Other Worlds

Abstract

Chapter 4 turns from social fictions to fictive renderings of the wide and variegated world of trade. Early modern merchandise mirrored—and fueled—the poetic imagination. In turn, poets conjured fantastic visions of the world structured by trade. Ben Jonson’s Volpone exemplifies the period association of circulating commodities with poetic creativity: between world and word. Yet the play, remarkably, lacks debt relations. Decades later, Jonson revisits the relationship between word and world in his late, strange The Magnetic Lady, where credit takes center stage. The play’s figure of commerce, Moth Interest, is a moneylender whose verbal and imaginative capacity marks him as an heir of Jonson’s Volpone but renders him out of place in an economy increasingly oriented towards abstract capital and away from tangible wealth. Reading this play alongside tables of compound interest and tables of logarithms, the chapter argues that the play represents a world turning toward the abstract and numerical, and away from the verbal and material. It thus signals an end to the fictions of credit that had animated the Shakespearean stage: fictions that were fundamentally local and dialogic, developed in the interplay of artifice and interpretation.