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CRITICS of Thomas Heywood's second part of If You Know Not Me, You Know No Bodie (c. 1605) have long acknowledged the play's interest in prais- ing certain aspects of England's increased trade and mercantilism. Most recently, David Hawkes wrote that the play legitimizes merchants by insisting on a strict connection between signs and referents; in this play's case, the connection between money and its value. Hawkes argues that Heywood's play promulgates the "idea that signs are naturally and inherently connected with their referents" and that this idea "is compatible with aristocratic notions of birth and breeding" but not quite so in "a money-based market economy."1 Hawkes's argument that the play thus emphasizes how Gresham and merchants like him will not make use of any "ethically dubious" modes of representation detached from reality echoes the large amount of critical work about Heywood's play in particular and nascent capitalism in general that examines the ways in which early modern writers created and described the new statuses and practices arising from certain modes of commerce.
For the second If You Know Not Me, the shift in focus from Elizabeth as Protestant savior in the first play to Sir Thomas Gresham as an economic one in the second reflects a growing interest in representing merchants as legitimate figures of social and political power over and above any aristocrat. In the later play, the protagonist obtains fame and political connections not by virtue of noble birth, but by participating in and facilitating the growing prosperity of the city. Jean Howard describes London at this time as a "place where both status and gender relations were constantly being renegotiated."2 Howard argues that these strategies reflect a new method for establishing prestige. She explains that
[r]ank remained crucial to male identity, but in the urban context it was challenged by a new emphasis on what I call performative masculinity, that is, the ability to master codes of fashionability and to comport oneself with distinction in the city's emerging arenas for mannerly display.3
This mastering of new codes to affirm certain ranks is also noted by H. R. French in "The Search for the 'Middle Sort of People' in England, 1600- 1800," where the "value" of this search for a middle sort...