Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing, 1600–1642 by Bradley D. Ryner (review)

We take as axiomatic that the early modern playhouse functioned as a laboratory for developing concrete formal strategies by which to represent increasingly abstract market relations developing within and beyond England. However, Jean-Christophe Agnew’s Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 and Douglas Bruster’s Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare inaugurated a new understanding of Shakespeare’s theater as an enterprise enabled by and responsive to a burgeoning capitalist culture. The centrality of what we presently call the “new economic criticism” attests to the staying power of economically inflected approaches to the period’s dramatic literature. Monographs on topics ranging from domestic consumption and international commerce to England’s culture of credit have fruitfully investigated the commercial operations of the playhouse and playing companies, as well as the discursive intersections of dramatic and economic texts. A new crop of literary critics influenced by developments in political philosophy, legal studies, and the sociology of science are now expanding the purview of the materialist theater by elucidating the relation between dramatic representations and economic transactions as a series of theoretical problems. As a part of the epistemological turn in the “new economic criticism,” Bradley Ryner’s Performing Economic Thought explores the ways that early seventeenth-century drama depicted various economic systems as an abstract totality. In so doing, Ryner argues, plays interrogated the very conceptual models upon which mercantilists relied to construct the Economic as a self-contained, distinct arena. While we take for granted that the theater represents market relations, only now are we coming to understand theatricality as a contributing factor to the complexity of economic discourse itself.

The insights of Bruno Latour, Michel Serres, and Michel Callon into the relationship between representations and the material world underwrite Ryner’s project and lead him to productive discoveries about the epistemological status of economics and drama. Demonstrating an enviable ability to move between micro- and macroeconomics, Ryner sheds new light on theater’s role as an intermediary. Time and again plays stage exactly what mercantile writers sought to avoid—an awareness of the failure of abstraction to represent economic realities. Once we regard theatricality as a process of transformation, distortion, and modification, Ryner suggests, we come to see the stage as a showcase for how knowledge is performed. By foregrounding the constructed nature of economic models, the theater enhanced rather than invalidated its own ability to make knowledge.

Through a close examination of playwrights who crafted “self-reflexive models of economic exchange” (188), Ryner anatomizes a theater that facilitated the conceptualization of royal finance, currency exchange, global trade, and poverty as elements of a systemic totality. Chapter 1 identifies the tension between mercantilists who sought to establish the factuality of their writings by disavowing literary features and playwrights who introduced self-critical models of economic phenomena that foreground the fictitious nature of mercantilist models. Ryner’s close reading of Gerald Malynes’s reliance on the medieval symbol of the dragon as a metaphor to conceptualize the devastating effects of inequitable exchange reveals that the relationship between quantifiable particulars and abstract theory was “the problem” for economic thinkers in the period (26). Ryner demonstrates how this problem is exacerbated onstage in his discussion of the failure of tabulated data to serve as a model for international commerce in Walter Mountefort’s Launching of the Mary. Plays, Ryner shows, were inferior delivery systems for the unmediated transmission of metaphors seeking to encapsulate the relation between individual data and economic systems.

In chapters 2 and 3, Ryner delves further into theater’s mediating function by exploring plays that draw attention to the economic externalities (overflows) that treatises tried to exclude. In these chapters, Ryner emphasizes that onstage overflow is the rule rather than the exception. Moreover, by exposing economic frames as fragile and artificial constructions, theatrical techniques alter the systems they seek to describe...