The Metamorphosis of Ajax, jakes, and early modern urban sanitation Dolly Jørgensen Abstract: This article examines Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called The Metamorphosis of Ajax through the lens of urban environmental history, examining the everyday context of Harington’s discourse. It argues that although Harington may have used the work for the political and social commentary discussed by other scholars, he also puts forward a vision of a new physical urban sanitation system to address concerns about disease transmission from exposure to waste. His proposal includes both individually-owned improved flushed privies and government-sponsored sewage systems, a hitherto overlooked element of his program. To keepe your houses sweete, clense privie vaultes. To keepe your soules as sweete, mend privie faults. (John Harington, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, 186)i Sir John Harington concludes the main text of his A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called The Metamorphosis of Ajax published in 1596 with a two-line verse that extols his readers to better themselves by cleaning their household privy latrines and correcting personal shortcomings. These twin concerns capture the gist of Harington‟s text, a rather complicated work mixing sociopolitical commentary with sanitary improvement suggestions. The title of the work plays on “a jakes,” the colloquial name for a privy in early modern England, and the legend of Ajax‟s blood turning into a flower from Ovid‟s Metamorphoses. The Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 2 play on words is fitting for Harington‟s text which proposes the design for a new and improved – a metamorphosed – jakes.ii The Metamorphosis of Ajax was first published in 1596 as one work with three parts: A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax; An Anatomie of the Metamorpho-sed Ajax; and An Apologie. The first two parts were also issued separately as trade publications at the same time. Although published under the pen name Misacmos, Harington was unequivocally the author of the first and third parts; An Anatomie is attributed to Thomas Combe, Harington‟s personal servant and fellow poet-translator. In addition to the regular pamphlets, Harington presented his friends with large-paper presentation copies with annotations.iii Harington begins The Metamorphosis of Ajax with an exchange of letters between Philostilpnos (a lover of cleanliness; identified as Harington‟s cousin Edward Sheldon) and his cousin Misacmos (a hater of filth; Harington). In the opening letter, Philostilpnos exhorts Misacmos to make his invention, a jakes with a water flushing mechanism, public. With this new jakes, Harington would not only help the great houses of the nobility and the Queen but also “be a great benefactor to the Citie of London, and all other populous townes, who stand in great neede of such convayances.”iv In Misacmos‟ reply, he acknowledges that the invention would beneficial to “townes and Cities” as much as his private friends.v In this way, Harington places his work in a much broader framework than scholars have previously realized: his invention might benefit the urban population writ large, in addition to the highest class. This hints at Harington‟s larger program of urban sanitation reform that I explore in this article. I argue that because Harington was concerned about unsanitary jakes causing disease, an individual solution – a new flush toilet design – was only one aspect of Harington‟s plan as outlined in Metamorphosis of Ajax; his proposal also extended to rethinking England‟s entire urban sanitation infrastructure and the role of government in providing it. It is the materiality of jakes that I assert Harington is responding to in The Metamorphosis of Ajax. Susan Signe Morrison has strongly advocated investigations in the field of waste studies, which “does not deal with signs or signified; it deals with materiality and the outcomes of that materiality.”vi By re-reading Harington with an eye on the historical sanitary Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010 Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 3 condition of the early modern England Harington lived in, we can see his work as proposing a broad new vision for urban sanitation. In keeping with the ending poetic line and its overt didactic message, The Metamorphosis of Ajax has attracted scholarly attention primarily for its insights about Elizabethan court society because of Harington‟s position as courtier-cousin to the queen and role within the Inns of Court.vii Another line of inquiry has stressed Harington‟s choice of subject matter. Recent analysis of late medieval and early modern English scatological literature has revealed the multifaceted social and cultural significance of excrement.viii Gail Kern Pastor has argued that Harington wrote the piece as “elaborate attempt to reconstruct his audience‟s orientation to dung and excretion in general” and places it at the intersection of Norbert Elias‟s discourse on the civility of manners and Henri Lefebvre‟s notion of social space, particularly through a gendered reading of the body.ix Julian Yates has likewise concentrated on the tension between visual and olfactory senses in the plumbing and the mechanism of Harington‟s flush toilet. In his reading, the privy occupies a crucial position “as mediator between parlor and sewer that which exists upon and within the relation between sewer and parlor, between „clean‟ and „dirty,‟ „proper‟ and „improper.‟”x While all of these perspectives are valuable analysis of Harington‟s work, it strikes me that all of them consider The Metamorphosis of Ajax as speaking only about the mental condition of the courtier class, rather than the reality of early modern urban life. While the social and political aspects of The Metamorphosis of Ajax have been examined, its environmental program has not been.xi I contend that the closing poem‟s penultimate line about cleaning privy vaults should be taken as seriously as the final metaphorical one. The urban environment has been an expanding subset of environmental historical studies over the last 15 years, and it provides a valuable perspective for analyzing Harington‟s work. Martin Melosi, Christine Meiser Rosen and Joel Tarr have all convincingly argued for the inclusion of urban areas in environmental narratives.xii The urban environment as home to humans is no less important in environmental history than wilderness areas or agricultural production. The sanitary condition of cities has been a primary strand of analysis within this Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010 Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 4 context. Melosi is the most renowned scholar in the field with his books, Garbage in the Cities and The Sanitary City. In these studies of sanitation in American cities, he stresses the influence of public health and ecological theory in decision-making, the role of professionals (engineers, physicians, politicians) in service implementation, and the environmental effects of those choices.xiii Dale Porter and Donald Reid have written marvelous studies of London and Paris, respectively, focusing on the interplay of sanitary ideas, technical infrastructure, and the urban environmental condition in the nineteenth century. Both works point out how cultural constructions of cleanliness factor into the decision-making process and highlight the role of the state in sanitation projects.xiv Recent work has even looked back to the medieval and early modern periods to examine urban conditions and governmental provisions for sanitary services.xv Following the example of urban environmental history, I analyze The Metamorphosis of Ajax within its physical urban context and the sanitary problems of the day. Recent early modern English literary analysis has revealed the fruitfulness of examining the urban environmental condition within which writers produced their work and how it influenced their political and social programs. For example, Mark Jenner has shown in his analysis of John Evelyn‟s Fumifugium, which deals with London‟s air pollution, that philosophical and political commentary and reforming environmental proposals can co-exist and build upon one another in early modern pamphlets.xvi Rebecca Totaro has likewise explored the role of outbreaks of bubonic plague from 1348 to 1666 in English literature. She aptly characterizes the disease‟s influence: All lives – including those of the most imaginative of English writers – had a conceptual place for plague. And if all lives had a conceptual place for plague, then its influence reached beyond the politics and the cash flow of production. It crept into church sermons, into medical treatises, into royal proclamations, and into literary lives, cities, and worlds – the fabric of characters and plot and setting.xvii Totaro shows how Thomas More‟s personal experience with the bubonic plague, including service as Commissioner of the Sewers, Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010 Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 5 influenced the hygienic practices such as the disposal of butchery offal outside of town and the provision of clean drinking water he ascribes to Utopia: “He combined his religious, legal, medical, and experimental knowledge to depict an island on all levels less susceptible to bubonic plague than England had been.”xviii Such a contextual reading of More‟s text portrays Utopia as a call for improved city infrastructure to fight a feared disease. Totaro‟s work suggests that a new reading of The Metamorphosis of Ajax within the framework of urban environmental history will allow us to grasp Harington‟s multifaceted sanitary vision for England – a vision that included individuals and the government contributing to sanitary improvements. Metamorphosing a jakes The Prologue begins with Ovid‟s tale of Ajax, whose blood after his death turned into hyacinths, thus literally recording the metamorphosis of Ajax. But more importantly, Harington ties this metamorphosis to the privy, or jakes. He tells the a story of a French gentleman who cleaned himself at his privy with some grass cut from Ajax‟s transformed site and was afterward stricken with disease. After a penitential trip during which he was cured, the man “built a sumptuous privie, and in the most conspicuous place thereof, namely just over the doore; he erected a statue of AJAX… and further, to honour him he chaunged the name of the house.”xix According to Harington, the accent of the word Ajax was changed so that now it is called “a Jakes.”xx Harington also gives two other etymological roots of the word, being partial to a contraction of the proverb “age breedes aches” to “age aches” and thus to “A Jax.”xxi After the Prologue, the text proper presents a discourse in three parts: 1 The first justifies the use of the homelyest wordes. 2 The second prooves the matter not to be contemptible. 3 The third shews the forme, and how it may be reformed.xxii The third section culminates in a suggested new privy design, which is described in the text and shown pictorially in the attached An Anatomie. While the text has been rightly characterized as “a Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010 Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 6 satire of contemporary persons and practices,” it also clearly presents a revolutionary toilet, a practical solution to a long- standing problem.xxiii Diagrams of Harington's new privy from An anatomie of the metamorpho-sed Ajax. Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London. Reproduced under Creative Commons Attribution-Non- Commercial version 2.0 licence for England & Wales. Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010 Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 7 Placing Ajax in the urban environment Harington understands filth from privies as a particularly urban phenomenon and one with health consequences. He traces the roots of the problem to early urbanization: when companies of men began first to increase, and make of families townes, and of townes cities; they quickly found not onely offence, but infection, to grow out of great concourse of people, if speciall care were not had to avoyd it. And because they could not remove houses, as they do tents, from place to place, they were driven to find the best meanes that their wits did then serve them, to cover, rather then to avoyd these annoyances: either by digging pits in the earth, or placing the common houses over rivers…xxiv In this way, Harington links urban population first with an increased concentration of feces and then with infection. Throughout his text, Harington is particularly concerned with the bad odors emanating from privies. It is the “breath” of Ajax that makes those using a privy “glad to stop their noses.”xxv Some try to use perfumes to cover up the smell, but the fecal odor is still there.xxvi After all, the letter from Philostilpnos had specifically encouraged his cousin to share his invention because it could make his privy “as sweet as my parlor.”xxvii Harington‟s concern, however, is not simple vanity. He is rather basing his interest in eliminating privy odors on contemporary medical theory. The miasmic theory, which attributed disease to the visible (like a fog) or invisible corruption of air, was the prevalent theory about disease transmission in early modern England.xxviii Infection could stem from wastes like human excrement with strong odors: “that many Physitions doe hold, that the plague, the measels, the hemorhoids, the small poxe, & perhaps the great ones too, with the fistula in ano, and many of those inward diseases, are no way sooner gotten, then by the savour of others excrements, upon unwholsome privies.”xxix In this passage, Harington cites contemporary medical theory that linked the transmission of many diseases (and other conditions like hemorrhoids) to the strong smell emanating from privies. Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010 Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 8 Harington, a man fluent in Greek, Latin, and Italian, was quite familiar with contemporary medical theory on the role of air and smells on health. In fact, he published an English verse version of the medieval medical text Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum in 1608. In one passage, he reiterated his position about the linkage between disease and smells from privies: Though all ill savours do not breed infection, Yet sure infection commeth most by smelling, Who smelleth still perfumed, his complexion Is not perfum'd by Poet Martials telling, Yet for your lodging roomes giue this direction, In houses where you mind to make your dwelling, That neere the same there be no evill sents, Of puddle-waters, or of excrements, Let aire be cleere and light, and free from faults, That come of secret passages and vaults.xxx The Latin version of Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum actually only has two lines about air and Harington quotes these in The Metamorphosis of Ajax: “Aer sit mundus, habitabilis ac luminosus, / Infectus neque sit, nec olens foetore cloacae.”xxxi A literal translation of this Latin would be “Let the air be pure, habitable, and bright, / and let it be neither contaminated nor odorous with the stink of the sewer.”xxxii We see that Harington expands his verse version of the passage to stress that houses in particular should be constructed to avoid the smell of excrement from privy cisterns (the “secret passages and vaults”) in order to ward off infection. Within the scholarly context of this medical text, Harington shows the same concern about foul air attributed to excrement and privies causing infection as he does in his satirical The Metamorphosis of Ajax. He clearly had a medical basis for advocating a new type of jakes that did not smell. Harington‟s line of thinking is consistent with others in sixteenth century. For example, Thomas More‟s Utopians did not “suffer any thing that is foul or unclean to be bought within their towns, lest the air should be infected by ill smells which might prejudice their health.”xxxiii Such a belief extended beyond literary tracts to governmental actions. In 1544, Coventry‟s council forbade the inhabitants of Coventry‟s Cross Cheaping district to deposit Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010 Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 9 dung and other waste at the cross in the market because the waste was a “great incommoditie of the marketh-place” and caused “great daunger of infection of the plague.”xxxiv The town council of Norwich likewise heard a complaint in 1579 about foreigners who kept untidy “necessaries” and dumped their wash water into the gutter, which bred “greate infeccion” in the river and street gutters. These actions poisoned the water and bred “corrupte humours” within their bodies. The council ordered the foreign residents to keep their latrines dry; cleanse their houses, clothes, and bodies; and use perfumes and preservatives prescribed by physicians to ward of pestilences. The council‟s sanitary mandates were directly connected with a recent outbreak of a “the plague” in two parishes of the city.xxxv These governmental actions show the contemporary belief that disease was linked to wastes, particularly privy wastes and wastewater. The governments of the major metropolitan areas like London and Florence made significant efforts to clean up stenches that were believed to bring disease. Mark Jenner has shown that the mayor and aldermen of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ordered the streets cleaned in order to reduce the smells and minimize infection from the plague several times.xxxvi Carlo Cipolla‟s study of the Florentine health officers established by an ordinance of 1622 shows without a doubt that the linkage between waste, smell, and disease was clearly in force in Italy by the early seventeenth century. Doctors who investigated disease outbreaks made this connection frequently in their reports. The ordinance itself says, Since experience has often shown that contagions and sicknesses are caused mainly by the fact that in their houses … men are surrounded by dirt and by such quantities of filth…; since this rubbish tends to give off smells and stenches which are so damaging to health…everyone should remove and have removed from before their houses all the filth and rubbish which are to be found there, including manure and other things which can and do cause smells and stench.xxxvii Through the miasmic theory, people believed that the smells of waste caused disease. Human excrement and its odors thus Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010 Jørgensen/ The Metamorphosis of Ajax 10 needed to be contained and controlled to avoid infection. Harington, as a man of learning, was up-to-date on the physicians‟ theories and framed his modified jakes within this context. The problem of jakes Harington recognized that the removal of excrement from urban spaces has been a long-standing concern. In The Metamorphosis of Ajax, Harington cites Deuteronomy 23: 12-14, which required the Israelites to leave camp to relieve themselves, dig a hole for the excrement and cover it up, giving his own English translation of the passage: 12 Thou shalt have a place without thy tents, to which thou shalt go to do the necessities of nature. 13 Carying a spade staffe in thy hand, and when thou wilt ease thee, thou shalt cut a round turfe, and thou shalt cover thy excrements therewith, in the place where thou didst ease thy selfe. 14 For the Lord they God walketh in the midst of thy tents to deliver thee, and to give thy enemies into thy hands, that thy tents may be holy, and that there appeare no filthinesse in them, lest he forsake thee.xxxviii As a follow-up to this quote, he writes that “here at home, that it is an unreverent thing, for Churches ordained for prayer, and church-yardes appointed for buriall, to be polluted and filed as if they were kennels & dunghills.”xxxix While there may be some political commentary here about the religious turbulence of the period, Harington may also be referring to real urban sanitation problems. In 1471, for example, the Coventry town council issued an order saying that none should throw muck, straw, or other filth into the parish churchyards; the injunction was repeated twice in the 1540s for St. Michael‟s and Trinity churchyards indicating that waste disposal there must have been habitual.xl How to deal with urban waste was a tangible problem. Harington noted that the common urban response to human waste had been to dig cesspits or place privies over running water. Both types of arrangements are well documented from archeological and written sources in London and elsewhere.xli The Early English Studies • Volume 3 • 2010