In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England by Amanda Bailey
  • Michelle M. Dowd (bio)
Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England. By Amanda Bailey. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. x + 210. $55.00 cloth.

The “new economic criticism” has become one of the most vital methodological forces in Shakespeare studies in recent years, encompassing analyses of labor, consumption, foreign and domestic trade, and various forms of monetary exchange. In Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England, Amanda Bailey adds an important component to this critical conversation by turning our focus to debt, specifically the early modern debt bond. Bailey is interested in the “flexibility of debt as a concept that underwrites morally murky ideologies and ethically ambiguous practices” (x), and her theoretically sophisticated study concerns itself throughout with not only the economic but also the political and ethical implications of debt. The debt bond, Bailey demonstrates, was a new species of money in the period, unique in that its speculative logic of return was secured by the body of the debtor. The human body, in other words, was transformed by the debt bond into a form of property with fluctuating value, a process that served to abstract the body while simultaneously rendering it subject to imprisonment and physical violence. At the same time, the early modern commercial theater was itself [End Page 479] shaped by the use of penal debt bonds by both theater managers and players to (among other things) gain access to costumes, properties, and the use of playhouses. Bailey thus focuses her investigation on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, reading six plays from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that focus on debt. In her deft analysis of canonical texts such as The Merchant of Venice and less discussed plays such as Fletcher and Massinger’s Custom of the Country, Bailey considers how the theater made possible new ways of imagining the intersection of legal, monetary, and literary discourses. In doing so, she reveals “the stakes of staging the complex process of remuneration in a theater financed by debt” (28).

Bailey divides her book into three sections. The first, which features a chapter on Shakespeare and Middleton’s Timon of Athens and another on The Merchant of Venice, considers the “ethical problem of property-in-person” (20) and the latent connection between bodily violence and monetary restitution that structured debt relationships. This is the strongest section of Bailey’s study, providing cogent and original analyses of two plays that have become favored objects of study by Shakespeareans interested in economic criticism. Bailey, however, brings a fresh approach to these texts by demonstrating how the bond fundamentally shapes the formal and ethical impulses of both plays. In chapter 1, Bailey argues that debt bondage enables the restitution of social order in Timon insofar as the bond relies upon an eschewal of the excesses of revenge or “payback” (128). Although the connection Bailey draws between the play world and theater’s material practices through the parallel figures of Timon and Philip Henslowe feels strained in a few places, the chapter does an admirable job of resituating the play’s much-discussed (and much-disparaged) formal structure in terms of a broader logic of debt. As such, of all of the chapters in the book, this one is most successful at fulfilling the promise of Bailey’s arguments: it provides an explicit analysis of how dramatic form responded to and reshaped understandings of debt in the period, and it argues for a direct link between the commercial theater, the playtext, and debt bondage. The second chapter on Merchant is arguably the most exciting because it offers a highly compelling reassessment of a play that might at first blush seem to have outlived its sell-by date for early modern economic scholarship. In reading Merchant as a play about debt rather than usury, Bailey brilliantly elucidates Shakespeare’s concern with questions of forfeiture and ethical ownership. In this shrewd analysis, Shylock errs ultimately “not because he is inhumane but because he deviates from the logic of investment, which recognizes value not in the...

pdf

Share