| This dissertation depicts the life of England's money in circulation through purses and through texts between 1540 and 1610. I not only portray coins as represented by literary practice, but examine the material coinage that survives from the Tudor period as itself a polymorphous representation: of value, of the money-form, of the monarch. The work responds to recent developments in the object-based criticism of 'material culture,' but attempts to expand both the method and the scope of that practice: the method, by drawing upon word-image theory from the convergence of literary study and art history; and the scope, by asserting an object of study that is individuated neither by its production history nor by its life as a possession, but is entirely interchangeable and mass-produced. I present the coinage in four distinct constructions made available by different Renaissance discourses, some of them complementary and others contradictory. I argue that in the works of the mid-century 'commonwealth' writers the coinage represents the public standard of measure, a civic good wrongfully manipulated by the crown; while in the versions of prodigality described by sonnetteers and pamphletteers the coin becomes a private and individual burden. I then construe the impression of the stamp upon gold as an ontological problem in the temporal relation of matter within form, in Spenser's 'Mammon' episode in Book II of The Faerie Queene, and in Marlowe's Jew of Malta . Lastly, the records of counterfeiting trials and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and Henry V alike display the coinage as a uniquely exposed, promiscuous representation of the Queen. These analyses converge in my argument to define the coin as a complex and historically specific instrument for the measurement of values, one which serves in turn to measure the Renaissance subject in relation not only to his or her possessions, but to the national market and to the state. |
