The theater, the market, and the subject of history.

Nothing has so consistently underwritten recent efforts to historicize the stud of Renaissance drama as a perceived correspondence between economic commodification and representation. In Worlds Apart, Jean-Christophe Agnew suggests how implicated the worlds of the theater and the market were during th early modern period. With the advent of exchange-value as a property independen of use-value, the market-place evolved from a localized institution to a supervening process capable of reconstituting the very society that set it in motion. "To those caught up in this expanded circulation of commodities of the early modern epoch," Agnew writes, "the very liquidity of the money form--its apparent capacity to commute specific obligations, utilities, and meanings into general, fungible equivalents--bespoke the same boundless autonomy that Aristotle had once condemned as an unnatural, 'chrematistic' form of exchange."(1) According to Agnew's account, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England the newly liquid market conspired with the protean character of theater to prompt a "crisis of representation" bearing on identity as such. "The new drama showed, as no other genre could, how precarious social identity was ... By deliberately effacing the line between the self's iconic representation in art and ritual and its instrumental presentation in ordinary life, Renaissance theater formally reproduced the same symbolic confusion that boundless market had already introduced into the visual codes and exchange relations of a waning feudal order."(2)

Literary critics preoccupied with the economic determinations of cultural productions have figured this crisis in terms of an increasingly unbounded process of social commodification. Thus Don Wayne's reassessment of "Drama and Society in the Age of Johnson" turns on the dramatist's inability to conceive himself fully independent of an "emerging commodity system of economic and social exchange," and Karen Newman reconceives the woman's role within drama of the era in terms of a generalized structure of consumption: "She is represented in the discourses of Jacobean London as at once consumer and consumed."(3) The centrality of the economic perspective in these accounts has considerable--even shrill--empirical support. Consider the not-so-obscurely intertwined proliferation of anti-theatrical and anti-usury tracts during the era, each declaring the limitless shame of a cultural transformation that threatened to reduce all to a groundless play of terms.

Yet it is precisely the sweeping and fundamental nature of such a transformatio that raises methodological qualms. It is the constitutive force of economy--the prospect that one might be reduced to a commodity or mere factor in a system of exchange--that prompts fear and shame. But isn't apprehension precisely what guarantees one's externality to the threatened transformation? From what position could one perceive one's own commodification with anxiety? The problem of registering the empirical ground of a structural transformation can similarl be posed at the level of the social totality. How is it possible to speak of th origins of an economic shift that reconstitutes the society that institutes it, thus eliding its own causes?

Paradoxically, far from disabling historical enquiry, economy's peculiarly equivocal status as an empirical phenomenon--its tendency toward a certain groundlessness--has if anything empowered historicism's most recent avatar, New Historicism. The writings arrayed under that heading are bound together in good part by their reliance on the ease with which economic description seems to len itself to a generalized metaphorics of speculation and exchange, to a thrilling measure of discursive liquidity.(4) Here is Stephen Greenblatt's account of the relationship between a historical document--the report of the wreck of a merchant ship written by a company man--and a literary work--The Tempest:

The changes I have sketched are signs of the process whereby the Bermuda narrative is made negotiable, turned into a currency that may be transferred from one institutional context to another. The changes do not constitute a coherent critique of the colonial discourse, but they function as an unmooring of its elements so as to confer upon them the currency's liquidity.(5)

Freed from the particularities of the market, the discourse of "negotiation," "liquidity" and "exchange" comes to articulate an account of the entire social field, all under the inclusive rubric of "the circulation of social energies."

In this case, one is prompted to ask, not so much what grounds economy, as what gives it its apparently limitless alchemical powers as a descriptive term. The effectiveness of New Historicism's cultural--or economic--poetics, its capacity to seem at once historically particular and boundlessly expansive, depends both on the residual empirical aura that clings to such economic language, and, as importantly, on economy's distinctive ability to dissimulate its status as a system. In Greenblatt's account, one is struck by the combination of fungibilit at the level of discrete phenomena and totalizing force at the level of the social field itself, a globalization most evident when the cultural exegete is most at pains to banish it: