Performing Economic Thought: English Drama and Mercantile Writing 1600-1642

This book provides an original account of the relationship between economic thought and early modern drama. This new study examines the structural similarities between English mercantile treatises and drama c1600-1642. Bradley D. Ryner analyses the representational conventions of plays and mercantile treatises written between the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600 and the closing of the public playhouses at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642. Ryner shows that playwrights’ manipulation of specific elements of theatrical representation – such as metaphor, props, dramatic character, stage space, audience interaction, and genre – exacerbated the tension between the aspects of the world taken into account by a particular representation and those aspects that it neglects. Treatises by Thomas Milles, Gerard Malynes, Edward Misselden, and Thomas Mun are considered alongside plays by William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Walter Mountfort, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, Philip Massinger, and Richard Brome.