| This dissertation examines the process by which the early modern market began to accommodate notions and practices of self-interest. Economic agents with a wide range of motivations began, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to assimilate practices and languages that legitimized personal profit and advantage; alternately, they began to temper conventional vilifications of usury, prodigality, and risky enterprises. What is of particular concern to this study is the methods by which poets and playwrights both gauged this shift and advanced it in their own works. Previous examinations of self-interest fail to recognize the extent to which this accommodation took place or the significance of its beginnings in the late sixteenth century. Often authors represented subjects as reacting in inventive, novel ways when faced with vexed social situations in which their social "credit" was skewed and their self-interest was not adequately accounted for. Thus ways in which the individual is represented as proposing readjustments in his or her relationship to the collective, rather than either rejecting broader communal interests or accepting a position of subordination, warrant our attention.;In identifying these representations, I recover early moments in a larger cultural shift toward the acceptance of explicitly self-interested responses. In the drama for example such assumptions can be expressed by way of contrasting characters' behaviors or sets of decisions, one implicitly more attractive than the other. In The Duchess of Malfi (1614), for example, Webster employs the idiom of conscience to contrast a virtuous self-interest on the part of the Duchess with a pernicious one in her brothers. In other cases sympathetic characters echo or mimic the actions of questionable characters, in the process distorting the function of those actions. Jonson, Marston, and Chapman, in Eastward Ho (1605), deploy idioms of personal credit to dramatize virtuous characters borrowing economic behaviors from devious characters. Languages of economic credit and of property rights are employed by the poets Aemilia Lanyer and Isabella Whitney to assert, through their poems' speakers, their own claims to credit and patronage networks. Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon steep Timon of Athens (1608) and The New Atlantis (1627) in credit and legal discourses to critique paternalistic systems that deny the expression of self-interest. |
