The Social Meaning of Money in Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice

Abstract

With growing interest in early modern English economic issues, money has become focus of critical attention in recent years, as attested by Money and Age of Shakespeare, a collection of essays that consider how Renaissance literature challenges commensuration of money and human life even when it is saturated with bookkeeperish, quantifying language. (1) More recently, literary critics focus on materiality of coined money to investigate various aspects of early modern English society and culture. Certainly, materiality of early modern money contributes to its function as medium of both economic and social exchanges, but it barely tells full story. As sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer argues, given its fungible, impersonal characteristics, money may indeed 'corrupt' values and convert social ties into numbers, but values and social relations reciprocally transmute money by investing it with meaning and social patterns. (2) In this essay, I want to focus primarily on social roles money plays at encroachment of market economies. Through my readings of Thomas Dekker's The Shoemakers Holiday and William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, I argue that vestiges of social currency can be detected in use of money for social purposes; that money as a form of social currency works in tandem with its use as commercial currency to deal with changing dynamics of both inter-group as well as intragroup relations; and that, consequently, how money is used depends on kind of relationship wishes to form or maintain with another person or a group. Among those critics who focus on materiality of coined money is David Hawkes, who delves into ways in which separation of monetary value from gold bullion provides a conceptual link between religious idolatry and commodity fetishism. He argues that it was during early modern that value became increasingly detached from its physical incarnation in precious metals and turned into independent force. The autonomy of for most literate Englishmen, was one manifestation of same tendency that could be observed in religious idolatry and carnal sensuality in all its forms. It is this totalizing perspective that offers the thinkers of early modern period and, perhaps more importantly, Hawkes's post-modern readers, an insight into the spiritual and ethical implications of commodity fetishism that has largely been lost to our own epoch. Such an insight, however, is achieved by considering money in isolation and thereby reducing its various social meanings and implications into mere financial value, an autonomous and nonreferential force that reverses natural relationships of use and exchange, things and signs, reality and representation. (3) Similar to Hawkes, Stephen Deng and David Landreth both emphasize ways in which discrepancy between extrinsic and intrinsic values of coined money opened up a space for a wide variety of social relations that were not necessarily related to exchange. Deng argues that interactions between literary representations and malleability of coinage inform complex dynamic interrelations between state formation and economy. (4) Landreth, on other hand, contends that interaction of material qualities and socially determined values in gold and silver coins enables intrusion of these objects into discursive debate over the contested relations among poetics, human institutions, and material substance. (5) For Deng and Landreth, it is peculiar material form inhabited by early modern money that allowed it, in contrast to its modern counterpart, to maintain capacity to embody memories and social relations beyond circuits of exchange. Their emphasis on materiality of coins, however, implies that once money loses that malleable materiality, it would also cease being reservoir of a value antithetical to exchange, and function effectively as a universal medium of exchange. …