Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England & The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage.

Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England

(Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 31.) New York and Oxford: Cambridge University Press. 1999. xii + 199 pp. $54.95. ISBN: 0-521-64031-8.

Garrett A. Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. vii + 292 pp. $39.50. ISBN: 0-8047-3303-1.

Humanistic scholarship in the recent past, to some observors, was characterized by a so-called "linguistic turn," a common focus, across many disciplines, on textuality, rhetoric, discourse, and the sign as constitutive elements of culture. By contrast, the scholarship of the last decade or so might perhaps be understood as making an "economic turn." In English studies generally, and in early modern studies in particular, there is an evident new interest in the symbolic and material "economies" that might be thought to shape or determine the rest of culture, even textuality itself. The capaciousness of the very word economy is perhaps part of its efficacy as a unifying topic. A considerable body of recent work addressing "local" topics such as marriage, child-rearing, domestic architecture, servants, and the like can be considered "economic" in its original sense of household management. Similarly, historicist criticism has in recent years moved beyond its initial fascination with politics and state power to the kind of topics commonly associated with economics as a discipline -- property, money, contracts, industrial production, and so forth. The renewed interest in such topics has enriched and complicated our understanding of the early modern period and its literature even as it also raises what remain open theoretical questions.

The titles of two recent books -- Theodore B. Leinwand's Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England and Garrett A. Sullivan's The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage -- announce clearly what Sullivan calls the "yoking of incompatible categories" (1), the conjunction of literary and socio-economic concerns, that so often characterizes this new economic criticism. Leinwand's book focuses primarily on money matters: the way in which a variety of financial practices such as moneylending, contracts, mortgages and so forth evolved in the era of nascent capitalism. Leinwand surveys such practices with an eye on what he calls their "affective economies, that is, the way people thought, felt, and sometimes wrote about these evolving practices. The book is structured, in other words, around two kinds of juxtaposition. First the literal economy is paired with what are claimed to be the subjective economies within which early modern people came to terms with the f ormer. Then, using a technique now familiar from new historicism, canonical literary texts, including Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens, Jonson's The Alchemist, and Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts, are paired with archival materials concerning the financial dealings of figures such as Walter Ralegh, Thomas Gresham, James Burbage, and others.

Leinwand's accounts of these real-life figures are impressive in their detail, often offering unfamiliar historical information and usefully contextualizing the plays. In particular, he demonstrates convincingly how complex arrangements of money-lending and debt were far more prominent in early modern England than has sometimes been assumed by literary scholars, particularly given the far mote conservative and nostalgic economic visions offered by the period's drama. Based on the sometimes conflicting evidence of literary and archival texts, Leinwand finally concludes that early moderns reacted to their changing world with "notably varied affective responses" (142). This seems a safe enough conclusion, though it is hard to imagine how it could be otherwise, or on what basis such a conclusion could even be disputed. One also wonders how much is gained by referring to such mixed emotions as an affective economy. In the end, such a formulation seems to be using mere terminology to make that crucial link between the material and the symbolic that is, after all, at issue in the project as a whole.

Sullivan's The Drama of Landscape, by contrast, tends more toward a methodology of accretion, mosaic or "bricolage" in which a very wide variety of disparate textual materials, including atlases, estate surveys, ballads and pamphlets, legal documents, and of course plays and poems, are joined into a rich tapestry of social description. The book is divided into three broad sections focusing respectively on estates, on roads, and on the city; and within these sections individual chapters consider one or two early modern plays along with a variety of other materials. While the analysis here remains, as Sullivan concedes, within a broadly "new historicist" tradition of literary analysis, the sheer breadth and unexpectedness of its evidence finally allows the book to transcend the technique of juxtaposition and to reach toward a kind of holistic approach. Sullivan calls on the simultaneous aesthetic and geographic senses of his titular term landscape, using the word as a rubrick for a historical process, at once material and symbolic, in which both literal property relations and the ideological valence of land were drastically transformed. In particular, Sullivan follows the discursive traces of a historical evolution in which what he calls landscapes of "stewardship" or "custom" (in which land is understood as manifesting social relations and moral obligations) were finally transformed into landscapes of "absolute property" (in which land is understood as a fungible economic object, and an object of economic development and profit). Here again, Sullivan's three "landscapes" refer usefully both to the changing forms of land tenure, and to the changing ways in which such changes were seen, understood, celebrated or lamented within discourse. Although he rightly renounces any intention "to gesture toward an idealized feudal past" (44), Sullivan occasionally finds it difficult to avoid a note of elegy or nostalgia for the world we have lost; so that, as he acknowledges, "The story that this book tells is that of the ago n preceding... the triumph of landscapes of absolute property" (14-15).

I will add, finally, the obvious observation that both these books locate themselves unmistakably within the traditional terrain of a Marxist cultural criticism, and yet almost wholly evade any direct encounter with that tradition. Leinwand does occasionally invoke Marx, yet seems unwilling either to quite agree or quite disagree with him. He argues of Merchant of Venice, for example, that the play's "unexpected conjunction of affective elements ... leaves us hard pressed to align the play ideologically with Marx, Smith or Weber" (120). For me, such an assertion merely expresses a quasi-romantic faith that the literary masterpiece somehow transcends its conditions, and achieves a kind of mystical freedom that will not even abide our questions. Sullivan, for his part, avoids Marx altogether, although Marx's rigorous refusal of arcadian nostalgia might sometimes have been a useful corrective. One must point out, however, that the very conjunctions of theater and finance, between plays and property, pursued in both volumes must finally be placed squarely within the Marxist problematic of the economic "base" and the cultural "superstructure;" and that Marxism thus remains a curious absent presence in both books. This is certainly not to suggest that Marxism is the only possible approach to the early modern period; but it is to assert that the long and continuing tradition of Marxist theory and scholarship cannot safely be ignored, especially on the terrain of the "economic."