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

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Money and the Age of Shakespeare: Essays in New Economic Criticism Edited by Linda Woodbridge New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

"It is the premise of this volume," Linda Woodbridge writes in the introduction to her edited collection Money and the Age of Shakespeare, "that money, commerce, and economics make a good deal of difference to English Renaissance literature" (9). This premise is hardly revelatory or controversial, at least not now in the wake of two decades of scholarship on the relations between early modern English literature and the economic. In the eighties and the nineties, important studies by Jean-Christophe Agnew, Richard Halpern, Douglas Bruster, William Ingram, Lars Engle, and Theodore Leinwand helped delimit the field. (1) Those groundbreaking works have been joined in the new millennium by contributions from David Hawkes, Natasha Korda, Ceri Sullivan, and myself. (2) Woodbridge's collection takes its place amongst these studies, each of which has shown how economic matters "make a good deal of difference" to early modern English literature.

Even as Woodbridge's premise presumes some kind of critical consensus, however, that "difference" also hints at the exact opposite. Although few would quibble with her claim that the literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is riddled with the traces of the economic, the question of how we are to read those traces has generated a considerable divergence of focus and method, divergences readily apparent in the extant critical literature. Agnew's account of an impalpable, alienating market (for example) is very much at odds with Sullivan's vision of a personable agora; Halpern's Marxist analysis of the poetics of primitive accumulation diverges from Leinwand's more psychoanalytically inflected study of finance and affect; Korda's feminist investigation of Shakespeare's domestic economies contrasts Engle's pragmatist analysis of Shakespeare's markets of value. If early modern economic activity makes a difference to the literature of the Renaissance, then it has also generated an astonishing array of differences in the critical literature of the present. In the face of such diversity, however, the subtitle of Woodbridge's collection--"Essays in New Economic Criticism"--makes a striking claim for unity. In doing so, the volume signals its debt to Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, who devised the term "New Economic Criticism" to designate not just a theme but also a new movement in literary criticism. (3) But just how much...

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