In the matter of the relations of sellers and purchasers, we may note, as one of those little touches of nature which make the whole world kin, that customers, as we learn from more than one old play, often indulged in the quite modern practice of having half the goods in a shop laid out for inspection before buying the most trumpery article. Nor, on the other hand, were the dealers of the time much behind their descendants of to-day in what are known as the tricks of trade. Adulteration was a crying evil; some of the methods often employed, for example, for the “sophistication” of tobacco, will be recalled by all readers of “The Alchemist.” Another common practice among shopkeepers was that of darkening their stores to disguise the inferiority of their merchandise. This is constantly referred to by contemporary writers. The sturdy Stubbs attacks the abuse in his “Display of Corruptions.” “They have their shops and places where they sell their cloth very dark and obscure,” he writes, referring to the mercers and drapers of his time, “of purpose to deceive buyers.” Webster, in “The Duchess of Malfi,” employs this familiar abuse in the turn of a compliment: “This darkening of your worth is not like that which tradesmen use in the city; their false lights are to rid bad wares off;” and Quomodo, in “Michaelmas Term,” boasts, humanly enough, that his shop is not “so dark as some of his neighbors’.” Again, Brome, in the “City Wit”: “What should the city do with honesty? Why are your wares gummed? Your shops dark?” In “Westward Ho” we read that the shop of a linen-draper was generally “as dark as a room in Bedlam,” and, not to multiply quotations, Middleton, in “Anything for a Quiet Life,” speaks of shopwares being habitually “set in deceiving lights.” Colliers, too, were so notorious for short measure and other crafty practices that Greene, in his “Notable Discovery of Cosenage,” includes a special “delightful discourse” on purpose to lay bare their knavery.
The houses were not yet numbered, and all trading establishments were known by their tokens—great signboards decorating every shop with strange mottoes and fantastic devices, which took the place of the advertising media of the present day. Milton, we remember, was born at the Spread Eagle, in Bread Street, and well on in the eighteenth century the imprints of publishers still refer to these customary signs; as in the case of the famous “left-legged Tonson,” who did business at “Shakespeare’s Head, over against Catherine Street, in the Strand.” Quotations illustrative of these trading tokens and the part they played in the commercial life of the time might be indefinitely multiplied; but we must content ourselves with a single bit of evidence from “The Alchemist.” Abel Drugger, the young tradesman, is opening a new shop, and comes to Subtle to take his advice about the choice of a suitable device. In the one suggested by Subtle, Jonson satirizes the wildly absurd combinations frequently employed, like the foolish advertisements of our own century, to attract or compel public attention:—