Performing Economic Thought
Subtitle
English Drama and Mercantile Writing 1600-1642
"Performing Economic Thought" examines representations of economic exchange in English plays and mercantile treatises written between the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600 and the closing of the public playhouses at the outset of the English Civil War in 1642. These were crucial decades during which economic thinkers re-examined how they conceptualised and depicted commerce as a system.
Adapting approaches pioneered by scholars working under the expansive rubric of Science Studies, "Performing Economic Thought" compares the formal features of treatises and plays, giving particular attention to those features unique to the theatrical experience (for example, the presence of props and actors' bodies and the position of the audience relative to the staged action) that allowed economic systems to be represented and conceptualised differently in the playhouse than in the printed treatise. The book argues that the representational techniques available to playwrights facilitated a more insightful exploration of economic systems than those available to economic writers.
Bio
Bradley D. Ryner is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University.
Praise for this book
'Performing Economic Thought' is an innovative investigation of theatrical technique and mercantilist discourse. Ryner provides lucid readings of dense economic treatises and cogent explications of demanding theoretical material. His objective of historicize the division between fact and fiction that has bought a privileged place for economics is important and ambitious.
Amanda Bailey Shakespeare Quarterly
Ryner has staked out his own turf in this excellent book: he treats seriously economic thought in Renaissance drama, and illuminates the formal qualities of plays that display that thought. In the end, he is successful in his project to compare the efficacy of mercantilists’ economic models and playwrights’ plays: while both attempt to link individual actions to their systemic effects, plays’ more comprehensive, mediated and consciously constructed models successfully ‘teach’ audiences how to see complex socio-economic patterns and their consequences.
Jill P. Ingram Review of English Studies
