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Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (review)

1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tj.1999.0065

1086-332X

Kathleen McLuskie,

Historical Economic and Social Studies

Reviewed by: Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern Englnad Kathleen E. McLuskie Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern Englnad. By Theodore B. Leinwand. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; pp. xii + 199. $54.95. “Theatre, Finance and Society is an interpretive inventory of the responses to socio-economically induced stress” (1). Behind the abstractions of Theodore Leinwand’s opening sentence lies a complex of questions which have animated scholarship on early modern drama since the late nineteenth century. Early modern dramatists, who both participated in and offered a critique of the commercialization of theatre, celebrated and lamented the consequences of economic change. Writing in a much later moment of economic and cultural crisis, mid-twentieth-century scholars such as E. K. Chambers and L. C. Knights invoked the eloquent summations of early modern dramatists in their attempts to articulate the struggle between economics and ethics to provide what Francis Mulhern calls “a synoptic explanation” of the forces of social change. Both the dramatists and the scholars contend with the same problem: the intellectual analysis of social change deals in generalization and abstraction; its human consequences are both experienced and articulated in narratives of love and loss, betrayal and reconciliation. Timon of Athens’s visceral rant against “yellow, glittering, precious gold” is summarized in the essence of money; the theatrical energy of the opening battle among the conspirators of The Alchemist is abstracted into a conflict over credit relations in the shift from joint proprietorship to individual accumulation. The abstracting effect of economic discourse is evident in the modern market terms of Leinwand’s chapter headings: “credit crunch,” “debt restructuring,” “mortgage payments,” “venture capital.” In their anachronistic contemporaneity, however, lies a welcome engagement with the detail of recent economic history. Behind the grand narratives of feudalism and capitalism which have informed so much recent writing on the “market” in early modern drama, he detects “more fine-grained operations,” the detailed maneuvering and negotiations which brought modern economic relations into being. The very gaps between modern and early-modern economic terminology demonstrate the emergence of economics as an autonomous discourse, separate from the ethical and dependent upon the establishment of stable and authoritative economic institutions. Leinwand’s discussion of particular cases, including Sir Lionel Cranfield, Walter Ralegh, the Earl of Suffolk, and the investors of the East India Company, is set in the context of institutional adaptation such as the late establishment of a register of land or the “extension of full equity of redemption to mortgagers circa 1625” (92). There is no suggestion in this book, however, of a teleology that culminates in the triumph of modern economics. The reader is reminded again and again of the extent to which history is composed of fortuitous and co-incidental encounters among individuals, structured by and struggling with existing interconnections of kinship and patronage relations which overlay and complicate more familiar and schematic oppositions of gender and class, citizens and landowners. The abstracted homo economicus making rational choices, setting risk against profit, substituting one form of consumption for another, disappears behind much more colorful individuals gambling and risking and even toiling in the hope of honor and credit as well as profit. In this context, the plays of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries might seem almost beside the point. The book’s account of the lawsuits between John Brayne and James Burbage over financing the Globe or the conflict between sharer and [End Page 341] player revealed in the Kings Men’s “Sharers Papers” of 1635 demonstrates that theatre entrepreneurs were subject to the same pressures and responded with the same tenacity as other players in early modern finance but scant attention is paid to the special nature of the products on whose behalf they traded. Leinwand, indeed, is careful not to privilege plays simply because of their clearer, more mythologized, version of economic change. Rather, he presents their action and characters as homologous to the narratives of real life conflict, dramatizing, as they do, the excesses of affect, nostalgia, emulation, envy and desire which accompanied economic change. The connection between The Merchant of Venice and venture capital or between A New Way to...