Crediting errors: Credit, liquidity, performance and The Comedy of Errors

Abstract

The spectre of the market is a predictable end of teleological economic criticism, which promotes a play like The Comedy of Errors for anticipating and neatly illustrating the bewildering liquidity of the capitalist market. But looking to its pre-classical source and not only to a putative future, the play seems to reject cash liquidity – a striking choice given the much decried scarcity of coinage in England at the end of the sixteenth century. The comedy prefers credit, the credit of a citizen, over payment of the price it has set for happiness. As economic history adjusts its vision to accommodate the key role played by informal lending in commercial growth, economic criticism stands to fundamentally revise its position. Close attention to performance (looking beyond the limiting notion of a commercial theatricality) can reposition readings closer to the ground of actual exchanges, and counter a pervasive tendency to disengage from specific detail. Read in this way, The Comedy of Errors reveals the full extent of credit's significance and limitations.