Eklund - Literature and moral economy in the early modern Atlantic: elegant sufficiencies

LITERATURE AND MORAL ECONOMY IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC

for Pat Pratt

Elegant Sufficiencies

HILLARY EKLUND
Loyola University-New Orleans, USA

First published 2015 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright Hillary Eklund 2015

Hillary Eklund has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Eklund, Hillary Caroline, 1977

Literature and moral economy in the early modern Atlantic : elegant sufficiencies / by

Hillary Eklund.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4094-6234-7 (hardcover: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-3155-9263-3 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-3171-0443-8 (epub)

1. English literatureEarly modern, 15001700History and criticism. 2. Literature and societyEnglandHistory17th century. 3. Literature and societyEnglandHistory16th century. 4. American literatureColonial period, ca. 16001775History and criticism. I. Title.

PR431.E38 2015

820.93581dc23

2014040733

ISBN: 9781409462347 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781315592633 (ebk-PDF)

ISBN: 9781317104438 (ebk-ePUB)

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No person is sufficient to the task of completing a book independently. To those who prepared me for and supported me in this work, and to those who responded to it along the way, I owe a debt of abundant gratitude.

My dissertation committee at Duke University shaped this project in its earliest phases and continue to provide excellent advice: I thank Maureen Quilligan, Laurie Shannon, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Priscilla Wald for their brilliant guidance and moral encouragement. Thanks also to Matt Cohen, Meg Greer, Ranji Khanna, Walter Mignolo, Rob Mitchell, Kathy Psomiades, Tom Robisheaux, Marc Schachter, and Irene Silverblatt for their excellent teaching and mentoring. To my intrepid writing comrades, Andrew Burkett, Sarah Lincoln, John Miles, and Cord Whitaker: your voices continue to make me stronger. A generous grant from the Folger Shakespeare Institute allowed me to follow my earliest instincts about this project in a seminar directed by Kim Hall in the fall of 2004. I am grateful to Kim and to my colleagues in that seminar for providing an intellectual environment for my ideas to germinate.

My colleagues and students at Loyola University New Orleans have supported and improved this book in countless ways. Special thanks to Kate Adams, Sarah Allison, John Biguenet, Sara Butler, Maria Calzada, Ted Cotton, Jo Ann Moran Cruz, Barbara Ewell, Katherine Fidler, Judith Gruber, Nathan Henne, Melanie McKay, Laura Murphy, Connie Rodriguez, Artemis Preeshl, Christopher Schaberg, Janelle Schwartz, John Sebastian, Chris Washington, and Tim Welsh. To the many students who helped me see texts afresh, test hypotheses, and refine arguments, I extend my sincerest gratitude. Thanks especially to Caroline Fisse for her excellent work as RA and her unassailably good humor.

One of the greatest joys I have experienced as a scholar of early modern literature has been discovering an expansive world of brilliant and generous colleagues in the field. For their thoughtful responses to earlier formulations of these arguments, I thank Robert Appelbaum, Amanda Bailey, Lynne Bruckner, Jim Casey, Stephanie Chamberlain, Kimberly Coles, Daniel Ellis, Valerie Forman, Ed Geisweidt, Eric Griffin, Jill Ingram, Bernhard Klein, Rebecca Laroche, Steve Mentz, Jemima Matthews, Katharine Maus, Jennifer Munroe, Vin Nardizzi, Jeff Rufo, Gitanjali Shahani, Valerie Traub, and Timothy Zajac. For inviting me to present on Renaissance literature and the problem of enough at Trinity University in San Antonio, I thank Nicole Marafioti. I am grateful to Erika Gaffney and Seth F. Hibbert at Ashgate, who made everything easy that could be, and to Kirsten Janene-Nelson, Susan Clements, and Lee Domingue for their editorial expertise. Any remaining errors are my own. Portions of were published in Shakespeare Studies, volume 42 (2014).

My final thanks go to my family, whose unshakable confidence is my greatest fortune. My parents, Bill and Elizabeth Eklund, are the ringleaders of an unrivaled community of love and support of whose beneficiaries I count myself just one among many. My husband, Greg Larsen, has shown a depth of kindness, patience, and love that surprises me with every new adventure.

As good ynough as a feast.

This for a truth say most and least.

But what ynough is iustly ment,

And with inough to be content,

Those are twoo pointes that fewe or none,

Can learne to know, and stande vpon.

John Heywood (1562)

It will be very difficult to define sufficiency and build the concept into economic theory and practice. But I think it will prove far more difficult to continue to operate on the principle that there is no such thing as enough.

Herman Daly (1993)

In sixteenth-century England material scarcity was a fact of life. What historians and climatologists call the Little Ice Age caused harvest failures and led to a five-fold increase in the price of wheat. Meanwhile, the growth of the English population and the conversion of farmland into pasture for livestock put tremendous pressure on limited resources. Against this backdrop of unpredictable cycles of plenty and scarcity, English poets and playwrights frequently quoted the proverb Enough is as good as a feast. The aphorism first appears in print as part of John Heywoods catalogue of Proverbs (1546). Literary uses like William Wagers interlude titled Inough Is As Good As a Feast (c. 1570) and George Gascoignes poem dedicated to an exploration of the theme (in The Poesies, 1575) confirm the proverbs appeal in late-Tudor contexts. But the ongoing discovery of the New World and the inexhaustible resources it was imagined to contain put new pressures on the question of what it meant to have enough.

At the heart of this book is a resistance to the cultural force of the commonplace enough is enough. The following chapters show how the idea of enough is not self-defining; it is instead formulated through the intersection of cultural and material forces. More specifically, Literature and Moral Economy in the Early Modern Atlantic traces how, during the century or so following European incursion into the Americas, English writers improvised new models of sufficiency in response to the growth of the English economy. Focusing on literature and moral economythe intersection of cultural attitudes and material practicesI describe how standards of economic sufficiency moved from strict regulations against excess toward the increasing pursuit of plenty through plunder, trade, and plantation. The very