Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public theatre was emerging to great controversy as the perfect medium to display, analyse and evaluate the newly autonomous power of representation in its financial, magical and aesthetic forms.
Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama is especially timely in the current era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which are just as mysterious and occult in their operations as the germinal finance of 16th-century London. Chapters examine the convergence of money and magic in a wide range of early modern drama, from the anonymous Mankind through Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson, concentrating on such plays as The Alchemist, The New Inn and The Staple of News. Several focus on Shakespeare, whose analysis of the relations between finance, witchcraft and theatricality is particularly acute in Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale.
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This vibrant collection of essays explores how Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists used the medium of the commercial theatre to represent the newly autonomous power of money as a form of magic.
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: David Hawkes (Arizona State University, USA)
Chapter One: Daniel Vitkus (University of California, San Diego, USA), The
Perverse Eco-Politics of Object-Oriented Criticism: Money, Magical Thinking,
and the New Materialism
Chapter Two: William Casey Caldwell (Carthage College, USA), The Vice of
Collecting Money in Mankind
Chapter Three: Kaitlyn Culliton (Texas A&M, USA), Cozening Queens and Phony
Fairies: Fairy Counterfeits in Early Modern Drama
Chapter Four: David Hawkes (Arizona State University, USA), The Sign of Abel
Drugger: Fake News, Finance and Flattery in Ben Jonsons Dotages
Chapter Five: Melissa Vipperman-Cohen (Eleanor Roosevelt College, USA)
Coins, Counterfeit, and Queer Threat in The Comedy of Errors
Chapter Six: Hugh Grady (Arcadia University in Glenside, USA), The Magic of
Bounty in Timon of Athens: Gold, Society, Nature
Chapter Seven: Kemal Onur Toker (Brandeis University, USA), An Antony that
Grew the More by Reaping: The Immeasurable Bounty of the Sharing Economy in
Cleopatras Egypt
Chapter Eight: Rebecca Steinberger (Misericordia University, USA), Woman,
Warrior, or Witch? Fetishizing Margaret of Anjou on the Early Modern Stage
Chapter Nine: Ja Young Jeon (City University of New York, USA), The stone
is mine: Theater, Witchcraft, and Ventriloquism in The Winters Tale
Index
David Hawkes is Professor of English at Arizona State University, USA.
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