1. For Elizabethan and Jacobean references, see Brooks, Tobacco 1:327, 334, 368, 378, 392, 448, 449, 455, 464, 479, and 2:21, 22, 77; Brooks's citations are by no means exhaustive. Spenser's second term of praise for tobacco, "sovereign" (FQ 3.5.33), appears at Tobacco 1:361, 412, 424, 433, and 2:21, 31, 77, 110. Lyly parodied Belphoebe's herb gathering in his Woman in the Moon (c. 1591-93) (3.1.65-70; see Dickson, Panacea , 177-78).

Brooks's work, an extraordinary sourcebook for the study of tobacco, cites almost all the tobacco references I will examine; see also the Supplement . Dickson's Panacea is a fine one-volume history.

2. Cited in CSP 8:140; the figures actually cover Michaelmas 1603-Michaelmas 1604. Records of smuggled tobacco are, of course, hard to come by.

3. Irish , F4r; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:48.

4. The oxymoron is more evident in Spenser's reference to tobacco as "the soveraigne weede" (FQ 3.5.33). Cf. Dekker, Guls , 231; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:464.

5. Cf., e.g., Nashe: "divine Master Spenser , the miracle of wit" (1589) and "heavenly Spenser " (1592) (Works 3:323 and 1:243).

6. Cf. Greenblatt on Guyon's destruction of the Bower of Bliss as in part an allegory of the English colonist's "need for constant vigilance and unrelenting pressure" in resisting a Circean seduction by the land he colonizes (Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 179-88). Again, the Elizabethans generally thought that the murderous greed of the Spanish set the "intemperate" precedent to avoid:

It is about a hundred years since they discovered a new world, under the conduct of Christopher Columbus , who in my judgment would never have undertaken this voyage, if he had thought that the men whom he brought thither, as if they were charmed by the cup of Circe , should straightways be transformed into Lions, Panthers, Tigers, and other savage beasts. (Ashley, Comparison , 23)

For Spenser's surprising turn to American gold at the end of book 4 (FQ 4.11.22), see chapter 5.

7. In her "English Commercial Development and American Colonization 1560-1620," Carol Shammas argues that Elizabethan imperialism was gold centered, while its Jacobean counterpart moved toward commodities-centered schemes. Joan Thirsk's Economic Policy and Projects sees more Elizabethan interest in commodification than Shammas allows. This essay, however, tries to highlight a strand of Elizabethan expansionism at once uneasy about gold and, in its most radical form, indifferent to corn-modification.

8. "Great Chronologie [of England]," MS entry for 1573, quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:298; PN 5:242.

9. James's Counter-blaste asserts that some of the gentry have been "be-stowing three, some four hundred pounds a year upon this precious stink" (C4v).

10. Brooks, Tobacco 1:381. The title character in Chapman's Monsieur D'Olive (acted 1605, publ. 1606) seems to allude to this unusual time lapse when he describes tobacco as "an ancient subject, and yet newly / Call'd into question" (2.2.151-53).

11. Parker, Books , 76, on Monardes (1571), translated by John Frampton as Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Worlde (London, 1577). (For the complicated publishing history of Monardes' work, see Brooks, Tobacco 1:245-46, 263-64.) Parker, whose Books is a valuable starting point for research into Renaissance English travel literature, adds that "two issues in 1577, another in 1580, and still another in 1596 were not in keeping with the tendency of most English travel books of this period to appear in only one edition, even when they were vigorously imperialistic." His explanation of Monardes' exceptional popularity, "its utilitarian value to medical practitioners," sounds plausible enough, but skirts two problems. First, the timing of the various editions matches two small waves of Elizabethan propaganda about America, the earlier stimulated by Frobisher's northern voyages (1576-78), the later by Raleigh's Guianan expedition (1595). Second, the translator Frampton was, as Parker notes, a former victim of the Spanish Inquisition and an ardent imperialist: he translated five other exploration tracts, including that of Marco Polo, in hopes to spur his countrymen into action. Parker maintains that this first translation is "the only one . . . in which the political motive is not evident," which is to say, perhaps, only that Frampton became increasingly explicit about his motives. Parker's bibliography of travel literature (243-65) makes dear that his own definition of politics, like the definitions of so many other researchers into travel literature, does not include plants—no tobacco books, not even James's, appear there. My own explanation of Monardes' popularity, which I hope this chapter will make more convincing, is that his herbal provided the sort of information about America that most interested the Elizabethans.

12. John Melton (1609) alludes to tobacco's high-class origins, and subsequent degradation, when he says that it "was wont to be taken of great gentlemen, & gallants, now made a frequent & familiar Companion of every Tapster and Horse-keeper (Sixe-Folde , 35; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:472; cf. Dekker, Guls , 208).

Even James, in the proclamation of 17 October 1604, that levied a heavy custom on the weed, distinguished between "the better sort," who "have and will use the same with Moderation to preserve their Health," and "a number of riotous and disordered Persons of mean and base Condition, who, contrary to the use which Persons of good Calling and Quality make thereof, do spend most of their time in that idle Vanity. . . and also do consume that Wages which many of them get by their Labor" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:406-7). Cf. Doctor Clement in Jonson's Every Man in His Humor (1598, publ. 1601) pretending to hold a similar position and scaring Cob the tobacco hater: "What? A tankard-bearer, a thread-bare rascal, a beggar, a slave that never drunk out of better than pisspot mettle in his life, and he to deprave, and abuse the virtue of an herb, so generally receiv'd in the courts of princes, the chambers of nobles, the bowers of sweet Ladies, the cabins of soldiers —Peto , away with him, by god's passion, I say, go to" (3.3.108-14). Whether or not the playwrights are mocking James in particular, as Brooks assumes (Tobacco 1:424), Chapman's D'Olive too claims to believe that tobacco's "lawful use" should be "limited thus: / That none should dare to take it but a gentleman, / Or he that had some gentlemanly humor, / The murr, the headache, the catarrh, the bone-ache, / Or other branches of the sharp salt rheum / Fitting a gentleman" (Monsieur D'Olive 2.2.290-95)—SO the rheum itself has come to seem a high-class affectation, like spleen.

13. "On the Continent tobacco had been generally accepted as a panacea since 1560, and as such had been woven into daily life there. But in England, about three decades later (after its fairly limited reception as a wonder-working simple) smoking suddenly and triumphantly became a social force, developing into an almost national recreation" (Brooks, Tobacco 1:43).

14. See Brooks, Tobacco 1:47-49, Dickson, Panacea 170-74. It is Raleigh's authority that Philaretes seems to have particularly in mind when in a prefatory poem he anxiously tries to distinguish his special attack on tobacco from his general endorsement of Raleigh's American projects: "Let none deny but Indies soil can yield, / The sov'reign simples, of Apollos field. / Let England Spain and the French Fleur de Lis / Let Irish Kern and the Cold seated Freese / Confess themselves in bounden duty stand / To wholesome simples of Guiana land" (Work , A4v).

15. Stow's Annales (1615) too say that "Sir Walter Raleigh brought first the knowledge of tobacco" (quoted in Suppl . 4:177); while Camden's Annales (1615, trans. 1630) maintain that Raleigh's colonists "were the first that I know of, which brought into England that Indian plant. . .. Certainly from that time, it began to be in great request, and to be sold at an high rate" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:156).

16. For Raleigh's silence, see Brooks, Tobacco 1:68. Theodor de Bry reprinted Harriot's tract in four languages as the first volume of his America (1590), adding to the original text some engravings from the watercolors of Harriot's fellow colonist John White, along with Harriot's commentary on them (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages 1:390-464).

17. "Renaissance Influences," 82-83. Quinn is following Beer, Origins , 32-77.

18. Cf. William Barclay's "To my Lord the Bishop of Murray," from his Nepenthes, or the Vertues of Tabacco (1614): "A stranger plant shipwracked in our coast, / Is come to help this poor phlegmatic soil" (unpaginated).

See Brooks, Tobacco 1:389 on the identification of Marbecke as the author of the Defence .

19. Cf. the True Declaration (1610), which imagines overpopulation as itself an "inundation" that "doth overflow this little Island" (61).

20. As "good Merchandize" Ralph Lane mentions only "Sassafras, and many other roots & gums" (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages 1:273). For sassafras as the primary New World commodity garnered by Raleigh's man Samuel Mace in 1602, and by Bartholomew Gosnold in a voyage unlicensed by Raleigh the same year, see Quinn, England , 408, 414-16; tobacco is not mentioned in the extant records of either venture.

21. See Strachey, Historie , 122-23, 38; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:525-26; and see 1:86. Hamor says Rolfe "first took the pains to make trial thereof" in 1612 (True Discourse , D4b; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:524).

22. Of course, England must have acquired a good deal of tobacco in a happily indirect way also, via privateering; see Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering . For the interesting history of homegrown tobacco in the English Renaissance, see Thirsk, "New Crops."

23. Cf. Hakluyt, "Discourse," 223-24.

24. The continuation of Harriot's sentence seems to mark a separation from Indian barbarity, as if the superstitious use of tobacco had not been felt as entirely barbarous before: "but all done with strange gestures, stamping, sometime dancing, clapping of hands, holding up of hands, & staring up into the heavens, uttering therewithal and chattering strange words & noises."

25. These last three quotations, from Harriot's captions to John White's drawings, are Hakluyt's translations of Harriot's Latin.

26. For example, "Deer Skins . . . are to be had of the natural inhabitants thousands yearly by way of traffic for trifles" (Harriot, Report , 331). Apparently Harriot came to be regarded as England's resident authority on the subject of Indians misvaluing things. When Newport returned to England in January 1609 with one of Powhatan's sons, "Harriot advised that no expensive gift be made to him but that he would be satisfied with copper decorations only, so that there duly appeared in the [Northumberland house] accounts a payment of three shillings 'for 2 Rings and other pieces of Copper given to the Indian prince.' Similarly, we can identify as probably chosen by Harriot, amongst the goods sent to George Percy in July 1608, 'for blue beads' six shillings and 'for Red copper' nineteen shillings and sixpence, objects Harriot had long ago found the Indians anxious to have" (Quinn, "Thomas Harriot," 50). Cf. Harriot's memoranda for Mace's 1602 voyage, in which we witness the odd spectacle of England's premier scientist carefully directing the production of copper trifles for the Indians (Quinn, England , 410-13).

27. From Greville's advice to England in "A Treatise of Monarchy," 390-95; Grosart's comment on this theory of toy trade anticipates my argument here: "as in barter with the Indians" (Works of Fulke Greville 1:142).

28. The most famous work to celebrate a newly discovered people who contemn gold is of course Utopia , but the topos is a very common one. Cf. Gascoigne's The Stele Glass (1576):

How live the Moors, which spurn at glistring pearl,
And scorn the costs, which we do hold so dear?
How? how but well? and were the precious pearl
Of peerless truth, amongst them published,
(Which we enjoy, and never weigh the worth)
They would not then, the same (like us) despise,
Which (though they lack) they live in better wise
Than we, which hold, the worthless pearl so dear.
                                                                      ( Works  2:153)

29. Shortly before his disastrous second voyage in search of E1 Dorado, Raleigh reportedly boasted "that he knew a Town in those parts, upon which he could make a saving Voyage in Tobacco , though there were no other spoil" (A Declaration of the Demeanour and Cariage of Sir Walter Raleigh [1618], quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:68 n. 8). Cf. Harcourt (1613): "I dare presume to say, and hope to prove, within a few months . . . that only this commodity Tobacco, (so much sought after and desired) will bring as great a benefit and profit to the undertakers, as ever the Spaniards gained by the best and richest Silver mine in all their Indies, considering the charge of both" (Voyage , 105; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:502-3).

30. "In Tabaccam" 1-6, in Epigrammatum libri II (1629) (Works , 238). Trans. Suppl . 4:191.

31. Though Englishmen had smoked tobacco before Lane's men returned home (see, e.g., Brooks, Tobacco 1:240, 298), Charles de L'Ecluse's Latin abridgment of Monardes (1605, trans. 1659) notes that "the English returning from thence [i.e., Virginia] brought the like [Indian] Pipes with them, to drink the smoke of Tobacco; and since that time, the use of drinking Tobacco hath so much prevailed all England over, especially amongst the Courtiers, that they have caused many such like Pipes to be made to drink Tobacco with" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:427-18). Quinn explains that "what the colonists apparently introduced was the smoking pipe used in Roanoke Island as a model for English pipe-makers" (Roanoke Voyages 1:345-46 n. 3).

32. C. T., Advice , A3v. This most common of tobacco jibes could appear in the mouths of foreigners—"both Spaniards & all other Nations say tauntingly to us, when they see all our goods landed (to use their own words) Que todo esso sepagtaa con humo ; that all will be paid in smoke" (Bennett, Treatise , unpaginated)—and of kings: a proclamation of Charles I (6 January 1631) prohibited the importation of foreign tobacco so that "our Subjects may not unthriftily vent the solid Commodities of our own Kingdom, and return the proceed thereof in Smoke" (quoted in Beer, Origins , 82).

33. While it has long been recognized that Lucian presents a similar anecdote (1.163), Dickson sensibly observes that this coincidence alone does not prove the story apocryphal; "It is even possible that Ralegh, having read the story in a Greek or Latin edition of Lucian, carefuly arranged the matter of the wager to amuse his royal mistress" (Panacea , 172). As it is, I am less concerned with the anecdote's authenticity than with the testimony it offers about contemporary opinions of Raleigh and tobacco.

34. See Dickson, Panacea , 174. Cf. T. W. on the Gunpowder Plotters: "In the time of their imprisonment, they rather feasted with their sins, than fasted with sorrow for them; were richly appareled, fared deliciously, and took Tobacco out of measure, with a seeming carelessness of their crime" (quoted in Suppl . 3:133).

35. I cite Wands's translation throughout.

36. Cf. the braggadocio Bobadillo in Jonson's Every Man in His Humor : "I have been in the Indies (where this herb grows) where neither my self, nor a dozen Gentlemen more (of my knowledge) have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but Tobacco only. Therefore it cannot be but 'tis most divine" (3.2.70-75).

37. Taylor, Original Writings 1:367-68; quoted in Seelye, Prophetic , 43, who comments: "So Raleigh's constancy to Elizabeth, his loyalty to his colony, the Queen's barrenness, and Virgina's ill repute are all spun into an ambiguous fabric of allusion, ending by associating the New World with the paradisiac promised land of the Mosaic epic." Seelye also observes that "Hakluyt lifts himself to a level of expression which he seldom attained" (42), though the quality may in fact be Raleigh's: Hakluyt writes to him that "if there be anything else that you would have mentioned in the epistle dedicatory, you shall do well to let me understand of it betimes" (Taylor, Original Writings 1:355).

38. The Latin in the original compensates to some degree for this raciness, as Hakluyt's characterization of Martyr's Latin suggests: "He depicts with a distinguished and skillful pen and with lively colors in a most gifted manner the head, neck, breast, arms, in brief the whole body of that tremendous entity America, and clothes it decently in the Latin dress familiar to scholars" (Taylor, Original Writings 1:363).

39. As I will explain in chapter 5, Raleigh is free to enter America only when he has been barred from Elizabeth's presence.

40. For James, tobacco is the food of the belly fillers in Numbers 11.4-6 who reject manna (Counterblaste , C4r).

41. The wound occurs during a battle reminiscent of Raleigh's well-publicized Irish skirmishes. For the most recent compilation of evidence that Timias represents Raleigh, see Bednarz, "Raleigh," 52-54.

42. For a fine discussion of the relation between Ariosto's Medoro and Angelica on the one hand and Spenser's Timias and Belphoebe on the other, see Alpers, Poetry , 185-94.

43. Raleigh at least understood "Belphoebe" as the queen made approachable. He laments of the angry Elizabeth after his disgrace, "A Queen she was to me, no more Belphoebe, / A Lion then, no more a milk-white Dove" (Ocean to Scinthia , 11. 327-28).

44. On flowers, herbs, and weeds as conventional terms for poetry, see, e.g., Gascoigne's Posies (1575), a book of poems divided into "Flowers to comfort, Herbs to cure, and Weeds to be avoided" (Works 1:17). The locus classicus for the identification of pastoral, poetry, herbs, and erotic frustration is the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses , in which Apollo, the god of herbal cures, notes the irony of his love for Daphne:

inventtam medicina meum est, opiferque per orbem
dicor, et herbarum subiecta potentia nobis.
ei mihi, quod nullus amor est sanabilis herbis
nec prosunt domino, quae prosunt omnibus, artes!
                                               ( Metamorphoses  1.521-24)

(Of Physick and of surgery I found the Arts for need
The power of every herb and plant doth of my gift proceed.
Now woe is me that ne'er an herb can heal the hurt of love
And that the Arts that others help their Lord doth helpless prove.)
                                                                               (Trans. Golding 1:635-38)

Apollo must learn to exchange his useless skill in herbs for a more satisfactory skill in the reeds Daphne becomes: what heals his desire for Daphne is, in other words, its sublimation into poetry. Spenser, however, rejects the innocent pastoral version of such conversion (e.g., "Aprill," 50-51) as too worldly, but believes that his epic "flowers" can indeed cure lustful fixation.

45. Cf. the shepherds' commentary on the equally lovesick lover of Paris, Oenone: "Farewell fair Nymph, sith he must heal alone that gave the wound. / There grows no herb of such effect upon Dame Nature's ground" (Araygnement of Parts , 601-2).

46. When Peele later comes round to such dissatisfaction with Elizium, he puts himself in Colin's shoes: "Leave foolish lad, it mendeth not with words, / Nor herbs nor time such remedy affords" ("The Honour of the Garter," 69-70).

47. In equating Spenserian virginity as I do with devotion to "a higher ideal" ("Spenser's Accommodation," 423), H. M. English reveals the practical difficulty of this philosophy when he imagines that Elizabeth can readily combine the alternatives of literal virginity and literal marriage, represented by Belphoebe and Amoret respectively.

48. What enables Raleigh to present his return home as even more pathetic and involuntary than Wyatt's, apparently, is that Wyatt's prince and beloved are now one and the same.

49. The Bower is, for instance, said to be

A place pickt out by choice of best alive,
That natures worke by art can imitate:
In which what ever in this worldly state
Is sweet, and pleasing unto living sense,
Or that may dayntiest fantasie aggrate,
Was poured forth with plentifull dispence,
And made there to abound with lavish affluence.
                                               (FQ 2.12.42)

Elsewhere, the Bower's "Art" seems "halfe in scorne / Of niggard Nature" (50), and delivers such delightful sounds "as attonce might not on living ground, / Save in this Paradise, be heard elsewhere" (70).

50. This "writ" is thus distinguished from the writing on the Bower's gate, which in telling "all the famous history / Of Jason and Medea " gives the impression that "ye might have seene" the events described (FQ 2.12.43-46).

Greenblatt pursues something like this argument about Spenser's oxy-moronic allegory when he claims that "The Faerie Queene announces its status as art object at every turn" so as "to spare ideology" the skepticism absorbed by the overtly fictional poem (Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 190- 92). I would argue that Spenser is far more skeptical of certain popular Elizabethan political assumptions than Greenblatt allows; Spenser believes in "wardling] off idolatry" (192) not only of the artwork but of Elizabeth herself. Cf. Montrose, "Elizabethan Subject," passim.

No doubt Spenser's conception of his writing as antithetical to idolatry derives in part from Protestant scripturalism, enforced by visitation articles such as the following (1551-52):

Item , that when any glass windows within any of the churches shall from henceforth be repaired, or new made, that you do not permit to be painted or portrayed therein the image or picture of any saint; but if they will have anything painted, that it be either branches, flowers, or posies taken out of Holy Scripture. (Frere and Kennedy, Visitation Articles 2:289)

Cf. Sidney on poetry's unique power to convey an image such as idolatry used to paint: reading "that heavenly discourse" of the prodigal son (Luke 15.11-32), Sidney exclaims, "me seems I see before my eyes the lost child's disdainful prodigality, turned to envy a swine's dinner" (Apology , 30). But, as I have indicated, Spenser's overtly trifling poetry even shuns what Michael O'Connell has called the Protestant "logolatry" of Scripture ("Idolatrous," 287; cf. esp. 293-94, 298).

51. "It was before 1560, in or about Lisbon, that the gospel of tobacco as panacea was evolved" (Brooks, Tobacco 1:236); see Dickson, Panacea , 57-80. The most influential publicists of tobacco's divinity were Jean Liebault (1570) and Pierre Pena and Matthias de L'Obel (1570-71); see Brooks, To bacco 1:232-42. Frampton's edition of Monardes (1577) includes a translation of Liebault on tobacco's "divine effects" (Joyfull Newes , 93; see Brooks, Tobacco 1:232).

52. His Majesties Gracious Letter (1622) to the Earl of Southampton, treasurer of the Virginia Colony, includes this similar appraisal by the master of the king's silk works, John Bonoeil: "Sure there is some such sorcery in this weed; it was first sown (it seems) by some Indian Enchanter's hand, with spells and Magic verses, or otherwise you could never so much dote on it" (quoted in Suppl . 5:206).

53. The most common way to represent fears about tobacco's ill effect on the English character was to personify tobacco as a witch or whore: e.g., "that Witch Tobacco " (James I [1618], quoted in Dickson, Panacea , 156); "that Indian whore" (William Fennor [1617], quoted in Suppl . 4:182); "a swarty Indian [who] / Hath played the painted English Courtesan " (Philaretes, Work , A4v); "the Indian Devil , our bawd, witch, whore, manqueller" (Scot, PhiIomythie , 41r; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:8). This particular stigrnatization of tobacco is due in part to tobacco's associations with fast living—"It is the thing his soul doth most adore," says John Taylor (1614) of the tobacco taker, "To live and love Tobacco, and a whore" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:522)—but more generally to worries that tobacco will block the production of legitimate Englishmen. William Vaughan (1612) wanted smokers to memorize this rhyme: "Tobacco, that outlandish weed, / It spends the brain, and spoils the seed: / It dulls the sprite, it dims the sight, / It robs a woman of her right" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:131). This physiological argument aside, writers often depict wives complaining about the greater affection their husbands feel for tobacco. The most elaborate diatribe occurs in John Deacon's Tobacco Tortured (1616): e.g., "Why dost thou so vainly prefer a vanishing filthy fume before my permanent virtues?" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:12; for more references see 5:280 under "Smokers, wives of"). Uncannily enough, the first Englishman to begin growing commercially successful tobacco in Virginia was also the first Englishman to marry an Indian: in the same breath Ralph Hamor praises John Rolfe's importation of tobacco seeds and his marriage to Pocahontas, both done "merely for the good and honor of the Plantation" (True Discourse , D4v; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:524). Marlowe assodates tobacco with a third un-English choice: he reportedly declared "that all they that love not Tobacco & Boys were fools" (quoted in Shirley, Harriot , 182).

54. Reprinted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:352-58 and Dickson, Panacea , 198-99; I cite Brooks's edition of the poem, one of thirteen extant MS versions. Heffner, "Essex," 23, notes that William Browne alludes to the poem in the course of his meditation on Essex's career in Britannias Pastorals 1.4.685-760 (Heffner gives 1625 as the date, though book 1 was first published in 1613). What Heffner fails to note, however, is that Browne also alludes to Timias and Belphoebe in the same passage: returning from war, Essex searches for Elizabeth in the hope that "her skill in herbs might help remove" a wound Envy gave him, but she mistakes him for a beast and kills him. To Browne's mind, Spenser's Timias and the narrator of Essex's poem are the same man.

55. Institution , 168r. Cf. Psalms 102.3, Isaiah 51.6, Hosea 13. 3.

56. Cf. Simion Grahame (1609) (quoted in Suppl . 3:145). Thomas Jenner turned this allegorical potential of tobacco smoking into a very popular poem (1626):

The Indian weed withered quite
Green at noon, cut down at night
Shows thy decay, all flesh is hay,
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

The Pipe that is so lily white
Shows thee to be a mortal wight,
And even such, gone with a touch,
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

And when the smoke ascends on high,
Think, thou behold'st the vanity
Of worldly stuff gone with a puff:
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

And when the Pipe grows foul within,
Think on thy soul defil'd with sin,
And then the fire it doth require
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

The ashes that are left behind,
May serve to put thee still in mind,
That unto dust, return thou must,
Thus think, then drink Tobacco .

Quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:128; see ibid. n. 2 for a bibliography of the poem's popularity. As if to emphasize the ambiguity of Jenner's position here—does he approve or disapprove of smoking?—the poem was published "Answered by G. W. [George Wither?] thus, / Thus think, drink no Tobacco. " Incidentally, Wither came full circle on tobacco, and published a similar contemptus "Meditation Whilst He Was Taking a Pipe of Tobacco" (1661) lauding tobacco's educative powers, which he composed during his third incarceration at Newgate; see Brooks, Tobacco 4:421-23.

57. Old Fortunatus (1599), quoted in Suppl . 3:116.; Fortunatus himself sounds like Essex when he refers to "that lean tawny face Tobacconist death, that turns all into smoke" (1.1.336-37).

58. See 2 Peter 3. Buttes's awkward comparisons of the gluttonous eater to an empty oven and desolate house depend on this apocalyptic resonance for their coherence. Both occur in the Psalms as figures for God's judgment upon David's enemies (21.9, 69.25; cf. Matthew 23.38).

59. From Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus, De Proprietatibus Re rum (trans. 1398; 1495 ed.), 4.3.evi.b/2; cf. Bateman's 1582 ed., 4.3.fiii.a/1.

60. For a different account of this process of sublimation, see William Vaughan's Spirit of Detraction (1611), whose prefatory epistle has certain "Cavaliers and Gentles" simply aping Monardes' Indian priest: after smoking,

they fain themselves so long ravished as it were in an ecstasy: until after a thorough perambulation of their barren wits . . . they have coined some strange accident worthy the rehearsal among their boon companions. Then as though they started out of an heavenly trance. . . They recount tales of ROBIN-HOOD , of RHODOMONTING rovers, of DONZEL DEL PHOEBO , of a new ANTI-CHRIST born in BABYLON , of lying wonders, blazing out most blasphemous news, how that the DEVIL appeared at such a time with lightning and THUNDRING majesty . . . and if they had not suddenly blessed themselves better, he had carried away with him men, women, houses, and all right into hell. (Quoted in Suppl . 4:158)

61. The standard reference on this subject is Fink, "Milton," supplemented by Stroup, "Climatic"; the theory derives from Aristotle's Politics 7.7. For other English speculations on New World climate, see Kupper-man, "Puzzle."

62. A satiric epigram from Humors Antique Faces (1605) by Samuel Row-lands nicely illustrates, by way of mockery, the idea that tobacco as miraculous fare might alone cure the economic wants Virginia was supposed to supply:

A Poor Slave once with penury afflicted,
Yet to Tobacco mightily addicted
Says, they that take Tobacco keeps their health,
Are worthy fellows in a common wealth.
For if (sayth he) Tobacco were our cheer,
Then other victuals never would be dear.
Fie on excess; it makes men faint and meek,
A penny loaf might serve a man a week.
Were we conforrn'd to the Chamelion's fare,
To live by smoke as they do live by air.

O how our men oppress and spoil their sense,
        in making havoc of the elements.
He can give reason for what he hath spoke.
My Salamander lives by fire and smoke.
Necessity doth cause him to repeat,
Tobacco's praise for want of other meat.
                                       (Quoted in  Suppl  3:131-32)

Cf. the imp in Warner's Continuance of Albions England (1606), who celebrates the "Indian weed, / That fum'd away more wealth than would a many thousands feed" (quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:436).

63. Brathwait, Smoaking Age , 196; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 2:41. A leaf explaining Brathwait's picture (reproduced at Brooks, Tobacco 2:37) appears only in the Arents copy of The Smoaking Age . The use of a smoking blackamoor as a trade sign seems to have been introduced around 1615 (Brooks, Tobacco 2:37). For Brathwait's other references to the sign, see Smoaking Age , 155 and 164; Jonson appears to allude to an actual black boy used as an advertisement in Bartholomew Faire 1.4. 116-18.

64. Hall refers to "certain Indian chiefs of the Torrid Zone, so renowned for smoking that they had blackened their insides. It is clear that this color pleased them, for it did not seem right that the inner part of their bodies should differ in color from the outer" (Mundus , 96; cited in Suppl . 3:129). The joke is recalled by Edmund Gardiner (1610) (Triall , 18r-v; cited in Brooks, Tobacco , 1:480). For accounts of dissections that supposedly showed internal blackening, see Brooks, Tobacco 1:404, 2:11-12 and 89; for brains said to be blackened, see 1:381, 411, 516, and 2:89, 91, 234; on internal blackening in general, see 1:355, 411, 445, 535, and 2:22, 52, 234. The most elaborate version of the conceit that tobacco makes smokers black like Indians, who are themselves black like the devil, is in John Taylor (1614) (Nipping , C4v-D3r; quoted in Brooks, Tobacco 1:519-22).

65. Marbecke's emphasis; cf. 16, 20, and 63-65. Marbecke believes, moreover, that tobacco compensates for any residue it may leave in the body by purging rheum: "It bringeth no more thither, than it carrieth away from thence" (13). James counters that what tobacco smokers take for rheum is really only smoke condensed, "and so are you made free and purged of nothing, but that wherewith you willfully burdened your selves" (Counter-blaste , B4v).

66. Beaumont and his friends subscribe to the Spenserian tobacco tradition with a vengeance: five times in the commendatory verses and poem tobacco is called "divine," five times "sacred," three times "celestial"; five times its effects are "blest"; and then it is also "ethereal," "heavenly," "metaphysical," "immortal"—in short, a "god."

A tradition making Spenser the archetype of the impoverished poet arose almost immediately after his death—e.g., in the third of the Parnassus plays (c. 1601-2): "And yet for all, this unregarding soil / Unlac't the line of his desired life, / Denying maintenance for his dear relief: / Careless ere to prevent his exequy, / Scarce deigning to shut up his dying eye" (Return part 2, 1.2.220-24). See Heffner, "Did Spenser Die in Poverty?" and Judson, Life , 202-3.

67. Martyr paraphrases a treatise on Indian rites by Ramon Pane, a friar who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage. Pane describes the superstitious use of the herb cohoba ; the ceremony is very similar to the tobaccoan one Monardes reports, and in fact by the end of the sixteenth century commentators accepted cohoba as tobacco (Brooks, Tobacco 1:196). Martyr comments to the future Charles V: "Now (most noble Prince) what need you hereafter to marvel of the spirit of Apollo so shaking his Sibyls with extreme fury? You had thought that superstitious antiquity had perished" (Eden, Decades , 102).

68. Cf. Samuel Walsall's praise of tobacco in his commendatory poem to Buttes: "Sovereign Nepenthes, which Tobacco hight, / Tobacco not to Antique Sages known, / Sage wizards that Tobacco knewen not?" (Dyets , Aa3v). An epigram by Sir John Davies (1598?), "apparently the first [poem] in English entirely on the subject" of tobacco (Dickson, Panacea , 201), indirectly suggests the literary boost provided by classical ignorance about America:

Homer  of MoIy  and Nepenthe  sings,
Moly  the Gods' most sovereign Herb divine:
Nepenthe  Heaven's drink, most gladness brings,
Heart's grief expels, and doth the wits refine,
But this our age another world hath found,
From whence an Herb of heavenly power is brought,
Moly  is not so sovereign for a wound,
Nor hath Nepenthe  so great wonders wrought.
                                       (Epigram 36. 1-8, quoted in Dickson,
                                                                                    Panacea , 201)

For Beaumont on tobacco replacing moly, see Poems , 313.

69. Concilium Limense , ed. Jose de Acosta (Madrid, 1591); trans. in Suppl . 2:102. Acosta "appears to have formulated the decrees and defended them against opponents" (ibid.).

70. Cf. W. B.'s commendatory poem: "There didst thou gather on Parnassus cliff, / This precious herb, Tobacco most divine, / Than which ne'er Greece, ne'er Italy did lift / A flower more fragrant to the Muses' shrine: / A purer sacrifice did ne'er adorn / Apollo's altar, than this Indian fire" (Beaumont, Poems , 268-69). Nothing English figures in this account of the poem except Beaumont's head, which W. B. compares to a tobacco pipe.

71. The dearest explanation of this process, and the terms I've used, are Greenblatt's, in his discussion of an Accession Day celebration that seems to combine both classical allusion and Catholic ceremony: "The Roman mythology, deftly keyed to England's Virgin Queen, helps to fictionalize Catholic ritual sufficiently for it to be displaced and absorbed" (Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 230).

72. Cf. The Masque of Flowers , produced by Bacon for Somerset's marriage in 1614, which stages a kind of mock Great Instauration celebration of modem times. The masque begins with a debate about the relative merits of wine, represented by Silenus, and tobacco, represented by an Indian god described by Harriot, "Kiwasa" or "Kawasha." Part of Kawasha's argument is that "nothing but fumigation / Doth chase away ill sprites, / Kawasha and his nation / Found out these holy rites" (Masque, 166). The joke on tobacco is first that Kawasha is himself an ill sprite, and second that no one wants to chase him away, not entirely: the scene of the masque is a walled city, before which sit "on either side a temple, the one dedicated to Silenus and the other to Kawasha" (161). The debate soon gives way to a more explicit account of Britain's superiority to either classical or Indian barbarism, when James transforms some painted flowers— metamorphosed gentlemen, we discover back into men; a song helps explain the allegory:

               Give place, you ancient powers,
               That turned men to flowers,
               For never writer's pen
               Yet told of flowers return'd to Men.

Chorus. But miracles of new event
               Follow the great Sun of our firmament.
                                                              (168)

The apparent euhemerism of the allegory, in which the enlightening sun of James reverses the classical transformation of men into myths or "flowers"—poesies—does not demand that superstition be discarded; rather, the enlightened song is itself sung by twelve "Garden-gods," also referred to as "Priests." The masque wants Britain to retain superstition so that potentially heretical claims for Britain's superiority, indeed for its millennialness, may be maintained, but negatively: Britain is here simply "fit to be" the millennial "fifth monarchy" of Daniel 7.27.

73. I refer to the title of the last chapter of Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning .

74. Keymis, Second Voyage , 464. When Beaumont referred earlier to Elizabeth being "worshipt" in America, he may have been either misremembering this Guianan anecdote or alluding to the much less dramatic submission of the Virginian weroance or chief, Menatonon, who ordered his vassal king Okisko "to yield himself servant, and homager, to the great Weroanza of England." Menatonon seems to have been impressed less by Elizabeth's virtues than by the fact that at the time Lane held his "best beloved son prisoner with me" (Quinn, Roanoke Voyages 1:279, 262).

75. See, e.g., Yates, "Queen Elizabeth," 80-81.

76. Return from Parnassus part 2, 1.4.403; part 1, 1.1.368; Dekker, The Wonderfull Year (quoted in Cawley, Voyagers , 298 n. 152). The Parnassus plays, when optimistic, also transform the scholar's material poverty into his spiritual purity: on his way to Parnassus, Philomusus recalls Marlowe—"Though I foreknow that dolts possess the gold, / Yet my intended pilgrimage I'll hold"—while Studioso adds the moral—"Within Parnassus dwells all sweet content, / Nor care I for those excrements of earth" (Pilgrimage to Parnassus 5.594-97). In the later plays of the trilogy, however, after the scholars return to the quotidian world, this otherworldliness becomes more difficult to maintain, and tobacco soon surfaces as a correlative to ambivalence about poetical "spirit," sometimes like ale inspiring mere vapors (Return part 2, 1.2.160-62), at other times representing a more positive but still jocular alternative to the gold scholars lack: Philomusus, pleased with Luxurio's wit, prays that "long for a reward may your wits be warm'd with the Indian herb" (part 1, 1.1.432-34).

77. Davies, Epigrams 36.9.

78. Noted by Grosart (Beaumont, Poems , 265).

79. Pory to Edwin Sandys, 16 January 1620 (Powell, Pory , microfiche suppl. 81).

80. For tobacco's fortunes in the seventeenth century, see Morgan, American Slavery . Such trifling with the home market also figures in the Virginia Company's schemes for encouraging investments—namely, in lotteries that were advertised as doubly alchemical: on the one hand, they would turn "even but small sums of money" into the cache required to fund Virginia's colonization (Virginia Company broadside: "Whereas"); and on the other, they would repay such "small" investments exorbitantly:

Full many a man that lives full bare,
        and knows no joys of Gold,
For one small Crown may get a share,
        of twice two Thousand told.
                (Virginia Company broadside: 
                       "Londons Lotterie," 20)

For the real financial significance of the lotteries to Virginia, see Craven, Dissolution , 149-50. Due to corruption that, as Edwin Sandys reported, "very much disgraced" the lotteries, the royal license for them was withdrawn in 1621; see Craven, Dissolution , 183-84.

81. On the tobacco deals between the company and the Crown, see, e.g., Andrews, Colonial 1:55-57. Thirsk notes that "in no other country did merchants and planters manage to secure a total prohibition on domestic cultivation for the sake of the colonial trade" ("New Crops," 87).

82. A True and Sincere Declaration , 4; quoted in Beer, Origins , 67.

83. Such imposts eventually helped reduce Charles to smoke: "almost to a man prominent Virginia traders supported the Parliamentarian cause" (Pagan, "Growth," 262; see n. 93).