The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse by Ben Jonson and ‘Stoneware dish, Longquan kilns’ by Sarah Howe

Ben Jonson

The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse

[The shop opens. Enter the SHOP BOY.]

SHOP BOY

What do you lack? What is’t you buy? Very fine China stuffs of all kinds and qualities? China chains, China bracelets, China scarves, China fans, China girdles, China knives, China boxes, China cabinets, caskets, umbrellas, sundials, hourglasses, looking-glasses, burning-glasses, concave glasses, triangular glasses, convex glasses, crystal globes, waxen pictures, ostrich eggs, birds of paradise, musk-cats, Indian mice, Indian rats, China dogs, and China cats? Flowers of silk, mosaic fishes? Waxen fruit and porcelain dishes? Very fine cages for birds, billiard balls, purses, pipes, rattles, basins, ewers, cups, cans, voiders, toothpicks, targets, falchions, beards of all ages, vizards, spectacles? Sir, what you lack?

[Enter the MASTER.]

MASTER

Peace, sirrah! Do it more gently. 

[To the audience] What lack you, nobilities? Please you to take a nearer view of these excellencies, examine but some parcel of the particulars, and run over the rest upon the full speed of your eye. A few shelves, somewhat thin, and rarely furnished, I confess! But if all the magazines of Europe afford the like, I will shrink this poor head into my shop and never more be seen above board. You have divers other China houses about the town, I know, and that have been honoured with the visitation of great persons no less than this but, alas, what ha’ they, what rarity can they produce? Feathers? Cockleshells? Wooden daggers? Trash? Dutch trenchers? A few of these dishes counterfeit? You’ll fairly give me credit now – not a piece of porcelain about this town but is most false and adulterate, except what you see on this shelf. These are right such as the Grand Signor eats in, I assure you; on my sincerity, you can put no poison in these, but they presently break or discolour, out of a natural disloyalty to man. These are made of the true earth, first contused in a mortar and then ground in a mill, after put into your lake or cistern, and then macerated till the hardness be conquered. Then take they the cream o’the top (as your housewife makes butter) and form it into what fashion they list and, while it is melling in the furnace, paint it with those figures and give it perpetuity of what colour they please. Some hold the matter is working fourscore or a hundred years ere it come to maturity in a confused mass, and is left by the grandsire or the great grandsire to the nephews at three descents as an immediate portion to make ’em rich. Here is a piece of it now, tralucent as amber and subtler than crystal. He had need ha’ no gout chilblains in his fingers that drinks out of this; ’tis for the hand of a king’s daughter or a queen of Egypt. Your great-fisted groom should sup out of a pipkin! Here’s a second rarity, a conceited saltcellar, an elephant with a castle on his back, where beside the art of the artificer in the whole dimensions, the spreading of the ear, winding the proboscis, mounting of the tusks, and architecture of the castle, do but observe his engine! Why an elephant more than any other creature? He might have made it a mule, a camel, or a dromedary, but the elephant, being the wisest beast, it was fit he should carry the salt from ’em all, for by salt is understood wisdom: sal sapit omnia. Then here’s a dog, a fine gentle delicate thing for the chamber, and no less close than cleanly. He will neither bark at you, bite you, nor bewray you, but with silence defend you and is an excellent emblem of friendship, according to the poet, ‘As faithful, wise, and valiant as a dog.’ Nor have you a less elegant moral in this cat. For, Look as your cat playeth with the mouse, The play of your cat is the death of your mouse. Oh, your Chinese! The only wise nation under the sun! They had the knowledge of all manner of arts and letters many thousand years before any of these parts could speak. Sir John Mandeville was the first that brought science from thence into our climate, and so dispensed it into Europe and in such hieroglyphics as these. Here be other mysteries, too. The statue of the Spring, as she was in paradise, innocent and lovely; a fan of the feathers of Juno’s bird, that were once the eyes of jealousy and now the servants and safeguards of beauty. I assure you, he that would study but the allegory of a China shop might stand worthily to be the rector of an academy. Old Bartholomew of the Propriety of Things and Pliny in English are nothing to it, nor the story of birds and beasts with the wooden pictures, nor the Peg, Meg, or Margaret of the philosophers. Here is a book now – it is but a little one you see, but there is in this book to tickle the best head of England and yet to keep his hair from turning grey, by a certain virtue in the scolopendra’s bone to expel sadness whereof this comb is made! I have other delicacies too, as cabinets that you can scarcely fathom yet weigh but eighteen ounces avoirdupois; voiders for your table that have the true recipe of the Turkey varnish; carpets wrought of paraquitos’ feathers; umbrellas made of the wing of the Indian butterfly; ventolas of flying fishes’ fins; hangings of the island of Cochin, which, being but a natural cobweb of that country, last longer than your gilded leather; paper made of the barks of trees and ink to carry dry in your pocket; and thousand such subtleties which you will think to have cheap now at the next return of the Hollanders’ fleet from the Indies. But, I assure you, my factors from Leghorn have advertised that Ward, the man of war (for that is now the honourable name for a pirate) hath taken their greatest hulk, and in their second, with a cross-bar shot, hath made such a spoil in the porcelain as it is thought they will come home very much dissolved. Therefore, as ye please, my commodities shall not beg to be sold. Higher be glasses too, that I had almost forgot but that my boy suppeditate. First, a triangular, which, laid thus, shows ye all manner of colours by refraction and instructs ye in the true natural cause of your rainbow. A convex that diminisheth forms and makes your lady look like the queen of fairies and your knight like your grand duke of pygmies. A concave that augments them. This glass would have made the great Dutchman look more like a Saracen than he did and was invented to help a lean face cut out of a cherrystone, or the despair of a beard on a barren chin. Then here’s a spectacle, an excellent pair of multiplying eyes, and were made at request of an old patriarch of usurers in town here, to see his money come home in and sit brooding over the heap. Your epicure buys yonder, too! But here’s my jewel: my perspective. I will read you with this glass the distinction of any man’s clothes ten, nay twenty mile off, the colour of his horse, cut or long tail, the form of his beard, the lines of his face.
 

Sarah Howe

This poem is one within a series written by Howe as Visiting Writer for the Travel, Transculturality and Identity in England (TIDE) project. Howe’s poems respond to objects held in the Chinese ceramics collection at the Liverpool World Museum, and form part of a new multimedia installation on permanent display in their World Galleries. It gives those Chinese objects of desire a memory and a voice, recording their journeys across the global trade-routes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and into our present-day collections.

Stoneware dish, Longquan kilns

Admiring this fine green glaze

might bring to mind

a lichened

mountain pine, undertones

of grey and jade

ringed like tiny moons

along its darker side.

Or the travellers among you

might think

of the desert aloe –

its pale spines

picked out by starlight

and by camels

bound

in caravans, scenting hidden

veins of green

across the empty sand.

Once upon a time

dishes of my shade

were known as celadon –

named for

a shepherd in a French romance

sporting grey-green ribbons.

Others say it’s a garbled echo

of Saladin, who

a thousand years ago dispatched

forty greenware pieces

fired in far China

as a gift for the Sultan of Syria.

Later the Ottomans

prized us at imperial banquets

since in the presence

of poison’s slightest

drop

– it was said –

such vessels would begin to

sweat

or split apart with a terrible crack.

I remember

the pomegranates that bled

their ruby drops

across my face

the heads that rolled.

Thanks to my vigilance

the Sultan

outlived every single meal –

until the Silk Road’s

midnight cactus-trail

led me deeper west.

I, too, am a survivor.

Some themes and questions to consider 

• What do you think the function and effect is of listing as a device in each text?
   

• Each of these texts uses narrative voice (e.g., point of view, tone, diction) in particular ways. How does the narrative voice in each piece affect the reader’s (or audience’s) experience of it? How do they compare?