On Demand Writing for the Market in Early Modern England [Hardcover]

In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theater as wasteful and depraved and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theater in droves.On Demanddraws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behavior. He shows that during this period demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy. Over the long sixteenth-century consumption burgeoned, though justifications for it lagged behind. People were in a curious predicament: they practiced consumption on a mass scale but had few acceptable reasons for doing so. In the literary marketplace, authors became adept at accommodating such contradictions fashioning works that spoke to self-divided consumers: Thomas Nashe castigated and satiated them at the same time . William Shakespeare satirized credit problems. Ben Jonson investigated the problems of global trade, and Robert Burton enlisted readers in a project of economic betterment.

On Demandshows that consumers in early modern England were a powerful force in transforming the economy of the time and that their demand was a powerful, though contradictory, force in shaping its literature. As the feudal world receded and the middle class got more and more powerful, The Renaissance took materialism and the commercial world increasingly to heart . . . David J. Baker inOn Demandbrilliantly demonstrates how new marked operations and entrenched moral principles interacted and were discussed. The idea of the play as a marketable commodity and as a response to a growing consumer culture is . . . explored in a chapter onTroilus and Cressidafrom David J. Baker's excellent monograph,On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England. . . Baker's arguments are all valuable ones and his reading represents a fascinating and insightful contribution to scholarship onTroilus and Cressida. On Demandpresents us wlÓJ