![]() ![]() 3 I.e., in the ancient and medieval sense of luxuria.Focusing on an entertainment by Ben Jonson rediscovered by James Knowles in 1997 amongst the State Papers Domestic and originally performed on the occasion of the inauguration of Robert Cecil’s New Exchange in the Strand in the spring of 1609, 2 I would also like to argue that the performing arts and literature do not offer mere “echoes” of what happens on the economic stage of trade: in fact, they contribute to the marvel of things and to shape things as objects in relation to subjects they are enmeshed in a profit-making economy they share the anxieties linked to trade such as consumer fear of adulteration and of the fraudulent they work to perform, construct and deconstruct the contradictory impulses at work in commerce in other words, they commerce with commerce. But it does more than that: I would like to suggest that it enables the performance, through spectacle, of what French philosopher Marie-José Mondzain calls a Commerce des regards (2003), or “a commerce of gazes,” 1 in the title of a book she devotes to the fundamentally economic nature of icons, and that this “commerce of gazes” lies at the heart of “the force of commerce,” even while it may undermine it at times. At once an emporium and “empire” of commodities, the early modern exchange testifies to shifting economies, expanding urbanism, and new consumer practices. They qualify as early examples of “temples” of global consumerism, proto-capitalism, and entertainment. ![]() Although shopping and entertainment had already coalesced in medieval markets and fairs, London’s early modern exchanges are perhaps amongst our best candidates.
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