Queer Capitalism and Global Economies on the Early Modern English Stage

Abstract

This dissertation considers the intersections between emerging capitalism, global trade, and shifting negotiations of value as they are represented in early modern English theater during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. International exploration, contact with other cultures, and new forms of trade fundamentally transformed the English economy as well as English understandings of the self. This dissertation utilizes economic criticism and a focus on queer theory in order to examine early modern theater’s place in constructions of early modern value. Each chapter of this dissertation analyzes how certain plays explore newly emerging capitalist conceptualizations of value through language and relationships combining, intertwining, and complicating economic and erotic value in order to question the changing nature of the self, the economy, and the English state. Chapter One analyzes representations of male homosocial chains of credit and reputation that complicate, and at times supersede, those of the English heteronormative family structure in literature and in law. The plays offer representations of queer economic value and desire that are in fact vital to the English economy, though they also contend with historical anxieties regarding male eroticism, sodomy, and coinage. Chapter Two explores a complimentary financial institution, that of marriage, but the plays examine international marriages between English subjects and strangers. As England navigated its new capitalist practices at home, it increased its reach abroad, which in turn brought more opportunities to examine the relationships between economic power and gendered, racialized, and queer desire. Finally, Chapter Three interrogates plays that follow the circulation of gold specie and the rise in counterfeit gold, which reveal and influence English anxieties regarding the promise and peril of mercantile wealth within new representation-based global economies. This dissertation focuses on characters who employ both economic and erotic language to describe themselves and their worlds in order to search for opportunities to subvert the mandates of commodity fetishism, accumulation, and exploitation that the capitalist world demands.