Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 by Jean-Christophe Agnew (review)

Shorter Book Reviews 385 Jean-Christophe Agnew. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in AngloAmerican Thought, 1550-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. xiv + 262 pp. This suggestive essay explores the improbable links between the emerging market economy and the cultural function of the theatre. Sophisticated Marxism underlies the assumptions, preferred authorities and language of this book. However, nostalgic suppositions about the wholesomeness of pre-capitalist economic relations lets Agnew inflate the considerable social costs of commercial capitalism. While there is nothing here as simple as "base" and "superstructure," the emphasis is upon how changing market relations affected the theatre. ''The theatre became a laboratory of and for the new so~ial relations of agricultural and commercial capitalism'' (xi). There are rewards here, even for those who must suspend disbelief. The prologue is a clear assertion of claims that the cultural history of modern economic man needs attention, and that the money economy eroded traditional social relations and replaced them with antagonisms which the theatre alleviated, interpreted and symbolized. Self-interest is considered "an ideological solution to the cultural confusions produced by the spread of market exchange" (6). Agnew postulates a century of the disruptive power of the market exchange (1550-1650), followed by a century which developed '' a culture of the market.'' Separated by the Puritan closure of the theatres, these categories offer intriguing comparisons. He cleverly takes the central metaphor of the study, theatrum mundi, through its transition from a Stoic and Christian perception of the pointlessness of worldly ambition to a Restoration invitation to deception, role playing and artificial personality. The questions raised by this exploration are numerous, and the author's epigrams are especially provocative, but the whole adventure is fraught with difficulties. First, the structure of the experiment collapses. Not content to compare the theatre before and after the Puritan suppression, Agnew broadens his post-1660 subject to include selected men of letters. Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele, and Adam Smith may fit the history of the trope theatrum mundi, but their centrality pre-empts all serious pursuit of the theatre as a cultural mirror of economic change. A second major difficulty concerns the Puritans. Agnew accepts the notion that Puritans are significant players in the economic transition he is examining. Their hostility to the theatre is discussed in terms of mutual charges of hypocrisy, but this is not enough, given Agnew's chosen Marxist idiom. Marxist perceptions of Puritanism as the religion of emerging capitalism do no fit with Puritan hostility to Agnew's secular capitalist ritualism. Inclusion of America in the title of this study should not sell any copies. There is very little about America, and it does not concern the period before 1750. To 386 Shorter Book Reviews claim that there was no market economy there until after the American Revolution is an absurd way for Agnew to escape his Puritans in America. To see a centurylong cultural lag between England and America is not plausible in any department of life; Boston newsman James Franklin was selling a paper modelled on Addison and Steele's The Spectator as early as 1721. This study is also severely crippled by the dense, inscrutable language made fashionable by some prominent practitioners of the history of ideas. Even an attentive reader cannot penetrate the theatrical elusiveness of the text. A glimpse of an exciting insight is immediately masked by metaphor, by terms like polymorphous and liminalities, by neologisms like "fatedness," "facticity," and by the invitation to "historicize." Entymology is a valued part of the evidence, but it too often leads to elaborate word-play that, although sometimes poetical, is a very ambiguous substitute for explanation. This book will intrigue literary scholars, and should invite further work which can reach more readers. Economic historians, Marxist or otherwise, will use the extensive notes and teasing notions, but are likely to mutter dismissively about lost opportunities and intellectual ''worlds apart.'' Ian K. Steele Department of History University of Western Ontario John R. Nelson, Jr. Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789-1812. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. xv + 221 pp. This book is a thoughtful and useful addition to the growing body...