Astrid Giugni: Sophrosyne, Pleonexia and Urban Commerce in Eastward Ho!

Abstract:

Seventeenth-century London offered, for those who could afford it, a number of desirable commercial objects to satisfy what Eastward Ho! labels “ranging appetites,” from imported goods to theatrical productions. A collaborative effort by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho! belongs to a series of city comedies produced and published during James I’s reign that satirize excessive commercial and erotic desire to critique the perceived covetousness of London’s inhabitants. The play skeptically probes how the rapidly-changing city refashions social and economic relations, from desires for upward mobility to escapist fantasies about the New World. Focusing on two parallel couples, the play explores the threat posed by pleonexia to London’s social, as well as economic, relations, Eastward Ho! is concerned with Londoners’ shifting views of acquisitiveness, concerns made particularly acute by England’s attempt to reconcile the opportunities promised by with the risks inherent in its early commercial and colonial experiments. I turn to Eastward Ho!, alongside the discussion of the passions in William Fenner’s collection of sermons, A Treaties of the Affections (1641), to consider 17^th century representations of London and of the colonization of Virginia within the history of virtue ethics.

Short bio:

Astrid Giugni works at the intersection of Early Modern literature, Computational and Digital Humanities (with a focus on Natural Language Processing methodologies), and the ethics and the economic history of empire. Her research is interested in reconstructing how contested conceptions of desire shaped understandings of rational action in seventeenth-century literary and commercial culture. Her work draws from an archive that includes traditional literary works, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Ben Jonson’s plays, theological and pastoral works, including John Donne’s sermons and William Gouge’s domestic manual, as well as historical records that lend themselves to statistical treatment, such as the civil and demographic records of the Virginia and Bermuda Companies.