ABSTRACT
John Ricketts’s Byrsa Basilica, Seu Regale Excambium (The Royal Exchange) (circa 1633) is a Latin Cambridge University play that was never printed in the period, possibly never produced, and has hardly been the subject of more than a footnote since it was translated and published by R.H. Bowers in 1939.1 Yet the play’s startling imposition of a classical framework onto a contemporary economic subject raises questions about the pedagogical uses to which Latin drama was put at the universities. In particular, the mercantile subject-matter of this academic play takes up issues that often preoccupy the popular theater and then imports them to the university, making the literary and socio-economic spheres of production interpenetrate with the production of knowledge.2 Set in the Royal Exchange, the play takes as its model Plautine comedy and as its subject the transactions, machinations, and anxieties of London merchants, factors, mountebanks, and insurers. A Prologue, Interlocution, and Epilogue are spoken by Mercury, the god of both linguistic and manual dexterity and thus the deity of traders and thieves. Mercury’s temple is the Exchange itself and, in addressing his academic audience, he makes frequent allusions to the similarities between life in the Exchange and life in the university: “ingenii pari / Acumine artes si tractentur, et lucra” (ll. 64-5 [“learning should be conducted with equal sharpness of talent as gain”]).
