Marketing Luxury at the New Exchange: Jonsons Entertainment at Britain s Burse and the Rhetoric of Wonder

• Published in: Early modern literary studies 2006-09, Vol.12 (2), p.90
• Main Author: Scott, Alison V
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dramatists; Jonson, Ben (1573-1637); Literary criticism; Rhetoric; Theater
• ISSN: 1201-2459; 1201-2459

In order to mark the occasion of the opening of his New Exchange, an ostensibly classier rival to Thomas Gresham's Royal Exchange, in April 1609, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury commissioned Ben Jonson to write an entertainment now known as The Entertainment at Britain's Burse. That entertainment formed part of a more comprehensive program that sought to legitimize the potentially bourgeois, commercial space of the Burse, presenting it as a refined environment and claiming the goods that it traded were the genuine article, and clearly superior to the counterfeits and "Trash" about town. Scott says that the program was problematic because it sought, paradoxically, to dignify commercialism by presenting the New Exchange in terms of luxury, while at the same time, threatening to make luxury commonplace by making exotic goods and curios readily available. Moreover, the public appetite for such luxury, upon which Cecil's venture was transparently reliant for its economic success, was conceived in highly ambiguous terms within contemporary culture. Indeed, though luxury was a marker of nobility and restraint, luxury consumption was also still understood in Augustinian terms of the temptations of cupiditas, and the surrender of the rational soul to sensual and indulgent pleasures.