"The Allegory of a China Shop": Jonson's Entertainment at Britain's Burse

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

"The Allegory of a China Shop":Jonson's Entertainment at Britain's Burse David J. Baker "What doe you lacke?" cries a "Shop-Boy" in Ben Jonson's recently discovered masque, Entertainment at Britain's Burse (1609). "[W]hat is't you buy" from "our China man?" Will it be the "Veary fine China stuffes, of all kindes and quallityes" this dealer has for sale, the "China Chaynes, China Braceletts, China scarfes, China fannes, China girdles, China kniues, China boxes, China Cabinetts"? Or his exotic creatures: "Birds of Paradise, Muskcads, Indian Mice, Indian ratts, China dogges and China Cattes?" Or perhaps something more mundane: "Vumbrellas, Sundyalls, . . . Billyard Balls, Purses, Pipes, . . . Toothpicks, . . . Spectacles!" "See what you lack," he urges, and turn that lack into having.1 The occasion for this pitch was the first performance of the masque in London on 11 April 1609. It opened the New Exchange, a Burse, it was hoped, that would "rival Gresham's Royal Exchange in the City."2 Since this performance took place on the premises of the Burse itself, the commodities the Shop Boy hawks would, most probably, have been all around him, there for the audience to see and to desire, just as he instructed. But what did they see, exactly? Arjun Appadurai has pointed out that, in early modern Britain, luxury goods from abroad appeared first of all as "incarnated signs": not so much fetishized commodities, but "goods whose principal use is rhetorical and social." For Jonson and his contemporaries, they registered "semiotic virtuosity, that is, the capacity to signal fairly complex social messages," including the "specialized knowledge" that was a "prerequisite for their 'appropriate' consumption," the fashion sense that their elite consumer could display, and the intricacies of status that could be communicated thereby. Asian luxuries like those the Burse purveyed took on meaning first of all within the elaborate conventions of Jacobean court society. Their consumption was regulated not only by sumptuary laws, for instance, but by all the considerations of taste and behavior that courtiers applied to one another, and was linked intimately and specifically, among a knowing clique, to "body, person, and personality."3 Among [End Page 159] such persons, on this occasion, were James I, his family, and many members of his court. The host of the event was Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who had commissioned the masque from Jonson. The Entertainment, most critics think, is a bold declaration of mercantile ideology, although an unusual Jonsonian text for just that reason. Even before it was recently discovered by James Knowles among the State Papers Domestic in the Public Record Office, David Riggs, who relied on "quotes from unpublished manuscripts," considered the masque "to have been something quite anomalous: a royal entertainment in praise of trade."4 ("[A]nomalous," that is, because it suggests that relations between the dramatist and London's merchant establishment were not as prickly as we have often thought.) Martin Butler observes that Jonson did not include the masque in his collected works, and generally "preferred to leave the impression" that, unlike other playwrights, he was not beholden to "London's commercial ideology." But, as this critic reads the Entertainment, it "celebrates the expansion of British trade into Asian markets, and dwells approvingly on the luxury goods that could be bought from Salisbury's marvelous mall."5 Knowles himself points out that, "[s]trikingly, this Entertainment stands in direct contradiction of its contemporaneous companion-piece, Epicoene."6 There, Jonson has Ned Clerimont mock the dandy, Sir Amorous La Foole, who lingers to "watch when ladies are gone to the China houses, or the Exchange, that hee may meet 'hem by chance, and giue 'hem presents, some two or three hundred pounds-worth of toyes, to be laught at."7 But in this masque, which itself features a "China howse" (134), this ludicrous clientele, Knowles thinks, comes off better. The Entertainment is a paean of praise, "apparently unironic," to the "marvels of London's developing consumer culture."8 Jonson had been solicited by Cecil for "entertainments" several times before, Knowles observes, and the masque "embodies many of [his] political and personal concerns, especially his interest in the promotion of trade." It also embodies...