SOURCE: “Dangerous American Substances in Jacobean England,” in Cahiers Elisabéthains, No. 46, October 1994, pp. 1-7.

In the following essay, Hartman examines the ways in which English theatrical entertainment of the seventeenth century reflected King James's distrust of commodities from the New World—in particular, tobacco.

It is a truism that the English seek the exotic in order to reassure themselves that it is so much better to be British. That has certainly been true of England's élites, whether those courted by the masque writer or Agatha Christie. That parochialism which is a gentle joke in twentieth century mass market middle class fiction is a mainstay of that genre written for the enclave upon an island, the Jacobean court masque. As Stephen Orgel and Jerzy Limon have indicated, the Stuart masque projected the power of the sovereign, expressed royal wisdom, and magnified and lauded royal perceptions. It is “the...