In Shakespeare's England, credit was synonymous with reputation, and reputation developed in the interplay of language, conduct, and social interpretation. As a consequence, artful language and social hermeneutics became practical, profitable skills. Since most people both used credit and extended it, the dual strategies of implication and inference--of producing and reading evidence--were everywhere. Like poetry or drama, credit was constructed: fashioned out of the interplay of artifice and interpretation. The rhetorical dimension of economic relations produced social fictions on a range of scales: from transitory performances facilitating local transactions to the long-term project of maintaining creditworthiness to the generalized social indeterminacy that arose from the interplay of performance and interpretation. Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical texts--including commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interest--which offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute "equipment for living": practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possibilities. In their representations of a world re-written by debt relations, dramatic texts in particular articulate a phenomenology of economic life, telling us what it feels like to live in credit culture: to live, that is, inside a fiction.

About the Author
Laura Kolb is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. She received her PhD in 2014 from the University of Chicago. Her articles have appeared in SEL, Shakespeare Studies, The Sidney Journal, and The Forum for Modern Language Studies. She has written reviews for the TLS, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Shakespeare Newsletter.

Reviews
Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare is an exacting work of great focus, rigorously argued and attentive both to early modern "literature of economic advice" and to a variety of "credit plays" by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. * Benjamin D. VanWagoner, Shakespeare Quarterly *
In Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare, Laura Kolb provides an illuminating and elegantly written analysis of the concepts, depictions and negotiations of credit in a range of early modern drama. * Vicki Kay Price, Renaissance Studies *
Kolb excels at modeling a critical method that refuses to reduce, simplify, or resolve complex tensions. * Margo Kolenda-Mason, University of Michigan, RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY *
An important, thought-provoking analysis ... Kolb's prose is assured, expert, and full of lively charm ... I gladly recommend Fictions of Credit to anyone interested in how people collaborate in crafting the poetics we live by. * David Landreth, Modern Philology *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198859697
Author Laura Kolb
Format Hardback
Page Count 234
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 496g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 160mm * 20mm