Tragicomic Redemptions by Forman Valerie;

Author:Forman, Valerie;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Chapter Five

Balance, Circulation, and Equity in the “Prosperous Voyage” of The Renegado

As I argued in the Introduction, profit was as troublesome to early modern thinkers as loss, and the mixing of two genres to produce a third kind makes tragicomedy a particularly effective form for addressing both problems simultaneously. All of the tragicomedies discussed in the preceding chapters, however, are much more exclusively focused on the problem of loss. In fact, as I have argued throughout the book, the solution tragicomedy offers to the problems of loss depends on transforming that loss into profit, and profit through its derivation in loss is legitimated, in some sense, prior to its appearance. But this chapter focuses on a play, Phillip Massinger’s The Renegado (1623/4), whose need to redeem both loss and profit most fully challenges the capabilities of tragicomedy and also reveals how the developments of new economic theories were outgrowths of attempts to address these two interdependent problems.

While The Renegado is set in the pirate and market communities of Tunis, its only mercantile scenes are technically a result of its main (if not title) character, Vitelli’s, use of a merchant disguise to penetrate the Islamic world of Tunis in order to rescue his sister, Paulina. She has been captured by the title character (the renegade, Grimaldi) and sold to the Tunisian viceroy. While conventional romance problems abound in the play’s plot (a captured virgin and a forbidden love, for example), what frames and structures the play is a set of contradictory concerns about the outcome of new economic practices. On the one hand, the play represents ethical dilemmas that arise from the accumulation of too much profit. On the other hand, the play represents concerns about loss resulting from excessive consumption. The tension between these worries (about losses and profits) organizes the play at the thematic and formal levels.

These two worries are not so much opposed to one another as inextricably intertwined. In part, this interconnection develops from the play’s location, Tunis, a market town in the Barbary States under Ottoman dominion. As other critics have argued, the play associates excess with the temptations of the Ottoman Empire, both with the overconsumption of goods that are imported from there (hence, loss) and, conversely, with the profits that can be accumulated there, especially if one “turns Turk.”1 Trade with the Ottoman Empire becomes associated with loss as well, because of the significant threat posed by the Barbary pirates operating primarily out of Algiers and Tunis. What has yet to be explored is the tension between these two undesired outcomes: too much profit and too much loss. Paradoxically, trade with the Ottoman Empire is of great concern because it can be a source of great profit as well as a source of great loss.

Because recent critics have focused justifiably on the concerns with the taint of trading with the infidel and the temptation to turn Turk to trade even more profitably, they have largely ignored the way that trading with the Ottoman Empire

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