Coda

The coda tracks the afterlife of structures discussed earlier in the book, attending both to change and continuity. Today, personal creditworthiness is represented in numerical credit scores, and individuals often feel disconnected from the abstract, barely visible networks of global finance. Yet even within this economy—as different as it is from early modern England’s—the need for trust persists, and skills in rhetoric and interpretation remain valuable. The coda ends by linking classical theories of poetic and rhetorical efficacy to early modern practical literature, and both to modern advice on the importance of impression management in business and advertising.

Debt’s Poetry, Credit’s Fictions

This chapter examines Timon of Athens alongside handbooks that teach readers how to interpret the fictionalized credit world that surrounds them—a world full of false surfaces, which invite misconstrual. It focuses on the portrayal of a particular hard-to-read figure: the “rich beggar,” an outwardly wealthy person whose debts invisibly outstrip his assets. While handbook authors simply warn readers against lending to such persons, Shakespeare and Middleton go further, probing the conditions that produce this paradoxical figure. Their co-authored Timon of Athens suggests that rich beggary results less from poor estate management than from the interplay of language, conduct, and interpretation. The play suggests that the fiction-making power of debt and credit extends from the individual “rich beggar” to the fabric of society. Credit here appears as an agent of universal falsification: a demiurgic power that upends hierarchies and rewrites identities.

Introduction

Fictions of Credit’s introduction lays out the book’s aims and methods. It argues for a revised understanding of England’s credit culture: the nexus of social relations, discursive forms, and economic practices to which the widespread use of monetary credit gave rise in the early modern period. To do this, it lays out the case made by economic historians that, because of cash shortages and expanding market activity in the period, the majority of transactions at all levels of society ran on credit. The introduction argues that the resulting social and economic indeterminacy gave rise to something more complex than either straightforward trust or blanket suspicion: rhetorical strategies intended to produce trust in one’s own soundness and interpretive strategies aimed at evaluating the trustworthiness of others. The introduction then turns to the book’s source texts and methods: plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries and practical handbooks written by and for merchants, retailers, householders, and farmers.

Reckoning Reputation

Chapter 1 analyzes Shakespeare’s Othello alongside sixteenth-century commercial arithmetics. Othello makes a problem that inflects certain narrative examples in these math books into grounds for tragedy: the problem of calculating the value of persons in a society where new forms of commercial credit were unsettling traditional notions of worth. Social evaluation comes to the fore in the specific mathematical genre of “partnership problems,” which were designed to teach merchants how to calculate returns on joint ventures but which also demanded skill in reckoning the worth of words and of persons. Othello’s jealousy operates according to an extreme version of the logic inherent to these mathematical problems. The evaluation of others and of the self are linked, in Othello, to acts of evaluation drawn from the world of trade—the world reflected and addressed in arithmetic textbooks in general, and partnership problems in particular.

Friendly Credit and its Dangers

This chapter reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness alongside early modern letter-writing manuals. In the early seventeenth century, popular epistolary manuals began to include examples of letters begging for money and letters denying or extending loans. These fictional epistles offer a repository of stock phrases and rhetorical moves useful for eager borrowers and unwilling lenders alike, two positions most of the books’ users would occupy at one point or another over the course of their lives. Letter-writing guides teach their users the necessity of self-contradiction over time: of now adhering to one set of values and practices, now to another. Shakespeare’s and Heywood’s plays analyze their protagonists’ inability to do precisely this. In Merchant and A Woman Killed, tragedy or near-tragedy results from the failure to exercise the social flexibility necessary for balancing the demands of love with those of thrift.

Other Worlds

Chapter 4 turns from social fictions to fictive renderings of the wide and variegated world of trade. Early modern merchandise mirrored—and fueled—the poetic imagination. In turn, poets conjured fantastic visions of the world structured by trade. Ben Jonson’s Volpone exemplifies the period association of circulating commodities with poetic creativity: between world and word. Yet the play, remarkably, lacks debt relations. Decades later, Jonson revisits the relationship between word and world in his late, strange The Magnetic Lady, where credit takes center stage. The play’s figure of commerce, Moth Interest, is a moneylender whose verbal and imaginative capacity marks him as an heir of Jonson’s Volpone but renders him out of place in an economy increasingly oriented towards abstract capital and away from tangible wealth. Reading this play alongside tables of compound interest and tables of logarithms, the chapter argues that the play represents a world turning toward the abstract and numerical, and away from the verbal and material. It thus signals an end to the fictions of credit that had animated the Shakespearean stage: fictions that were fundamentally local and dialogic, developed in the interplay of artifice and interpretation.