Gift/economy: Drama and the politics of gift-giving in early modern England

This dissertation is grounded in the observation that nearly every instance of gift-giving within early modern English drama spanning from around 1590 to 1610 serves to concretize some form of hierarchical social hostility. I explain this phenomenon by locating the dramas within a "crisis of obligation" that characterizes this span of thirty years.;Due to a number developments in contract law, money lending, and business practices that stressed the need for explicit and bilateral agency in exchange agreements, traditions of gift-giving--especially those involving patronage and displays of noblesse oblige--increasingly tended to be met with attitudes of confusion and frustration among parties who had much to lose in a time of economic instability. At the highest level, this frustration was embodied in challenges to the sovereign's own prerogative of bestowing gifts, but the problem also characterized court favors more generally, the culture of credit in the marketplace, and even the economics of the theater itself. Drawing on recent scholarship concerned with patronage practices, the spectacle of power, and legal theory in early modern England, I show how representations of giving on stage could function as politically charged critiques of an increasingly distasteful culture of prerogative.