Ceri Sullivan. The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing.

Cranbury, NJ and Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. 224 pp. $46.50. ISBN: 0-8386-3926-7.

The last two decades have witnessed a growing scholarly interest in the links between the early modern stage and the market. The earliest and most influential studies of these links drew on Joyce Oldham Appleby's assessment of the early modern market as an impalpable, alienating entity. But more recent social history has called into question Appleby's view. In particular, Craig Muldrew has painted a picture of a very different market, one in which mercantile activity entailed face-to-face relations and credit was grounded in communal networks of trust. The fruits of Muldrew's and other revisionist historians' studies of early modern market relations have been reaped by a new wave of dramatic critics. Foremost among these is Theodore B. Leinwand, whose Theatre, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 1999) brilliantly illuminates the affective dimension of subjectivities embedded in relations of credit and debt.

Ceri Sullivan's new book takes its place in this new wave. Somewhat problematically for the distinctiveness of her study, however, Sullivan treads much of the ground covered by Leinwand. Like Leinwand, Sullivan is dismissive of Appleby's impalpable, alienating market, and proposes a new model in which mercantile activity is an occasion not for anxiety, but for cheerful opportunity: "the possibility of loss, the necessity to play oneself, the ceaseless bargaining are present but seen as openings for profit" (22). Also like Leinwand, Sullivan seeks to calibrate early modern conceptions of credit with city comedy; indeed, the three plays she reads figure prominently also in Leinwand's book. Yet there are crucial differences. While Leinwand is interested in the affective dimension of credit, Sullivan examines the rhetoric of credit--not "what merchants do," but "what they say they do" (20). This emphasis on saying as well as doing leads Sullivan to interpret "credit" as a speech act. The merchant's "word," grounded in his purported honesty, skill, diligence, and godliness, seeks to produce his credit as an asset--albeit an asset "that is lent, not given, by its audience" (122).

Sullivan's analysis of credit is played out in two parts. The first is devoted to trawling the bulky canon of early modern English mercantile handbooks and treatises; the second examines the rhetorical production and performance of credit in three city comedies. Sullivan's survey of mercantile literature is capacious, and perhaps overly so. In their voluminous catalogs of quotation, the first four chapters can read like an early modern merchant's day journal or general ledger, merely recording detail without analyzing it. Sullivan's cornucopian sourcing, like the credit-worthy merchant's, is partly a rhetorical move designed to show that she has done her homework. Yet this thick forest of detail, like the merchant's, arguably conceals even as it persuades. In particular, it camouflages the extent to which early modern mercantile writing is far more prone to anxiety than Sullivan is prepared to concede. This is particularly so with the writings of the so-called mercantilists, whom Sullivan too often uncritically lumps with more upbeat merchant handbook writers like Richard Dafforne or Lewes Roberts. Admittedly, the mercantilists' anxieties are less about the alienation induced by an economy of credit than a world in which money has become a commodity of variable value prone to "merchandising exchange" in new global markets. But, it is noteworthy that in her otherwise excellent discussion of the rhetoric of usury, Sullivan does not acknowledge how mercantilists such as Gerard Malynes included in his definition of "usury" the alienation of bullion from England to foreign countries as a result of merchants' and bankers' manipulation of exchange rates. Here, perhaps, is a version of Appleby's alienating, impalpable market--a market that, for the mercantilists, was increasingly an abstract, transnational phenomenon.

Sullivan's readings of the plays are more satisfying, not least for her speculations about the specific sensibility of the merchant playgoer. Such an audience member, Sullivan argues, might have seen in Heywood's If You Know Not Me Part Two less a sunny celebration of Gresham's patriotism, than a potentially ironic reflection on the massive financial costs of manufacturing and maintaining credit. He might also have found in Jonson's The Alchemist not a moralistic condemnation of covetousness, but a compelling display of how the gulls "venture their credit on profitable dealing in risky fictions" (121). And he could well have drawn from Chapman, Jonson, and Marston's Eastward Ho! not the dreary Golding's lesson in civic virtue, but the mercurial Quicksilver's lesson in credit-maintenance and money-marketeering. Sullivan's positing of a specifically mercantile playgoing sensibility is the book's most daring and innovative premise. As Andrew Gurr has noted, there are only a tiny handful of surviving references to early modern merchant audience members--an aporia that has been curiously taken at face value by many theater historians. Yet, as Sullivan insists, merchants were surely interested in the theater; apart from the evidence she adduces (including the city companies' sponsorship of entertainments, 124), one might also note Thomas Mun's elaborate reference to Dr. Faustus in Englands Treasure by Forraign Trade (London, 1669, sigs. G5v-G6). Sullivan's premise is perhaps overstated, at least within the larger context of this book. Do we really need to put merchants in the playhouses to make the performative rhetoric of credit legible to its early modern audiences? As Leinwand argues, networks of credit and debt were well-nigh omnipresent in early modern London. Yet Sullivan's book unearths new ground, less in the increasingly well-tilled soil of early modern credit relations than in the still neglected fields of Jacobean audience composition and sensibility.

JONATHAN GIL HARRIS

The George Washington University