Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism

L. Woodbridge

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781403963079
• eBook ISBN:
  9781403982469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

In this collection literary scholars, theorists and historians deploy new economic techniques to illuminate English Renaissance literature in fresh ways. Contributors variously explore poetry's precarious perch between gift and commodity; the longing for family in The Comedy of Errors as symbolically expressing the alienating pressures of mercantilism; Measure for Measure 's representation of singlewomen and the feminization of poverty; the collision between two views of money in a possible collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton; the cultural spread of an accounting mentality and quantitative thinking; and money as it crosses the frontier between price and pricelessness, and from early bodily-injury insurance schemes to The Merchant of Venice .

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Monetary Compensation for Injuries to the Body, A.D. 602–1697
• 2 Commerce, Community, and Nostalgia in The Comedy of Errors
• 3 Scene Stealers: Autolycus, The Winter’s Tale and Economic Criticism
• 4 On a Certain Tendency in Economic Criticism of Shakespeare
• 5 Exchange Value and Empiricism in the Poetry of George Herbert
• 6 Work and the Gift: Notes toward an Investigation
• 7 Material Dispossessions and Counterfeit Investments: The Economies of Twelfth Night
• 8 Gift Exchange and Social Hierarchy in Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury
• 9 Taking Excess, Exceeding Account: Aristotle Meets The Merchant of Venice
• 10 The Lead Casket: Capital, Mercantilism, and The Merchant of Venice
• 11 The Fiend gives Friendly Counsel: Launcelot Gobbo and Polyglot Economics in The Merchant of Venice
• 12 Freeing Daughters on Open Markets: The Incest Clause in The Merchant of Venice
• 13 Usury and Counterfeiting in Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London and The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London, and in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure
• 14 Middleton and Debt in Timon of Athens
• 15 Singlewomen and the Properties of Poverty in Measure for Measure
• 16 Fetish and Poem: Ben Jonson’s Dilemma
• Index