Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England by Amanda Bailey (review)

Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England, Amanda Bailey’s study of early modern debt bondage and its relationship to the theater, will give early modernists working in the realm of economic criticism much to ponder, enrich the work of theater scholars through the fresh and specific context Bailey brings to The Merchant of Venice and the other plays under discussion, and be welcomed by students of historical captivity and enslavement for its illumination of the related but heretofore understudied discourse of debt bondage.

Bailey’s introduction situates her project within the current historical formalist (16) and new economic (12) movements in literary criticism and lays out a number of ambitious goals for discussing the relationship of debt bondage not only to the content of early modern plays but also to the circumstances of early modern theatrical production. Chapter 1, “Timon of Athens, Forms of Payback, and the Genre of Debt” then begins the first of a series of close readings of individual plays. In this chapter, Bailey argues that the famously problematic Timon “is both an elaboration and amplification of the social and legal consequences of not simply credit arrangements in general but the specific monetary instrument, the penal debt bond” (28). Bailey shows that the debt bond’s claim on the debtor’s body in the event of default establishes links between debt and violence, and debt and possession, that the play exploits through metaphor and the events of its seemingly fragmented plot.

In chapter 2, “Shylock and the Slaves: Owing and Owning in The Merchant of Venice” Bailey builds upon an insight by Walter Cohen (51) to argue persuasively that the play has nothing to do with usury (which requires repayment of loans with interest) and everything to do with debt bondage (in which money is loaned interest-free, but if repayment is late, “penal conditions” such as penalty payments or imprisonment are the consequence) (53–54). Merchant thus “dramatiz[es] the moment at which the body of the debtor stands in for the monetary loan” (56) and, in so doing, “explores the circumstances under which a creditor may or may not possess his debtor, as well as the social, political, and theological implications of this conundrum” (57).

Chapter 3, “Michaelmas Term and the Problem of Satisfaction,” examines the role of the debt bond in Middleton’s play: the bond helps to disrupt the usual generic conventions of comedy—especially marriage—because “the hand [i.e. signature] of the male debtor, unlike that of the betrothed woman, attests to his coeval status as the object of property and the subject of contract” (78). The play, Bailey argues, also reveals an increasing early modern anxiety about the relevance of intention to the signing of contracts: if a debtor was tricked into putting his hand to an abusive contract, was the contract still legitimate? “In Michaelmas Term,” Bailey concludes, “even as the bond seems to render consent tangible through the material artifact of the signature, at every turn the play exposes the incoherency of agency and the debt bond as a palimpsest, a document comprised of layer upon layer of uncertain causality, confused intentionality, and suspect liability” (95). The disruptions to the play’s ostensibly comedic genre become moments when Middleton experiments with violating his own contract with his audience (96).

Bailey’s next chapter, “Freedom, Bondage, and Redemption in The Custom of the Country,” examines Fletcher and Massinger’s “obscene” and “scandalous” play that “capitalizes on its audience’s fascination with tales of captivity and self-sale of Christian men in the Mediterranean” (97). While this play about forced sexual servitude in Lisbon is less immediately about English debt bondage than about outright captivity and enslavement, Bailey makes the case that early modern English audiences would have connected the characters’ experiences with the sufferings of English indentured servants in the Americas—a form of servitude intimately connected to debt bondage. Bailey argues that Custom offers...