| This dissertation maps the varied terrain of the marketplace as it was presented on stage between 1590 and 1632: a sphere in which buying, selling, borrowing and lending were embedded in relationships, bound up in traditional measures of personal worth and social value (honor, valor, virtue, birth), and at the same time subject to manipulation by means of language, conduct, and self-conscious strategizing. Through readings of plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Heywood and analyses of non-literary works on mathematics, housekeeping, and merchandizing, it argues that many early modern writers identify the split between being and seeming, or surface and substance, as the defining formal feature of monetary credit. On stage, credit's status as a slippery sign links it simultaneously to social questions of self-fashioning, interpersonal bonds, and the opacity of others, on the one hand, and to literary questions of artful language, poiesis, theatricality, and interpretation, on the other.;My introduction reevaluates Craig Muldrew's influential economic history, The Economy of Obligation (1998). Whereas Muldrew claims that the uncertainties of a socially embedded and rhetorically grounded credit economy necessitated generalized interpersonal trust, I argue that that economic indeterminacy in fact gave rise to something more complex: rhetorical strategies intended to produce trust in one's own soundness and interpretive strategies aimed at evaluating the trustworthiness of others. Four chapters follow the introduction, each focused on a different configuration of the interrelated categories of credit and rhetoric. The first chapter analyzes a play rarely discussed in economic terms, Shakespeare's Othello, which I argue reflects a cultural tension between commercial credit and traditional gender- and profession-based forms of honor. The second turns from credit to debt, or rather indebtedness --the state in which Shakespeare and Middleton place the tragic protagonist of Timon of Athens. Timon embodies one of the central paradoxes of credit culture. In period terms, he is a "rich beggar," a nobleman whose dazzling surface appearance of wealth generates seemingly limitless credit and obscures catastrophic levels of debt. I argue that the play's discursive atmosphere of courtly flattery and its intense interest in poetry and painting amplify its sense that persons enmeshed in webs of debt and credit are artificers, feigners, and dissimulators. The third chapter analyzes two plays by Ben Jonson, Volpone and The Magnetic Lady. Paying particular attention to credit and luxury in both works, I claim that they index a significant change in representations of covetousness: Volpone (1606) presents material desire as integral to poetic 'making,' while The Magnetic Lady (1632) suggests that eloquence and imagination have little place in an increasingly abstracted economy. In the final chapter, I examine the ways in which Middleton's Michaelmas Term and part two of Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody depict London and its emerging paradigmatic institution, the shop, as spaces where credit's rhetorical dimension is intensified. |
