Speculative Enterprise

Mattie Burkert

Description

In the wake of the 1688 revolution, England’s transition to financial capitalism accelerated dramatically. Londoners witnessed the rise of credit-based currencies, securities markets, speculative bubbles, insurance schemes, and lotteries. Many understood these phenomena in terms shaped by their experience with another risky venture at the heart of London life: the public theater. Speculative Enterprise traces the links these observers drew between the operations of Drury Lane and Exchange Alley, including their hypercommercialism, dependence on collective opinion, and accessibility to people of different classes and genders.

Mattie Burkert identifies a discursive "theater-finance nexus" at work in plays by Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, and Susanna Centlivre as well as in the vibrant eighteenth-century media landscape. As Burkert demonstrates, the stock market and the entertainment industry were recognized as deeply interconnected institutions that, when considered together, illuminated the nature of the public more broadly and gave rise to new modes of publicity and resistance. In telling this story, Speculative Enterprise combines methods from literary studies, theater and performance history, media theory, and work on print and material culture to provide a fresh understanding of the centrality of theater to public life in eighteenth-century London.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Theater-Finance Nexus
1. "Virtue Is as Much Debased as Our Money": Generic and Economic Instability in Love’s Last Shift
2. Recoining the Repertory: Prologues, Epilogues, and Crisis
3. Women at the Theater-Finance Nexus: Susanna Centlivre as Playwright-Adventurer
4. Defrauding the Public: Spectacle and Speculation in Steele’s Theatre and The Conscious Lovers
5. "His Title, Not His Play, We Set to Sale": Literary Property in the Aftermath of the South Sea Bubble
Coda: The Theater-Finance Nexus in Later Eighteenth-Century London
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• 18th Century
• Modern
• Histoire
• History

Informations

• Publié par: University of Virginia Press
• Date de parution: 07 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780813945972
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Speculative Enterprise
Speculative Enterprise
Public Theaters and Financial Markets in London, 1688–1763
Mattie Burkert
University of Virginia Press
Charlottesville and London
University of Virginia Press
© 2021 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
First published 2021
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Burkert, Mattie, author.
Title: Speculative enterprise : public theaters and financial markets in London, 1688–1763 / Mattie Burkert.
Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identif iers: LCCN 2020051345 (print) | LCCN 2020051346 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813945958 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813945965 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813945972 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Theater—England—London—History—18th century. | Theatrical companies—England—London—History—18th century. | Theater—Economic aspects—England—London. | London (England)—Economic conditions—18th century. | Great Britain—Economic conditions—18th century.
Classification: LCC PN2596.L6 B835 2021 (print) | LCC PN2596.L6 (ebook) | DDC 792.09421—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051345
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051346
Cover art: The Lottery, William Hogarth, after 1724 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; www.metmuseum.org ); Whitehall Evening Post 383, February 25, 1721, 3 (Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin)
For John and Mina
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Theater-Finance Nexus
Part I. The Great Recoinage (1695–1698)
1.“Virtue Is as Much Debased as Our Money”: Generic and Economic Instability in Love’s Last Shift
2. Recoining the Repertory: Prologues, Epilogues, and Crisis
Interlude (1700–1720)
3. Women at the Theater-Finance Nexus: Susanna Centlivre as Playwright-Adventurer
Part II. The South Sea Bubble (1720–1722)
4.Defrauding the Public: Spectacle and Speculation in Steele’s Theatre and The Conscious Lovers
5.“His Title, Not His Play, We Set to Sale”: Literary Property in the Aftermath of the South Sea Bubble
Coda: The Theater-Finance Nexus in Later Eighteenth-Century London
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
At the outset of a book about debt, risk, and contingency, it seems fitting to thank the many individuals and institutions that have invested in this very speculative project over the years.
My doctoral dissertation, on which this book is based, was supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, as well as the Department of English, the Graduate School, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Subsequent archival research and writing was supported by the Department of English and a generous grant from the Center for Women and Gender (now the Center for Intersectional Gender Studies and Research) at Utah State University. In its final stages, the book benefited from a publication subvention grant from the Oregon Center for the Humanities and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. I owe a debt of gratitude to the archivists and staff at the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the V&A Archives, and the National Archives of the United Kingdom, where I conducted research for this project. My thanks extend to the institutions that allowed me to use images of items from their collections: the British Library, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I am also grateful to the University of Chicago Press for allowing me to reproduce, as part of chapter 1 of this book, material previously published in Modern Philology, vol. 114 (© 2016 by the University of Chicago; all rights reserved).
I am deeply grateful to my editor, Angie Hogan, for her enthusiastic encouragement of this project, and to Leslie Tingle, Ellen Satrom, Jason Coleman, Emily K. Grandstaff, and all the staff at the University of Virginia Press for their incredible energy, expertise, and professionalism in shepherding this work from manuscript to book. Particular thanks go to two reviewers—John O’Brien and one who remains anonymous to me—who took the time to offer rigorous feedback that made this an inestimably better work of scholarship.
I also wish to express my gratitude to the many mentors and colleagues who have helped to bring this book into existence. Karen Britland provided unflagging support for this work and continues to serve as a model of scholarly generosity. She, along with Mark Vareschi, Theresa Kelley, Kristina Straub, and Thomas Broman, guided the doctoral research that eventually became this book. Other formative input during that time came from Robin Valenza, David Loewenstein, Michael Witmore, Aparna Dharwadker, Katherine Lanning, Victor Lenthe, Laini Kavaloski, Theresa Ngyuen, and Mary Fiorenza. After my arrival at Utah State University, my colleagues Christine Cooper-Rompato, Lynne McNeill, Felipe Valencia, and Phebe Jensen offered generative responses to early versions of chapter 3. Jane Wessel, Chelsea Philips, and Leah Benedict were a font of insight, accountability, and camaraderie throughout the revision process. Tita Chico, Rebecca Shapiro, Emily Friedman, Kate Ozment, and Carrie Shanafelt created supportive spaces for daily work in the last stages of manuscript preparation, during which time Camille Sleight provided invaluable assistance.
My family and friends were an inexhaustible source of encouragement, love, and perspective throughout this lengthy process; my deepest thanks go to Phil Burkert; Susan and Rory Pople; Hannah Corcoran; Cas, Sandy, and Sarah Karczewski; Lauren Hock; Leah Misemer; Rachel Herzl-Betz; Faina Polt; and Jessie Gurd. Finally, it is to John, my loudest cheerleader and toughest critic—and to Mina, who came into being alongside these pages—that I dedicate this work.
Speculative Enterprise
• INTRODUCTION •
The Theater-Finance Nexus
As a symphony of music plays, the curtain rises, revealing a stage set with two wheels of fortune—round drums over six feet tall fitted with an elaborate set of doors, locks, and cranks. The goddesses of fortune and justice, Fortuna and Astrea, descend from above in golden chariots and deliver grand orations on the mysteries of destiny, fate, and chance. 1 Finally, the long-awaited moment arrives: over 1.5 million numbered ticket stubs, one corresponding with each lottery ticket sold, are placed inside one of the enormous wheels. One thousand winning “benefit” tickets labeled with prize amounts from £1 to £1,000 are placed inside the other wheel, along with a number of “blanks” indicating no prize. 2 A young boy turns the crank of the first wheel, rotating the contents; he reaches within, draws a ticket, and reads out the number, which matches a ticket held by someone in the crowd gathered around the stage. A boy at the other wheel turns its crank, unlocks one of its doors, and summons forth the adventurer’s fate. 3
The date is October 18, 1698, and the occasion is the first day of drawings for the Wheel of Fortune lottery at the Theatre Royal in Dorset Garden, a venue normally used for semi-operas and other spectacular entertainments. At a moment of intense competition among lotteries, this one was exceptionally successful, due to the unusually low cost of entry—each ticket cost only a penny—and because the extravagance of the drawing itself was advertised months in advance. 4 This performance illustrates vividly the profound material and figural links between the theater and financial markets in London around the turn of the eighteenth century. These connections persisted beyond the moment of the Wheel of Fortune, as a c. 1724 satirical engraving by William Hogarth demonstrates (fig. 1). In his image The Lottery, the goddesses Fortune and Wantonness stand onstage and draw tickets from drums like those used for the 1698 lottery. The entire image is framed by curtains, further emphasizing the theatricality of the scene. The audience, made up of allegorical figures like Hope, Fear, Suspence, Folly, and Misfortune, is overseen by National Credit on a pedestal, a reminder that the lotteries were intimately tied to the operations of public finance that underpinned England’s development as a global fiscal and military power.


Figure 1. The Lottery, William Hogarth, after 1724. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; www.metmuseum.org)
This book turns to the period of “financial revolution” that followed the Revolution of 1688 in England. 5 In the decades following William and Mary’s ascent to the throne, England saw the widespread adoption of credit-based currencies, securities markets, boom-bust cycles, speculative bubbles, insurance schemes, and lotteries, as well as the formalization of the national debt. While the story of England’s transition to financial capitalism is a familiar one, however, the centrality of the public theater to this story has been overlooked. London’s public playhouses played a key role in debates over new financial instruments and institutions and their broader cultural ramifications. Performances engaged with f