65. How's your brand image? Econolingua and Market Metaphors.

In a period when we are so conscious of the potential commercialisation of everything from sport, games and education to the genetic code and concepts of the self [what's your brand image?], it is instructive to look back at earlier times and examine the spread of market metaphors into everyday life.

Ben Jonson, in the induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614) [see blog 63], presents his play ‘as merely another commodity in a mercantile world.’ The idea of words, plays, people as commodities for barter or exchange in the marketplace brought the language of commerce to centre stage in the new Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. Sandra Fischer’s Econolingua: a glossary of coins and economic language in Renaissance Drama (1985) illustrated in detail the pervasiveness of economic and commercial terminology in the plays of the period and demonstrated the extent to which economic and commercial transactions were beginning to define social relationships, individual motivations and cultural institutions:

Economy begins to penetrate all human relations: money becomes the only way of assessing value, profit the only impetus for human action. Comedy shows characters defined by economic status: usurers, misers, prodigals, younger brothers, heirs, merchants, shopkeepers, tradesmen, scriveners, new men, charitable gentlemen, impecunious rogues; widows, wives, virgins, marriageable daughters and sisters, prostitutes. Plots often treat the growing connection between money and love; courtship and marriage become economic games, legal contracts, exchange transactions. The transference of wealth begins to represent love, the possession of wealth to define social value and status, and human relations to offer themselves primarily as means to profit through exploitation of exchange value rather than appreciation of intrinsic worth. Sex and wooing become commercial transactions, often instigated in a market or shop setting. In some plays women are actually auctioned off to the highest bidder.

By the end of the sixteenth century a range of economic language and terminology was in use in London providing a rich vein for playwrights to mine when drawing character and plot. Econolingua was embedded in popular culture and was by no means the language of the specialist few or of the merchant estate alone. Playwrights’ allusions, colloquialisms, double-entendres, puns, metaphors and stereotypical characterisations all suggest a common familiarity of audiences and authors with the everyday practicalities of a money economy, with the general language of commercial transactions and with the market roles related to specific occupations. Plays are full of references to the documents of the commercial world - to accounts, assurances,  bills, bonds, indents, indentures, inventories, quittances (documents certifying the full repayment of debts), reckonings, sureties, tallies, tenders; of references to financial processes and outcomes - audits, barter, brokage, credit, fees, forfeits, interest, investment, monopolies, profits, tolls, usury; of references to the physical locations associated with business and trade - the counting-house, the Exchange, the market or mart, the mint; and of references to the dramatis personae of the business community - agents, auditors,  bankrouts (bankrupts), bondmen, brokers, bursemen (merchants and money-men), cashiers, chapmen (buyers and sellers, hagglers over prices), creditors, market men, notaries, scriveners*, usurers. 

[*A scrivener was a scribe or an amanuensis, but scriveners were particularly associated with the writing of contracts and bonds and often acted as notaries and investment brokers.]

It is arguable that the English Renaissance dramatists, in their incorporation of economic ideas and expressions in their plays, are reflecting social changes of the period, particularly those changes that are consequent upon the development and extension of the market economy(1). It is Fischer’s view that by the middle years of the sixteenth century, the medieval economy, ‘a branch of religious morality based on Biblical texts and classical teaching and indoctrinated into the public through standard sermons, morality plays, and econo-religious tracts warning of the spiritual consequences of the abuse and misuse of money', is being progressively displaced by the expansion of a money economy and the demands of a growing international trade. This process of displacement, argues Fischer, is reflected in English Renaissance plays where a range of ‘recurring metaphor clusters’ (for example, marriage as an economic contract, women as merchandise, the economics of sex, human worth as exchange value) illuminate ‘the transition from medieval economy to mercantilist ethics’. Indeed Fischer claims that the ‘metaphors do not appear haphazardly; instead, they indicate first a resistance to the exchange ethic, then a grappling with its operation, and finally an acceptance of its metamorphised system of economy as the dominant force in society.’

This notion of a logical progression of dramatic metaphors paralleling social and economic changes in the period covered by the plays themselves is hard to sustain. The transition from a set of  values and attitudes rooted in feudalism to an acceptance of the ethical premises and ideology of a market economy and market society(2), if it happened at all in this linear fashion, which I very much doubt, happened over many generations. It was certainly not encompassed by the timespan of English Renaissance drama. The economic artefacts and commercial devices, the retailing and wholesaling practices, the banking and legal structures that support trade, the coinage and bills of exchange, the merchants and moneylenders, while they may give rise to a rich vocabulary for Renaissance dramatists to draw upon, have their origins in the medieval world. The practical realities of the marketplace and its transactional mode were undoubtedly well understood by Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. That those audiences accepted ‘mercantilist ethics’ as the organising principle for society generally is, however, not easily demonstrated.

Jean-Christophe Agnew, however, goes further than Fischer in theorising the relationship between the language and content of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and changes in economy, society and culture. In Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (1986), he argues that the theatre is instrumental in forming new attitudes towards individuality, personality, motivation and personal relationships, attitudes that are congruent with a newly emerging market economy and market culture. It is, in Agnew’s view, the theatrical representation of the impact of commercial and money values on issues of individual identity and motivation, and on personal relationships, that partially shapes new definitions of these matters in the broader community: ‘The early modern stage did more than reflect relations occurring elsewhere; it modelled and in important respects materialized these relations.... Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre....did not just hold the mirror up to nature; it brought forth “another nature” - a new world of “artificial persons” - the features of which audiences were just beginning to make out in the similarly new and enigmatic exchange relations then developing outside the theatre.’ For Agnew the critical period for understanding the growing impact of market exchange on definitions of individuality and personal identity is the two hundred year period from 1550 to 1750. The years from 1550 to 1650 - “the long sixteenth century” - are those ‘in which the disruptive and transformative powers of market exchange were first brought home to Britons,’ and the years from 1650 to 1750 are those ‘in which Britons and Americans alike began to fashion a culture of the market.'(3)

But the purchase of commodities and of character, the acquisitive instincts associated with, and promoted by, the excitements of the marketplace, and the reflection of these phenomena in cultural products like novels, is not simply a feature of “the long eighteenth century”. Even if, as has been argued, a fully fledged consumer society had emerged in England by 1800, we can nevertheless look both back and forward in time to similar connections between the commercial and the cultural. In his Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (1992), Douglas Bruster, for example, explores the relationship between the economic and social conditions of the period, the nature of theatres as commercial enterprises and the content of the plays performed in those theatres. He argues that, although the market was not a new phenomenon, Shakespearian London was a city at the hub of an energetic market expansion and developing financial sophistication and complexity. With its growing commercialism, expanding population and, following the agricultural depression of the 1590s, increased rural migration, unemployment and vagrancy, London was at the centre of an emergent ‘market society’. He links these macroeconomic conditions to the structure of the theatre industry and to textual analysis of particular dramas.

Bruster points out that both capitalism and the theatre were institutionalised in London during this period. The Royal Exchange (“Gresham’s Exchange”) was constructed in 1566-67 with a range of new shops establishing themselves in the surrounding piazzas. It provided national and international finance and foreign currency exchange, and distributed new coinage. The New Exchange, ‘a kind of stock exchange and estate agency’, was built in 1609. The Red Lion opened for plays in 1567, and the first purpose-built public playhouses, The Theatre and The Curtain, were built in 1576 and 1577 respectively. The Rose, the first theatre to be built on the south side of the River Thames, opened in 1587, The Swan in 1595 and The Globe in 1599. Playhouse construction continued into the new century. The playhouses were set up as entirely commercial enterprises although they did occasionally perform subsidised productions. Critics and playwrights of the period recognised this entrenchment of theatres and plays within a context of business and market transactions. Stephen Gosson, who was a playwright and later a critic of the theatre, called theatres ‘the very markets of bawdry’. The playwright Thomas Dekker drew a direct parallel between the theatre and the Royal Exchange: ‘The theatre is your poets’ Royal Exchange, upon which their Muses - that are now turned to merchants - meeting, barter away that light commodity of words for a lighter ware than words - plaudits.

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(1).  Market Economy: “a money economy in which open market exchange is the dominant form of economic transaction, in which there is regulation to facilitate open market competition, and in which buyers and sellers, producers and consumers need have no personal or social ties other than those necessary for the completion of their market transactions.”

(2). Market Society: “a society in which the social structure, the most powerful institutions and organisations, the highest political offices, the key leadership positions, the most prestigious social roles, and the pre-eminent forms of social control, primarily reflect or serve market-determined status.”

(3). Market Culture: “a cultural system in which market symbols, market language and market ideology dominate the material, intellectual and spiritual life of the community.”
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Sources:

         Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 1986. Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
         Bruster, Douglas, 1992. Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
         Fischer, Sandra K., 1985. Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama, Newark, University of Delaware Press.

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Related Blogs:
 9.  The Adventures of a Banknote, 18 November 2011.
11. "In the Name of God and of Profit", 26 November 2011.
63.  Mistress Commodity and the Shop of Satan, 24 August 2013.

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