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  • Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage
  • Ivan Cañadas
Forman, Valerie , Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008; cloth; pp. 296; R.R.P. US$59.95; ISBN 9780812240962.

In early seventeenth-century England, international trade was deemed economically detrimental. This applied particularly when English traders invested in foreign goods for resale, a practice that was interpreted as 'an unredeemable loss' which would deplete the nation of 'coin and bullion', rather than as conducive to subsequent profit (p. 3). Indeed, the concept of investment as a commercial principle was only formulated during this century: 'coined in 1613 in the correspondence of the English East India Company', the word that formerly described 'religious or regal endowment' came to describe 'the outlay of money in the expectation of a profit' (p. 5).

With a firm grounding in economic history, Valerie Forman traces a fascinating connection between evolving views about international trade, the religious discourse of Christian redemption - manifested in St Anselm's 'paradox of the felix culpa' (p. 15), with which Thomas Mun's advocacy of foreign investment as an ongoing process of 'recirculation and re-employment' (p. 155) raised important analogies - and the evolution of the period's most popular dramatic genre: tragicomedy.

Forman details the progression from romantic comedies, in which 'comedic obstacles' are 'overcome', to 'hybrid' plays such as Twelfth Night, which highlight 'the potential for loss' (p. 48), and then to 'true' tragicomedies, where losses are made good, and where the analogy with the theory of redemptive investment is often emphasized through commercial themes and international settings. As Forman demonstrates, the latter plays 'employ the dialectics of tragicomedy and the economic undercurrents of religious redemption to explore the perceived need for foreign exchanges and to rewrite the perils of such expansions as sources of profit and accumulation, which in turn are reabsorbed into the tragicomic theater' (p. 109).

She begins with a discussion of three late Elizabethan plays, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta, plays suggestive of economic 'stasis and insularity'. She then proceeds to The Winter's Tale, in which Leontes' surviving child is 'aptly named Perdita, after her position of loss, abandonment, and ruin' (p. 92), and which tellingly figures the redemption of the king's willful, initial loss of his family through the gold left with the child, which both re-establishes her identity and grows into a fortune in the [End Page 225] shepherd's hands, hence, also providing a princely dowry for Perdita.

Part II focuses on Eastern settings, which reflected concerns raised by trade in the Levant and in the East Indies. The common incidence of captivity and ransom demands, as well as the (propagandistic) celebration of a contrast between English forms of establishing 'free' foreign trade 'without colonial possession', and Dutch 'coercion', feature in Fletcher's The Island Princess (c. 1619-21) - 'the first English play to be set in the East Indies' (p. 121) - and in Massinger's The Renegado (1623/4), described as intended to 'showcase the inventiveness of [Thomas Mun's] balance of trade theory', while also intriguingly addressing moral anxieties about the potential inequity of making 'too much profit' (p. 148; emphasis mine).

The book's epilogue focuses on Webster's The Devil's Law-Case (c. 1617-19), a play which Forman sees in terms of 'the failure of tragicomedy to work' (p. 188). She cites as an allegory of the motif of economic redemption a situation in which two suitors fight a duel over the sister of the protagonist, who, stabbing the one he did not favour to finish him off, inadvertently saves his life by causing the putrefying blood to flow out. It is arguably possible to see Webster's play as something other than a failed, accidentally farcical late-tragicomedy, however. Firstly, The Devil's Law-Case actually preceded the tragicomedies by Fletcher and Massinger discussed, and there is also Webster's predilection for gore spectacle and shock-tactics - not to mention his proven capacity for satire and parody in the Jacobean poet's war, towards which the play's suggestively city-comedic...

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