Of Bondage by Bailey Amanda;

Author:Bailey, Amanda;
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Sentiments such as these underscore the claim—one that matches Galenic medical theory—that society is a finite body that functions best when properly balanced. As Davanzati warns, “Blood stopping in the Head or the larger Vesssels puts the Body naturally into…Apoplexy,” so then when money is “only in a few hands,” then the state suffers from “dangerous Distempers.”50

As Casey Evans has demonstrated, temperance in this period was conceived not only in terms of humoral, climatological, and alimentary balance but also in terms of temporal restraint, understood as the virtue of prudent delay. The temporal aspect of temperance, as Evans shows, appealed to those English writers aiming to defend the ethics of New World conquest. More particularly, temperance became “an explicit term of economic evaluation, with which to judge the financial and cultural implications of colonial settlement in the New World,” implications that would not be apparent to the English colonizer for quite some time.51 In the English imagination, Spanish activity in the New World was the model of intemperance, marked by excessive appetite for worldly goods and temporal mismanagement. Spanish explorers impulsively returned to Spain after having cruelly extracted spoils rather than choosing to remain in the Americas to establish plantations. Debt bondage and its conception of the debtor's body as a redeemable investment dovetailed with English colonialists’ ideals of delayed gratification, particularly because this ideal did not seek to extinguish the desire for profit but rather contain that desire within the bounds of deferred satisfaction.

The tension between the urgency of desire and the patience of deferral, which becomes heightened in Custom once the setting shifts from Rome to Lisbon, is managed in the play through the idiom of temperance. The interplay of sexual exploitation and threat of enslavement become even more pronounced at the moment at which the virgin bride construes the trial of her honor as a test of her “male constancy” (32). By turning the gendered language of sexual assault on its head, Fletcher and Massinger conflate the virtuous woman who desires to be inviolable with the male foreign captive who seeks to remain inalienable, or unpossessed by another. When pirates hijack the ship carrying the wedding party, the bride's husband and his brother leap into the ocean to ensure that they will “never” have to “taste the bread of servitude” (30). Yet when they come ashore, they are described as “disarm'd and ready to be put in fetters” (30). Arnoldo and his brother Rutillio are then subjected to a series of trials that threaten their respective rights of self-ownership.

In staging the careful negotiation of the ever-shifting boundary between voluntary and compulsory service, Custom represents the male body as vulnerable to an immoderate authority that seeks to drain it of its prowess. Once on shore, Zenocia is sold to the Portuguese Countess Hippolyta who is determined to “ravish” Zenocia's erstwhile groom Arnoldo (54). The occasion of Arnoldo's capture is marked by his signing a debt bond, when upon his arrival a Jewish moneylender recognizes the brothers as “poor and strangers” (34) and offers to assist them with a loan.

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