Pub Date : 2021-02-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198859697.003.0002
Laura Kolb
Chapter 1 analyzes Shakespeare’s Othello alongside sixteenth-century commercial arithmetics. Othello makes a problem that inflects certain narrative examples in these math books into grounds for tragedy: the problem of calculating the value of persons in a society where new forms of commercial credit were unsettling traditional notions of worth. Social evaluation comes to the fore in the specific mathematical genre of “partnership problems,” which were designed to teach merchants how to calculate returns on joint ventures but which also demanded skill in reckoning the worth of words and of persons. Othello’s jealousy operates according to an extreme version of the logic inherent to these mathematical problems. The evaluation of others and of the self are linked, in Othello, to acts of evaluation drawn from the world of trade—the world reflected and addressed in arithmetic textbooks in general, and partnership problems in particular.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198859697.003.0005
Laura Kolb
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.
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Pub Date : 2021-02-04DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198859697.003.0006
Laura Kolb
The coda tracks the afterlife of structures discussed earlier in the book, attending both to change and continuity. Today, personal creditworthiness is represented in numerical credit scores, and individuals often feel disconnected from the abstract, barely visible networks of global finance. Yet even within this economy—as different as it is from early modern England’s—the need for trust persists, and skills in rhetoric and interpretation remain valuable. The coda ends by linking classical theories of poetic and rhetorical efficacy to early modern practical literature, and both to modern advice on the importance of impression management in business and advertising.
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