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

There is a trend among some scholars to stress the ‘relevance’ of their material by sometimes drawing very long bows between their content of many centuries ago and recent events. So it is with Amanda Bailey’s text on financial bondage in early modern England, which she begins with reference to the credit crunch of the early twenty-first century.

What then follows, however, is a succinct (at 148 pages) analysis of the intersection of the legal history of debts and financial bondage with the content and themes of particular plays, including for obvious reasons The Merchant of Venice, but also less familiar works Timon of Athens, Michaelmas Term, and The Custom of the Country. As Bailey points out, many dramatists including Middleton, Tourneur, Jonson, and Dekker found themselves in jail for debt at various points in their careers and a Renaissance-era theatre company, whose members were bound to it, represented a form of legal bond. Bailey deftly weaves together legal and economic history with readings of the particular plays and positions a written bond as a crucial aspect of an economy with uncertain coinage. Her focus is the possibility of forfeiture on a bond and the implications of this in a society where the human body could then become property.

Although a vast literature has developed around The Merchant of Venice, Bailey aims to re-orient a particular understanding of the play originally proposed by Walter Cohen that stressed Shylock’s irrationality in demanding flesh. She instead repositions the demand as one that was fiscally rational, given that flesh and money were ‘comparable forms of property’ (p. 52). She similarly advances an original reading of Timon, stressing that it should be seen as a ‘botched’ revenge tragedy. This point on revenge is particularly important to Bailey, who stresses that bonds were more than statements of debt and often became a form of payback. The legal-themed Michaelmas Term and the Lisbon-set Custom of the Country both allow Bailey to consider types of bondage against historical actualities, including the fact of Lisbon having been the centre of trade in human beings.

Readers will find new light shed on the very familiar Merchant of Venice, but the value of this text is also in the assessment of the obscure works and Bailey’s detailed evaluation of the historical economic background to their themes of property, debt, and ownership.