"I Care Not, Let Naturals Love Nations": Cosmopolitan Clowning (Forum: English Cosmopolitanism and the Early Modern Moment‪)‬

"I AM HUMAN: nothing human is alien to me." So says the busybody Chremes in Terence's comedy The Self-Tormentor, answering a neighbor who tells him to mind his own damn business. (1) His off-the-cuff retort is often quoted solemnly today, having shed its lowly origins as a laugh line to re-emerge as "something like the golden rule of cosmopolitanism," in the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah. Chremes succinctly and unwittingly expresses "a tenable cosmopolitanism [that] tempers a respect for difference with a respect for actual human beings--and with a sentiment best captured in the credo, once comic, now commonplace"--Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. (2) The way jest can congeal into earnest over time may help explain the tenor of some oddly cosmopolitan moments in early modern foolery. In Davenport's The City Night Cap, an Italian insists that his wife follow the English fashion and allow his guest to kiss her in greeting. Warned that his eccentricity will be taken ill by his countrymen, he explodes: "I care not, let naturals love nations. My humour's my humour." (3) His experiment ends badly, but his pun on "naturals" lingers in the mind for the way it aligns narrow obedience to gender codes and "native"/national feeling with a natural fool's imbecility. This point of view is not particularly tolerant, but qualifies as satire that a cosmopolitan could enjoy.