Economies of Early Modern Drama: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Middleton - Hardcover

by Anne Enderwitz (Author)

This book provides new insights into how theatre responded to changing economic practices and structures. It reviews discourses on household management and commerce to create a rich context for the discussion of socio-economic actions and transactions in Macbeth, Othello, and Timon of Athens, as well as in city comedies by Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton. By approaching discourses on economy and commerce as complementary, the book opens up a diverse field of socio-economic practices, including the gendered division of duties in the household, new modes of valuation, and evolving credit instruments.

Theatre provides unique access to this field. In contrast to practical and policy-oriented discourses, it addresses socio-economic change and its vicissitudes in a spirit of experimentation, testing the ethical limits of socio-economic action and accustoming audiences to the demands of a changing socio-economic reality. Theatre thus offers a vital contribution to the prehistory of political economy. On the London stages, self-interest emerges as a key motive of socio-economic action, and theatre playfully explores its ambiguous status as a partly rational and partly excessive force that has a new ordering function but also creates social conflict. At the same time, by staging the contradictory demands of ethics and efficiency in economic decision-making, early modern plays offer access to a changing understanding of prudence that has a Machiavellian touch: by aligning with the pursuit of private interest, prudence sheds some of its ethical content and becomes foremost an instrumental faculty.

Author Biography

Anne Enderwitz, Professor of English Literature, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

Anne Enderwitz is Professor of English Literature at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She studied English and philosophy in Berlin and wrote her dissertation on modernist melancholia at London (UCL). As a postdoctoral researcher, she was affiliated with the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School in Berlin and taught English literature at the Peter Szondi Institute for Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin (FU). After submitting her post-doctoral dissertation (Habilitation) on early modern drama and economy at the FU, she taught in Munich, Tübingen, and Giessen. Professor Enderwitz specializes in early modern literature while also pursuing her research interests in modernism and climate fiction.