Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism

In this collection literary scholars, theorists and historians deploy new economic techniques to illuminate English Renaissance literature in fresh ways. Contributors variously explore poetry’s precarious perch between gift and commodity; the longing for family in The Comedy of Errors as symbolically expressing the alienating pressures of mercantilism; Measure for Measure ’s representation of singlewomen and the feminization of poverty; the collision between two views of money in a possible collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton; the cultural spread of an accounting mentality and quantitative thinking; and money as it crosses the frontier between price and pricelessness, and from early bodily-injury insurance schemes to The Merchant of Venice .

DOUGLAS BRUSTER Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, USA BARBARA CORRELL Teaches Renassiance Literature and Cultural Studies at Cornell University, New York, USA ROBERT DARCY Assistant Professor of English at Utica College, New York, USA VALERIE FORMAN Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Seventeeth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA DAVID HAWKES Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, USA JOHN JOWETT Reader in Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, UK NATASHA KORDA Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University, USA MICHAEL LEMAHIEU Doctoral Candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA KATHARINE EISAMAN MAUS Professor of English at the University of Virginia, USA STEVE MENTZ Assistant Professor of English at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, USA MARK NETZLOFF Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Wilwaukee, USA TERESA LANPHER NUGENT Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA CURTIS PERRY Associate Professor of English at ARizona State University, USA SCOTT CUTLER SHERSHOW Author of Puppets and ’Popular’ Culture ERIC V. SPENCER Associate Professor of English at Albertson College of Idaho, USA LUKE WILSON Associate Professor of English at Ohio State Univeristy, USA