Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare

Description

In Shakespeare's England, credit was synonymous with reputation, and reputation developed in the interplay of language, conduct, and social interpretation. As a consequence, artful language and social hermeneutics became practical, profitable skills. Since most people both used credit and extended it, the dual strategies of implication and inference--of producing and reading evidence--were everywhere. Like poetry or drama, credit was constructed: fashioned out of theinterplay of artifice and interpretation. The rhetorical dimension of economic relations produced social fictions on a range of scales: from transitory performances facilitating local transactions to the long-term project of maintaining creditworthiness to the generalized social indeterminacy thatarose from the interplay of performance and interpretation.Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts--including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest--which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types ofwriting constitute "equipment for living": practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate aphenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction. Cover Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare Copyright Acknowledgments Contents List of Figures Introduction I.1. Polonius in the Marketplace I.2. Economics and Fiction I.3. “Equipment for Living”: Practical and Dramatic Texts I.4. Archive and Structure 1: Reckoning Reputation 1.1. Jealous Arithmetic 1.2. Partnership Problems 1.3. Economic Language in Othello 1.4. Credit versus Honor 1.5. “For the Seas’ Worth” 2: Friendly Credit and its Dangers 2.1. Commonplaces, Common Goods 2.2. Proverbs and Contradiction 2.3. Managing Contradiction in Letter-Writing Manuals 2.4. All That Glisters in The Merchant of Venice 2.5. Pairs and Networks in A Woman Killed with Kindness 3: Debt’s Poetry, Credit’s Fictions 3.1. Debt Plus Poetry Equals . . . ? 3.2. Timon of Athens: or, The Rich Beggar 3.3. Debt’s Poetry 3.4. Origin Stories 4: Other Worlds 4.1. Unpuzzling Credit 4.2. The Stuff of Poetry 4.3. Volpone’s Will 4.4. The Magnetic Lady’s Logarithms 4.5. Interest’s Contradictions 4.6. “The World Over” Coda Bibliography Index