On Demand

Writing for the Market in Early Modern England

David J. Baker, David Baker

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780804738569
• eBook ISBN: 9780804772907
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves. On Demand draws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behavior. He shows that during this period demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy. Over the long sixteenth-century consumption burgeoned, though justifications for it lagged behind. People were in a curious predicament: they practiced consumption on a mass scale but had few acceptable reasons for doing so. In the literary marketplace, authors became adept at accommodating such contradictions fashioning works that spoke to self-divided consumers: Thomas Nashe castigated and satiated them at the same time . William Shakespeare satirized credit problems. Ben Jonson investigated the problems of global trade, and Robert Burton enlisted readers in a project of economic betterment.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Writing for the Long Run
• CHAPTER ONE - Marvelously Altered
• CHAPTER TWO - Thomas Nashe, ‘Pierce Penilesse,’ and the Demon of Consumption
• CHAPTER THREE - William Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’: Credit Risks
• CHAPTER FOUR - “The Allegory of a China shop”: Ben Jonson’s ‘Entertainment at Britain’s Burse’ and ‘Volpone’
• CHAPTER FIVE - “Idleness is an appendix to nobility”: The Preface to Robert Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’
• Coda: Butter Buyers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index