Prodigality

The spendthrift condition in the consumer society 1. APRESENTAÇÃO DO PROBLEMA Atividade realizada pelo homem diariamente, consumir é algo absolutamente normal, muito embora, hoje, no seio de uma sociedade cada dia mais aparadigmática, discorrer sobre a normalidade seja tarefa inglória. Entretanto há que se destacar a noção, ainda vigente ao menos no campo da dogmática, segundo a qual gastar muito, desordenadamente, sem tempo nem finalidade, comprometendo o patrimônio talvez, gastar, em resumo, como um louco, deixa de ser normal. E quem assim procede é denominado pródigo. O Direito, então, em princípio, visando proteger aqueles que do pródigo dependiam e, depois, protegê-lo de si próprio, baixou sobre ele verdadeira capitis deminutio-isso mesmo sem nunca se ter chegado a uma conclusão definitiva sobre a prodigalidade, sua caracterização, sua natureza.

The desire to spend money is one rarely associated with violent passion; in the early modern period, however, excessive spending (prodigality) was seen to pose an immoral, disorderly, and even perverse threat to society. In drama especially, gross prodigal urges register as a form of
concupiscence that interrelates the somatic and the financial in a nexus of immoderate perversity. While prodigality rarely receives the same critical attention afforded to more prosaic excessive passions, it occupied a major role in the early modern understanding of financial and sexual morality. This paper explicates how the desire to spend excessively was conceptualised as innately perverse, and how this is depicted as violent to both financial society and the personal body.

To do this, I concentrate on how syphilitic metaphor is used as a site of slippage for the interrelation of financial and sexual excess in early modern drama. I focus especially on how such metaphor positions the innately excessive female body as the infectious means for undoing
the moderate male body. Taking as my corpus the ‘prodigal son plays’, a genre which explores these themes with especial potency, I compare the use of syphilitic metaphor across its major works (including Eastward Ho , the Henry IV s, A Mad World, My Masters , Measure for Measure , Michaelmas Term , and Nice Wanton ) in order to build a preliminary account of the perversity of prodigality in early modern drama. In doing so, this paper delineates how Aristotelian ethics of moderation intersect with early modern understandings of sex difference and contagion theory to create a dense somatic understanding of prodigality. In early modern culture, it emerges that financial excess was often seen as more potentially perverse, socially destabilising, and even lethal as more conventionally recognised violent passions.