Desires of Credit in Early Modern Theory and Drama: Commerce, Poesy, and the Profitable Imagination

Studying the conjoined emergence of literary criticism, economic theory, and public theater at the turn of the seventeenth century in England, this book posits that what connects all three is a fascination with creating something out of nothing. Each of the five chapters highlights a particular dramatization of economic trust on the Renaissance stage, in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, and Jonson.