IN PRAISE OF DEBT: AFFECTIVE ECONOMICS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE Lauren Garrett A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2014 Approved by: Mary Floyd-Wilson David Baker Reid Barbour Megan Matchinske Jessica Wolfe © 2014 Lauren Garrett ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Lauren Garrett: In Praise of Debt: Affective Economics in Early Modern English Literature (Under the direction Mary Floyd-Wilson) This dissertation examines texts that thematize the crises of trust resulting from the pressures of early modern England’s expanding credit economy. A century before the founding of the Bank of England, early modern credit remained an emotive and moral currency, presumably dependent on affective ties, moral obligations, knowledge of a potential debtor’s character and a concern for their well-being. And yet, in this period of widespread mobility, immigration, urbanization, conspicuous consumption, and heightened levels of debt litigation, creditors and debtors were often strangers bound only by a legal bond that carried penalties of surprising severity. At this critical moment of emerging capitalistic practices and their attendant social and moral disruptions, Elizabethan and Jacobean authors are drawn to the discursive interplay between the legal problem of debt and those debts of love and social obligation it threatened. As an emerging ethos shaped by market relations and commercial culture pervades, complicates, and reconfigures traditional structures of affective relations – Christian fellowship, friendship, marriage, kinship, and service – early modern writers exploit the age-old interdependence of economic and moral discourses. The resulting discourse of debt is characterized by a strategic slippage between debt’s economic and emotive registers. The texts included in this study deploy this discourse to achieve ends at once self-interested and moralistic. Some debtors use the iii discourse to perpetually defer payment by reorganizing their debt relations, while others use it to resist disenfranchisement by reorienting the basis of credibility. Through its inscription into law with the 1571 Act Against Usury, this discourse enables the advancement of predatory lending as an acceptable violation of traditional social obligations. At the same time, its inscription into genres such as city comedy and domestic tragedy show the discourse to be a rhetorical antidote for the worst excesses of both economic and affective debt relations. On a broader scale, this project reveals a relationship between economic and affective bonds that is more complex than we have previously understood. As the two begin to move towards increasingly distinct fields, the implications of their shared rhetorical and conceptual basis become imbued with an unprecedented signifying power for social intervention. iv To Django, my partner in all things. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In the process of grappling with what it meant to be in debt in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, I have acquired my own debts of the sort for which I am happy to remain bound. Primary among my creditors is Mary Floyd-Wilson, a remarkable scholar, a generous teacher, a tireless advocate, and ultimately, a darn good friend. This project was born in a Shakespeare seminar I took with her my second year of graduate school, and she has encouraged and inspired me every step of the way since. Both this project, and my own abilities and confidence as a scholar, owe a great deal to her example and her guidance. I am also deeply in debt to Reid Barbour and Jessica Wolfe, from whom I learned everything I know about the intellectual history of the Renaissance. I came to graduate school a student of Shakespeare, and I leave it a student of an era thanks to the rigorous and fascinating courses I was so fortunate to take from these two truly great teacher-scholars. I owe a debt of gratitude to Megan Matchinske for helping me develop my theoretical acumen as a green graduate student with a lot of catching up to do, and more recently, for being an incredible editor and confidante during the job market process. And to David Baker, I owe thanks for allowing me to audit his course on Early Modern Economics and Literature, which helped me try out some of my early thinking around this project. In the later stages of the dissertation, I benefitted immensely from his first-hand experience and expert advice on how to responsibly and productively bring early modern economics and literature together. Finally, I will always be grateful to my first mentor, Eric Griffin, a great Shakespearean who I am honored to call a friend. My dissertation, my thinking, writing, teaching, and humanity vi are all the better for the examples and teaching of these six scholars. I am happy to remain in their debt and to pay it forward to my own students. I would not have found my way out of the dissertation writing stage without the help of my writing group colleagues: Heath Sledge, Katie Shrieves, Kate Massie, and Ben Sammons. Together we helped one another learn how to ask for help, share bad writing, admit to confusion and uncertainty, recognize great ideas, write a chapter, turn a chapter into an article, live with imperfection and rejection, celebrate victories, and above all, finish, finish, finish and move on. I am grateful to these scholars and friends for sharing their ideas and writing process with me, and for helping me to make sense of my own. I am also grateful to several friends in the department who were instrumental to my personal and professional development. Thanks to Elissa Zellinger for helping me navigate the last decade of my personal and professional growth through her constant friendship and advice. Thanks to Nick Gaskill for the example of an academic life that is at once ambitious, balanced, stylish, and fun. Thanks to Nathan Stodgill, a fantastic scholar and teacher who reminded me that being an academic should be a creative and self-reflective endeavor. To my family, my parents and my siblings, I’m grateful for emotional support, for their never really questioning, as they might easily have done, why in the world I was doing this and when exactly I would be finished. Above all, I am indebted to my husband Django for supporting me in every possible way through this long haul. When we met, I was working on my dissertation. When we married, I was working on my dissertation. And when we had our son, I was finishing my dissertation. Django read nearly every word I wrote and had an unfailing knack of reminding me of just how fascinating the central questions of this project are. Finally, thanks are due to my beautiful son who shared some of his earliest weeks of life with the happy conclusion of this project. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION – “Thou Owest Me Thy Love”: Falstaffian Debt . 1 The Problem of Debt in Early Modern England . 16 Debt’s Discursive History . 21 Debt in Classical Literature . 21 Debt in the Bible . 27 Debt in Theory . 33 The Critical Field . 37 CHAPTER 1 – Sympathetic Debtors and Creditors Obliged: The Paradoxical Praise of Debt . 52 CHAPTER 2 – “None Me Credit Dare”: Isabella Whitney’s Sympathetic Debtor . 83 CHAPTER 3 – True Interest and the Affections: the Dangers of Lawful Lending in The Merchant of Venice . 111 CHAPTER 4 – Reading the Unkind Household in City Comedy . 148 A Trick to Catch the Old One . 154 A Chaste Main in Cheapside . 166 Greene’s Tu Quoque . 183 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 . 189 A New Way to Pay Old Debts . 206 CHAPTER 5 – Kindness that Kills: Tragic Misreadings of Debt . 223 A Woman Killed With Kindness . 224 Timon of Athens . 237 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 266 viii INTRODUCTION “Thou owest me thy love”: Falstaffian Debt “The very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.” -David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years “At bottom, perhaps all economic criticism is founded upon a faith in universal equivalents: our ‘gold standard’ is a belief in the comparability of different cultural systems.” -Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, New Economic Criticism In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, Mistress Quickly informs Hal that Falstaff has publically claimed the prince owes him a thousand pounds. The implication here is that Falstaff has been using his relationship with the heir apparent to generate lines of credit to fund his sack and capon habit. When Hal confronts Falstaff with this fraudulent debt, the old knight dodges his lie by appealing to a higher obligation between them: “A thousand pound, Hal? A million! Thy love is worth a million; thou owest me thy love” (3.3.123-124).1 The ease with which Falstaff converts friendship into credit, and debt back into affective obligation, points to a continuity between affection and economics that Falstaff at once manipulates for his own interests and insists upon with surprising moral sincerity. This rhetorical trick is the crux of Falstaff’s paradoxical function as both a vice figure and, for me, the Henriad’s unlikely moral center. How should we understand this rhetorical sliding scale between debt’s monetary values on the one hand and its emotional and spiritual components on the other? Is it all rhetorical trickery, witty improvisation inspired by the pressures of a credit economy? Or do these rhetorical maneuvers also serve a 1 1 Henry IV, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997), 1147-1224. References are to act, scene, and line, here and hereafter cited in the text.