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

"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.' 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