Coining Crimes and Moral Regulation in Measure for Measure

Abstract

In Basilikon Doron, the same text wherein he warns against the temptations of debasement, James also lists six “horrible crimes” that his son Henry is “bound in conscience never to forgive”: witchcraft, willful murder, incest, sodomy, poisoning, and 0-false coin.” The emblem of Ganymede in Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna clearly depicts James’s catalogue: the “foule Sodomitan” sits astride a cock, holding a cup “top-fil’d with poison,” a wand, and “Meddals, of base mettais wrought, / With sundry moneyes, counterfeit and nought.” The text decodes this image as a representation of Ganymede’s various crimes: while the cock signifies incest and the cup and wand allude to witchcraft and murder, by the base medals and moneys, “false coine you understand.” Critics have sometimes alluded to this peculiar list in investigations of sodomy within early modern England; the fact that Ganymede commonly represents the object of homoerotic desire clearly warrants such study. But thus far little attention has been given to the unusual inclusion of “false coin” within a taxonomy that Gregory Bredbeck calls “a mythology of the unnatural, the alien, and the demonic.”1 While the term “sodomy” connotes biblical prohibition of certain acts—and similar prohibitions could be cited for poisoning, witchcraft, incest, and, of course, murder—such was not the case for counterfeiting or “coining” crimes in general. The practice was neither “unnatural,” ”alien,” nor “demonic” in early modern England, where, as Malcolm Gaskill notes, it constituted a “mundane cottage industry.”2 As James’s inclusion of the term among other “horrible crimes” suggests, coining remained a persistent cause of concern for English monarchs, but it seemed to pose more danger to the state than it did to its practitioners’ souls.