arguments about money’s sterility do not provide the only framework for understanding Jewish usury in The Merchant of Venice.¹¹ On the contrary, Shylock forcefully asserts his “thrifty” ability to make money breed as fast as did the biblical Jacob’s “rams and ewes” (1.3.88). According to Shylock, Jacob’s skillful manipulation of Laban’s sheep and their “work of generation” was an exemplary act of usury, yielding him interest in the form of a flock of “parti-coloured” (spotted) lambs (1.3.74, 80). Antonio, however, focuses instead on the criminality of charging interest to friends:

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not

As to thy friends, for when did friendship take

A breed for barren metal of his friend?

But lend it rather to thine enemy … (1.3.124–27)

Antonio here invokes both the familiar Lutheran image of money as a “barren metal” and the Deuteronomic opposition between lending to “friends” and lending to “enemies,” each of which conforms more straightforwardly to the customary Christian discourses of usury than does Shylock’s prolix parable about the breeding of “parti-coloured” eanlings. In attempting to make sense of The Merchant of Venice’s discourse of usury, readers have tended to focus their attention solely on Antonio’s Christian-inflected denunciation of Shylock’s moneylending practices. Hence in his influential study The Idea of Usury, for example, Benjamin Nelson interpreted the play’s presentation of usury within an exclusively moral framework, as inimical to a fading Christian ideal of friendship.¹² By contrast, I will argue that when read together with Shylock’s parable of Jacob and his “parti-coloured” lambs, Antonio’s speech drives to the heart of an anxiety that loomed large not just in rearguard defenses of moral economy but also in the emergent mercantilist discourse of national wealth.

Of particular importance here is the “brothers and others” typology of Deuteronomy, though I shall argue that its relevance to mercantilist discourse has to do less with Christian than with economic nationalist ideals of brotherhood.¹³ Inasmuch as the Deuteronomic proscriptions against usury prohibit the charging of interest to “brothers” from one’s own tribe, the activity definitionally entails a contract across national boundaries, however these may be defined (religiously, politically, economically). The Anglican divine Henry Smith, in a sermon delivered in the late sixteenth century, argued: “of a stranger, saith God thou mayest take usury, but thou takest usury of thy brother; therefore this condemneth thee, BECAUSE THOU USETH THY BROTHER LIKE A STRANGER.”¹⁴ Smith believed usury to entail a confusion or contamination of discrete categories: all Christians are brothers, yet any act of usury by a Christian “useth” a “brother” as if he were a “stranger” (i.e., a foreigner). Religious thinkers like Smith expressed such contamination in the register of moral economy. But early modern mercantilists such as Gerard Malynes tended to refashion the brother/stranger confusion of usury in the terms of transnational economy. As we will see, the usurer of mercantilist literature is accused less of sinful behavior than of political and economic sabotage. Francis Bacon, for example, echoes two standard mercantilist arguments when he asserts that usury “bringeth the treasure of a Realme of State into a few hands” and causes “the decay of Customes of Kings or States” (134). According to Bacon, then, usury deprives the state of bullion, diverting it into private and foreign coffers. The nationalistic inflection of Bacon’s argument is evident also in his recommendation that “these licensed lenders [should] be in number indefinite, but restrained to certaine principall cities and townes of merchandizing; for then they will be hardly able to colour other men’s moneyes in the country” (136; emphasis added).

Bacon’s choice of verb here is fascinating. “To colour” is synonymous in this context with “to dye” or “to stain” and hence, in a more metaphorically pathological sense, “to corrupt.” The OED lists Bacon’s use of “to colour” under the now obsolete sense of “to lend one’s name to; represent or deal with as one’s own.” I would argue that this meaning of “colour” also sheds light on Shylock’s otherwise enigmatic vision of usury. Although they are the offspring of Laban’s sheep, the eanlings become Jacob’s by virtue of his ability to (parti-) “colour” them, and hence “represent or deal with” them as his “own.” Shylock instructively aligns Jacob’s profit with the usurer’s interest, therefore, by means of an image of staining; like Bacon’s “coloured” money, the “parti-coloured” fleeces embody the lambs’ categorical hybridity as goods that have become alienated from Laban to Jacob, or Israel, father of the Jewish nation. For Bacon and Shakespeare alike, then, “colour” is the mark of a national boundary transgression intrinsic to usury.

In the process, the “colouring” usurer generates a potential crisis of uncertain identity, goods, and coin. Paraphrasing Portia, one might ask: which is the merchant’s, and which the lender’s “moneys”? For the mercantilists, this question was of pressing importance when the lender was a stranger and English bullion stood to be alienated across national borders. Thomas Milles, for example, argues that “many merchants do collour the conueying of ready Money out of the Realme of England.”¹⁵ The transnational undecidability generated by the foreign usurer’s “colouring” also informs the early modern phrase “to colour strangers’ goods,” which the OED glosses as “to enter a foreign merchant’s goods at the custom-house under a freeman’s name, for the purpose of evading additional duties” (colour, v., 4). Gerard Malynes uses this very phrase in his treatise Lex Mercatoria (1622): “a Factor or Merchant, doe colour the goods of Merchant Strangers in paying but English Customes.”¹⁶ For Malynes, such “colouring” is tantamount to usury, inasmuch as it involves a crafty profiting from transnational dealership less in goods than in money. In both Bacon’s and Malynes’s texts, then, the “colouring” effects of usury are made to figure a twofold indeterminacy that is the product of transnational commerce. First, the usurer “colours” goods and money in such fashion as to obscure knowledge of who owns them, and whether they are domestic or foreign (or both). Second, the usurer confuses national borders, both by merging with his host nation and by obtaining money from—or sending it to—uncertain destinations in which he has family, factors, or trading connections. The “colouring” usurer thus both embodies and transmits national indeterminacy.

The pathological dimensions of “colouring” and the nationally indeterminate usurer are particularly evident in Malynes’s first published work, Saint George for England Allegorically Described (1601). Unlike his later treatises, the text takes the form of a brief allegorical fable about England’s economic ills; to this extent, it may be seen as a boiled-down Faerie Queen set on London’s Lombard Street. Malynes recounts a dream he has had, in which he visits a city (“Diospolus,” or London) on a “most fruitfull Iland” (“Niobla,” an anagram of Albion).¹⁷ The country is suffering, however; a beautiful princess, whom Malynes equates with the nation’s treasure, is tormented by a rampaging dragon, which he identifies with usury. Despite the fable’s title, Saint George notably fails to make his promised appearance. England’s patron saint is “allegorically described” by Malynes only in his opening dedication to Sir Thomas Egerton; here he asserts that Saint George is a type of both Christ and Queen Elizabeth, each of whom has been used by God “to performe the part of a valiant champion, delivering an infinite number of the diuels power” (sigs. A2v–A3). When Malynes turns to the narration of his fable, however, he devotes nearly all of it to an allegorical description not of Saint George but of usury. And just as Malynes invokes a Christian frame of reference in his dedication only to exclude the very type of Christ from his actual narrative, so does the traditionally theological explanation of usury figure in his fable as a striking absence, referred to but once in a parenthetical citation of passages from scripture (65). Malynes instead focuses the majority of his critique on usury’s economic and political effects. The dragon is named “Poenus politicum [hardship of the polity]”; one of his wings is called “Vsura palliata [disguised usury],” the other “Vsuria explicata [explicit usury]”; the dragon’s tail is called “inconstant Cambium [exchange rates]” (sig. A8). As this allegorical anatomy suggests, Malynes imagines usury quite differently from Aquinas and the medieval scholastics. He believes not only that usury takes multiple forms, overt and disguised; it is also—as his invocation of exchange rates suggests—intrinsic to the systematic practice of commerce across national borders.

Malynes does not entirely abandon the language of moral economy. At times, he blames the dragon for a brace of sins practiced by Niobla’s inhabitants: usury has, for example, produced “a present greater abilitie … to liue licentiously, following whores, harlots, wine-tauernes, and many other vnlawfull games, to their vtter destruction” (21). But throughout the fable, the religious is overwhelmingly subsumed within the economic, and medieval sins are eclipsed by systemic modes of transnational commerce. Uppermost in Malynes’s lengthy list of the dragon’s crimes are dangerous practices of “merchandizing exchange” that have resulted in the flow of bullion out of the nation: “he maintaineth a league with forreine nations, and causeth them to serue his turne, by bringing in superfluous commodities at a deare rate, and they to feede vppon our natiue soile, to the commonwealths destruction.… He carieth out our treasure in bullion and money, empouerishing our commonweale.” (42). Here Malynes emphatically refashions usury in accordance with the characteristic nationalist preoccupations of mercantilism.¹⁸ As a consequence, “usury” begins to lose its traditional meaning. In the above passage and elsewhere in Malynes’s fable, the term refers no longer simply to the charging of interest on loans but more generally to “money being made a merchandize” in the course of transnational trade (71)—in this case, merchant strangers’ manipulation of rates of currency exchange in order to buy English commodities cheaply and to sell foreign commodities at exorbitant prices. What should be England’s wealth, therefore, becomes “coloured” as foreign.

Throughout his allegory, Malynes employs a resolutely pathological vocabulary to figure the usurious underbelly of transnational commerce. In his dedication, he compares statesmen to the “Phisitions of commonweales” whose job is to heal “the biles botches, cankers and sores thereof”; chief among these is the “venimous sore” of usury (sig. A7v). And in the fable proper, Malynes describes the dragon of usury variously as a “Gangrena” (49) and “this contagion, where-with we are infected” (13). Both of these latter pathological metaphors are, I would argue, crucial to Malynes’s vision of usury and the relationship between the “domestic” and the “foreign.” On the one hand, Malynes seems to figure the dragon of usury as an invasive disease when he compares “Gangrena” to “Synons [the Trojan] horse” (49). To modern eyes, a presumption of invasive disease may be yet more apparent in Malynes’s use of terms like “contagion” and “infected.” All these pathologies might suggest that he views usury as a practice specific to foreigners. But I would argue that each of Malynes’s metaphorical diseases implies less foreign invasion (though that is certainly one of their connotations) than a corruption or mixing of categories that is redolent of usury’s “colouring” indeterminacy.

Gangrene, which derives from the Latin “cancrena,” was regarded as a perilously advanced form of more mild skin ailments like serpego and canker (both of which I examine in the next chapter). Renaissance physicians imagined gangrene as an invasive disease only to the extent that they recognized its ability to spread rapidly through the body, “devouring” it bit by bit. They located its causes not in foreign bodies, however, but in elemental factors such as extreme cold. What most exercised physicians’ imaginations was gangrene’s blurring of a crucial medical distinction: they characterized it as a form of living death, a confusion of vitality and mortification. Bartholomew Traheron notes in his 1543 translation of Vignon’s work on surgery, for example, that “Cancrena [gangrene] is not taken for flesh deade altogether, but for that whych begynneth to putrefye by lyttle and lyttle.”¹⁹ Gangrene muddles the boundary between what is proper to the body and what is alien to it; thus seen, the affliction is both endogenous and invasive. The confusion of categories that distinguishes early modern understandings of gangrene is even more notable in the sixteenth-century meanings of “infection.” The term had not yet decisively acquired its modern sense, that is, the communication of a determinate, exogenous illness. Although it was increasingly associated with foreign bodies as a result of new explanations of epidemic diseases such as syphilis (as we saw in Chapter 2), the dominant meaning of “infection” was contamination or pathological mixing. The term derives from Latin “inficere,” to stain or taint; for Galenic physicians, it came to mean corruption, including the miasmic putrefaction of water or of air, and hence the transmission of disease. But in the late sixteenth century, “infect” still retained vestiges of its residual meaning, “to dye, tinge, colour, stain” (OED, infect, v., 1.a).

The gangrenous, infected dragon is thus “coloured” and “colouring,” in both pathological and economic senses. As Malynes says, the dragon has a “compounded body” (56); he is “half a man & halfe a beast” (73). This pathological mixing figures the hybridity of the usurer’s capital, which creates the illusion of an “imaginatiue wealth” even as it “hath transported our treasure into forraine parts” (71). The usurer thus “colours”—or alienates—the nation’s bullion. As this might suggest, the dragon’s infected state entails the fusion and confusion of discrete national identities. “His tridented toung,” Malynes tells us, is “like vnto a Turkish dart”; but his body is “like an Elephant.” Indeed, Malynes repeatedly associates the dragon with Islamic nations: the dragon’s tail, he informs us, “is marked with the new Moon of the Turkes, like vnto the letter C” (57). Malynes is less invested in Islamicizing usury, however, than in simply exoticizing it. The crescent moon that he here retools as the badge of usury conveniently enables him to allegorize the dragon’s tail as “the letter C,” the initial of Cambium or foreign exchange rates, with which he allegorically identifies this part of the body: “with the operation of his taile,” he complains, the dragon has “transported the moneys of our Hand, and within our land altered the nature and valuation of the money, making one hundred pounds, to be one hundred and ten pounds” (62).²⁰

Yet even as Malynes exoticizes the dragon, he also brands it as a recognizably domestic villain. Its “compounded body” may have an Orientalized tail, but its head is marked with “an F, like a fellon” (57). Malynes’s remark seems calculated to exploit “fellon”‘s linked early modern legal and pathological associations. The term derives from the Latin fel, gall, and was used in early modern medical writing as a synonym for a carbuncle or boil. In law, however, a “felon” was originally anyone who breached the feudal bond of trust between man and lord; he or she was thus understood as a domestic disease, disrupting the internal balance of the body politic.²¹ Interestingly, the OED tells us that a “taint” was a mark applied to anyone convicted of a felony. Hence Malynes’s “fellon”-marked dragon is “tainted” in both pathological and legal senses. A conflation of exotic and domestic ills, the creature embodies Frances E. Dolan’s model of the early modern “proximate other,” a suppositious social threat that was perceived to be simultaneously foreign and domestic.²²

In focusing explicit attention on the dragon’s “compounded body,” however, Malynes diverts attention from the extent to which the England of his fable is itself already hybrid. Niobla’s beautiful princess is by no means nationally pure; rather, she sports a transnational, Oriental motley. She wears clothes that are “odiferous as the smell of Lebanon” (52); her cheeks are like “a bed of spices” (52); her “admirable body” is “covered with a garment of white silke Damaske” (53); and she is “this Indian Phenix” (55). Yet it is the dragon of usury that is made to bear the burden of transnational mixing and the “coloured” indeterminacy that underwrites it. In the most eerie passage of the fable, Malynes describes the literal impossibility of pinning down the dragon’s precise location:

albeit he seemeth with the index of the dyall not to moue, when he is continually moouing, and stirred in such sort, that when men begin to perceiue his motion, and pretend to runne from him: he doth so allure them, that the more they runne, the more he seemeth to follow them, as the moone doth to the little children, whereby his motion is the lesse regarded. (57–58)

The dragon is always in motion, but his most dangerous skill lies in his ability to create the illusion that he occupies a fixed location. This passage captures particularly well the distinctive qualities of the usurer as he is rhetorically produced in mercantilist discourse: for all his seeming fixity, he is a fluid shapeshifter, “continually moouing” across categorical and national boundaries.

In mercantilist writing about usury, the oscillation between fixity and fluidity is most at work in the seemingly firm attribution of usury to the figure of the Jew. Thomas Milles, for example, follows Malynes in imagining usury as a pratice of “merchandizing exchange” that alienates bullion across national borders; yet despite usury’s global status, Milles insists that merchandizing exchange transforms “our Christian Exchange into Iewish Vsury.”²³ The same strategy is evident at a crucial moment in Bacon’s essay on usury. In his list of “witty invectives” against usury, he reports the view that “Usurers should have orange-tawney bonnets, because they doe judaize” (133). “Judaize” serves here as both a metaphor and an ostensible cure for usury’s undecidability. On the one hand, the Jew was the master trope of national indeterminacy; as James Shapiro has argued, the waves of Jewish and Marrano migration from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries facilitated the birth of the legend of the Wandering Jew, a stateless, transnational vagabond.²⁴ But Bacon’s use of the verb “Judaize” also lends a reassuring local name, if not habitation, to a practice that involves a transnational blurring of discrete categories: usurers should wear the orange hats mandated of Jews in the Papal States, not because they are Jewish, but because their practice “colours” them as Jews. “The Jew” thus both figures transnational fluidity and lends it a provisionally stable identity.

Something similar happens in Saint George for England Allegorically Described. Malynes makes reference to Jews only once; but this reference is rhetorically crucial to his demonization of the transnational Turkish/English dragon. Admonishing the supporters of usury, he asks: “Will not the daunger that the leaguors of this Dragon do runne into, give them warning, when as at one time fiue hundreth Jewes were transported with Carons boate the ferrie man of hell, which were slaine by the Cittizens of Troynouant for feeding him?” (65). It is difficult to know at which historical incident Malynes glances here, but it may well be the York Massacre of the twelfth century, when the citizens of that town conveniently dissolved their debts by murdering the Jewish population.²⁵ In any case, Malynes, like Milles and Bacon, makes “the Jew” the certain material in which to clothe usury’s transnational uncertainty. Yet that very material, like Bacon’s “orange-tawney” bonnet, exacerbates even as it attempts to stabilize the dragon’s hybridity: “the Jew” becomes less a name for the palimpsested identities of transnational commerce than one of the layers in that palimpsest.

Malynes’s chilling fantasy of retribution against Jews also recalls what was a much more recent phenomenon: the antiforeigner libels of the early 1590s. For many London citizens as for Malynes, Saint George needed to slay no dragon when an English mob could be relied upon to administer wild justice to strangers. One such libel of 1593 warns: “Be it known to all Flemings and Frenchmen, that it is best for them to depart out of the realm of England between this and the 9th of July next. If not, then to take that which follows: for there shall be many a sore stripe. Apprentices will rise to the number of 2336. And all the apprentices and journeymen will down with the Flemings and strangers.”²⁶

The antiforeigner libels of the 1590s are rhetorically close to Malynes’s fantasy of punishment in another respect. Even as they ostensibly target “Flemings and strangers,” the libels use “the Jew” as a figure with which to lend a name to the hybrid identities that were increasingly a feature of early modern Europe and its networks of transnational commerce. Understanding these libels, and the confluence of economic and pathological language that distinguishes them, is crucial to an understanding of the social and rhetorical horizons within which Shakespeare composed The Merchant of Venice.

Infection: The Dutch Church Libel

In May 1593, during a period of mounting hostility toward London’s immigrant Dutch community, a libelous poem was affixed to the wall of one of the city’s foreign Protestant churches. It directly addresses foreigners living in London:

Ye strangers yt doe inhabite in this lande

Note this same writing doe it vnderstand

Conceit it well for savegard of your lyves

Your goods, your children, & your dearest wives

Your Machiavellian Marchant spoyles the state,

Your vsery doth leave vs all for deade

Your Artifex, & craftesmen works our fate,

And like the Jewes, you eate us vp as bread

The Marchant doth ingross all kinde of wares

Forestall’s the markets, whereso ‘ere he goe’s

Sends forth his wares, by Pedlers to the faires,

Retayl’s at home, & with his horrible showes: Vndoeth thowsands

In Baskets your wares trott up & downe

Carried the streets by the country nation,

You are intelligencers to the state & crowne

And in your hartes doe wish an alteracion,

You transport goods, & bring vs gawds good store

Our Leade, our Vitaille, our Ordenance & what nott

That Egipts plagues, vext not the Egyptians more

Than you doe vs; then death shall be your lotte

Noe prize comes in but you make claime therto

And every merchant hath three trades at least

And Cutthroate like in selling you vndoe

vs all, & with our store continually you feast: We cannot suffer long.

Our pore artificers doe starve & dye

For yt they cannot now be sett on worke

And for your worke more curious to the ey[.]

In Chambers, twenty in one house will lurke,

Raysing of rents, was never knowne before

Living farre better than at native home

And our poore soules, are cleane thrust out of dore

And to the warres are sent abroad to rome,

To fight it out for Fraunce & Belgia,

And dy like dogges as sacrifice for you

Expect you therefore such a fatall day

Shortly on you, & yours for to ensewe: as never was seene.

Since words nor threats not any other thinge

canne make you to avoyd this certaine ill

Weele cut your throtes, in your temples praying

Not paris massacre so much blood did spill

As we will doe iust vengeance on you all

In counterfeiting religion for your flight

When ‘t’is well knowne, you are loth, for to be thrall

your coyne, & you as countryes cause to flight

With Spanish gold, you all are infected

And with yt gould our Nobles wink at feats

Nobles said I? nay men to be reiected,

Upstarts yt enjoy the noblest seates