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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
LITERATURE, CULTURE AND ECONOMICS
Early Modern Debts

1550–1700
Edited by
Laura Kolb · George Oppitz-Trotman
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture
and Economics
Series Editors
Paul Crosthwaite
School of Literatures, Languages & Culture
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
Peter Knight
Department of English and American Studies
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK
Nicky Marsh
Department of English
University of Southampton
Southampton, UK
This series showcases some of the most intellectually adventurous work
being done in the broad field of the economic humanities, putting it
in dialogue with developments in heterodox economic theory, economic
sociology, critical finance studies and the history of capitalism. It starts
from the conviction that literary and cultural studies can provide vital
theoretical insights into economics. The series will include historical
studies as well as contemporary ones, as a much-needed counterweight to
the tendency within economics to concentrate solely on the present and
to ignore potential lessons from history. The series also recognizes that
the poetics of economics and finance is an increasingly central concern
across a wide range of fields of literary study, from Shakespeare to Dickens
to the financial thriller. In doing so it builds on the scholarship that has
been identified as the ‘new economic criticism’, but moves beyond it by
bringing a more politically and historically sharpened focus to that earlier
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Laura Kolb · George Oppitz-Trotman
Editors
Early Modern Debts

1550–1700
Editors
Laura Kolb George Oppitz-Trotman
Baruch College CUNY Norwich, UK
New York, NY, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics

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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, as well

as Christa Jansohn and the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, for
supporting this project at an early stage. An earlier version of Chapter 4
appears in Shakespeare Studies, vol. 48 (2020), edited by James R. Siemon
and Diana E. Henderson, published by Fairleigh Dickinson University
Press and distributed by Associated University Presses. We are grateful for
permission to reprint this material here.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Laura Kolb and George Oppitz-Trotman
1.1 Debt Connects 1
1.2 Economies of Obligation, Then and Now 6
1.3 Expanding the Horizons of Early Modern Debts 8
References 15
Part I Family, Household, Community
2 Debt and Doorways in Renaissance Comedy 21

Lorna Hutson
2.1 Everyone Is Afraid of Giving Credit ( Metuont
Credere Omnes) 21
2.2 ‘Batti Quell’uscio’—‘Pound on This Door’ ( La
Lena, 4.3.999) 27
2.3 Doors and Debts in Ariosto’s La Lena
and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors 34
References 50
vii
viii CONTENTS
3 Masters as Debtors of Their Servants in Early Modern

Brandenburg and Saxony 53
Sebastian Kühn
3.1 Introduction 53
3.2 The Uncertain Nature of Servants’ Wages 56
3.3 Financing the Noble Household: Daily Advances
and Chains of Credit 64
3.4 Formal Loans 71
3.5 Transforming Debt into Gift 74
References 79
4 Debt Culture in Shakespeare’s Time 83

Lena Cowen Orlin
References 102
5 A Legal Remedy Against Rent Arrears:

Landlords’ Privilege on Furniture in Sixteenth-
and Seventeenth-Century France 103
Nga Bellis-Phan
5.1 Introduction 103
5.2 Dealing with Unpaid Rent: A Public Order
Preoccupation 105
5.3 An Exceptional Privilege Consolidated by Customary
Law 112
5.4 Effectiveness in Execution: A Strong Privilege
Challenged by Unavoidable Difficulties 119
5.5 Conclusion 124
References 125
Part II Debt’s Networks
6 Crafting the Hierarchy of Debts: The Example

of Antwerp (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries) 131
Dave De ruysscher
6.2 The Relevance of Ranking Debts 135
6.3 Antwerp Rules on Debt in the Fifteenth Century 138
CONTENTS ix
6.4 Hesitation around the Dowry and Bills Obligatory 143

6.5 Conclusion 149
References 150
7 Debt, Trust and Reputation in Early Modern

Armenian Merchant Networks 153
Alexandr Osipian
7.2 Trust, Credit and Trading Diasporas 155
7.3 Credit and Networks of Reputation 157
7.4 Public Discourse on Commerce, Luxury
and Armenian Trading Diasporas 160
7.5 Legal Exemptions from Debt Repayment 165
7.6 Debt Collection and Church Agency 167
7.7 A Credit History between Poland and India:
Responsibility, Surety and Solidarity 169
7.8 Reputation, Defamation and Moral Pressure 173
7.9 Conclusion 175
References 176
8 How to Deal with Obligations? Contentious Debts

and the Parere of the Handelsvorstand in Early
Modern Nürnberg 181
Christof Jeggle
8.2 Merchants and Their Obligations 183
8.3 Establishing Commercial Jurisdiction in Nürnberg 184
8.4 The Establishment and Reception of the Parere 190
8.5 The Parere as a Component of Commercial
Jurisdiction 195
8.6 Narratives of Obligation 198
8.7 Conclusion 201
References 202
x CONTENTS
9 Capillary Obligations: Fletcher’s Island Princess

and the Global Debts of the East India Company 209
Benjamin D. VanWagoner
9.1 A Company of Debtors 211
9.2 Carceral Debt in The Island Princess 216
9.3 Capillary Obligations 223
References 229
Part III The Language and Logic of Debt
10 Hypallactic Debt Management: The Rhetoric

of Exchange in Wyatt and Shakespeare 235
Andrew Zurcher
10.1 Debt, Grief and Incoherence in Wyatt’s ‘The piller
pearisht’ 235
10.2 Misgivings and Mistakings in Shakespeare’s Sonnet
87 243
10.3 Debt, Hypallage and the Double-Take in Cymbeline,
King of Britain 246
10.4 The Winter’s Tale: Consideration
and the Hypallactic Changeling 255
References 267
11 Caroline Debt: Shakespeare to Shirley 271

John Kerrigan
References 301
12 Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies in Early Modern

England 303
Laura Kolb
12.2 Business Letters and Familiar Letters 310
12.3 Entertainment and Utility 316
CONTENTS xi
12.4 Conclusion: Beyond Manuals 324

References 327
13 Debt and Paradox in the Early Modern Period 331

Alexander Douglas
13.2 Is It Good to Be in Debt? 334
13.3 Can a Borrower Bind Herself? 339
13.4 Is Usury Justified? 344
13.5 Conclusion 348
References 349
Part IV The Indebted Self
14 Self-Love and the Transformation of Obligation

to Self-Control in Early Modern British Society 353
Craig Muldrew
References 395
Index 403
List of Contributors
Nga Bellis-Phan University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, Paris, France

Dave De ruysscher Tilburg University and Vrije Universiteit Brussels,
Brussels, Belgium
Alexander Douglas University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland,
UK
Lorna Hutson Merton College, Oxford, UK
Christof Jeggle University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
John Kerrigan St. John’s College, Cambridge, UK
Laura Kolb Baruch College CUNY, New York, NY, USA
Sebastian Kühn Leibniz Universität Hannover, Hannover, Germany
Craig Muldrew Queens’ College, Cambridge, UK
George Oppitz-Trotman Norwich, UK
Lena Cowen Orlin Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA
Alexandr Osipian Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of
Eastern Europe, Leipzig, Germany
Benjamin D. VanWagoner Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Andrew Zurcher Queens’ College, Cambridge, UK
xiii
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Bodleian Library Arch. G.c7, fol.H3v (Source Photo:

© Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Licensed
by Creative Commons) 43
Fig. 2.2 Door of the Phoenix in Antic Disposition’s 2016 Comedy
of Errors, directed by Ben Horslen at Gray’s Inn. (Source
Photo: © Scott Rylander, licensed by ArenaPAL) 44
Fig. 2.3 ‘Door’ of the Phoenix in the RSC’s 2005 Comedy
of Errors, directed by Nancy Meckler (Source Photo: ©
Ellie Kurtz, licensed by The Royal Shakespeare Company) 45
Fig. 7.1 Map of locations, from Poland to India, linked by the debt
of Armenian merchant Pirhuzad of Brody (Source ©
Alexandr Osipian) 170
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Laura Kolb and George Oppitz-Trotman
1.1 Debt Connects

Isabella Whitney’s verse ‘Wyll and Testament’ (1573) turns on a seeming
paradox: that debt is desirable. For most of the poem, Whitney’s speaker
enumerates the goods—from staples like soap and oatmeal, to luxuries
like French ruffs, to cheap trifles hawked in the street—she will bequeath
to London for the care and feeding of its inhabitants. Allegorizing her
departure from the city as death, she describes herself early in the poem
as ‘very weake in Purse’. We might think from this that her ‘fatal’ illness
is a lack of cash. It turns out to be a lack of debt. In a set of bequests to
London’s prisons, she records a failed plan to sequester herself in Ludgate:
When dayes of paiment did approch,

I thither ment to flee.
To shroude my selfe amongst the rest,
that chuse to dye in debt:
L. Kolb (B)
Baruch College CUNY, New York, NY, USA
e-mail: laura.kolb@baruch.cuny.edu
G. Oppitz-Trotman
Norwich, UK
© The Author(s) 2020 1

L. Kolb and G. Oppitz-Trotman (eds.), Early Modern Debts,
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59769-6_1
2 L. KOLB AND G. OPPITZ-TROTMAN
Rather then any Creditor,

should money from them get.1
Her plan could never be realized. Never having come ‘in credit so / a
debtor for to bee,’ she remains too poor to be in debt.2 Debt turns out to
be an enviable state, ‘a prosperity comically beyond the author’s reach’.3
To have debt is to have (or to have had) credit, and credit in turn makes
life in the city—life itself, in the ‘Wyll’s’ conceit—possible.4
Taken together with the proliferative list of consumer goods in the
poem’s first half, the speaker’s self-declared plight—lack of debt, because
‘none me credit dare’—serves as a reminder that debt was, for many early
modern people, a basic condition of existence. Not having debt is like
not existing at all, a form of social and economic death. Debt is also
the lifeblood of the poem’s commercial city, the mechanism underlying
the busy circulation of money, goods and people in London’s streets.
Debt would grant the speaker entry into the refuge of debtor’s prison,
as we have seen. But it would also grant her access to the material goods
she ‘leaves’ to London—goods she leaves behind; goods she could never
afford; goods whose purchase might drive her deeper into debt, but also
into the circuits of consumption and exchange from which, as things
stand, she is firmly excluded. Debt would thus also grant her an expanded
set of relationships—to creditors, most directly, but also to a long list of
1 Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye (London, 1573), sig. E6r.
2 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E6r.
3 Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in
Sixteenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 128.
4 While many readings note the paradox of debt’s desirability, recent criticism of the
‘Wyll’ tends to focus on other economic structures: utopian communal abundance; urban
poverty; emergent forms of private property. See Crystal Bartolovitch, ‘“Optimism of the
Will”: Isabella Whitney and Utopia’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32,
no. 9 (2009): 407–432; Carolyn Sale, ‘The Literary Thing: The Imaginary Holding of
Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll” to London (1573)’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Law
and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), 431–449;
Marilyn Sandidge, ‘Urban Space as Social Conscience in Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll and
Testament”’, in Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, ed. Albrecht
Classen and Marilyn Sandidge (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 595–613. For a reading that
locates the poem in the context of Whitney’s authorial program of cultivating social credit
(and thereby opening economic horizons) through print, see Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter,
116–128.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
named vendors: brewers and bakers by the Thames, mercers and gold-
smiths in West Cheap, hosierers in Birchin Lane, even a boy by the
stocks hawking combs, knives, glasses and other ‘needeful knacke[s]’.5
Beyond them, if indirectly, she would be tied into the broader networks
of exchange through which these goods moved before ending up for sale
in London’s streets. Given that some wares would have been of foreign
manufacture, it is no exaggeration to say that debt would link the poem’s
speaker to nothing less than the world.6
That link between a single debt and the world is made visible—
and tangible—in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1594), which gently
fantasizes that world trade might be brought to a halt by a debt too
easily granted, and to the wrong person. Whereas credit is lacking and
debt is impossible for Whitney’s speaker, both are amply available to
Antipholus of Ephesus—and therefore to his lookalike (and long-lost
twin), Antipholus of Syracuse. The goldsmith Angelo makes a chain for
Antipholus of Ephesus (one twin) but gives it to Antipholus of Syracuse
(the other); Antipholus of Ephesus, when presented with the bill, refuses
to pay for something he has not received. This is a disaster for the gold-
smith, because he needed the money in order to make good a debt owed
to a merchant; that same merchant requires prompt payment, because
he is ‘bound / To Persia’ and wants money for his voyage there (4.1.3–
4).7 The missing commodity, the chain, symbolizes the transactions in
which it is implicated. The Comedy of Errors can only show parts of the
transactional chain at its heart, but hints at a comically extensive series
of consequences. Presumably someone is waiting on goods or monies in
Persia, and someone else is waiting on goods or monies from Persia. The
golden chain thus embodies the chains of debt that bind together a whole
mercantile and commercial world, in which the failure of a single link has
consequences that resonate far beyond the limits of immediate knowl-
edge. The unreconciled comedy is an economical blockage because every
other person in the world is chained to another by a debt that they are
5 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E4r.

6 Even non-luxury goods, like the ‘knackes’ sold near the stocks, could be imported.
In A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (1549), Thomas Smith
expresses concern over the economic consequences of ‘trifles’ that come ‘hether from
beyond the sea’.
7 William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Methuen,
1968). Citations are by act, scene, and line.
unable to pay—until, back down the line, in the staged mart of Ephesus,
each twin finds his lost brother and so reclaims his own place in the world,
obligations and all.
Debt connects. This is a central premise of Shakespeare’s play and
Whitney’s poem, where to have no debt is to have no place. It is also
the overarching claim of this volume, which explores the links debts
created among persons within early modern households and across cities,
in merchant diasporas and joint-stock corporations, as codified by law and
complicated by bonds of kinship and amity. Even in today’s global, largely
depersonalized economy, debt operates as a kind of connective tissue,
binding individuals into collectives whether they know it or not.8 But in
the early modern period, debt’s ability to link persons both to one another
and to the wider world was more immediately palpable: a recognized
feature of everyday, lived existence. In an age when financial institutions
were developing unevenly across Europe and when instruments for medi-
ating credit had yet to gain widespread use, exchange remained largely
interpersonal and face-to-face. As Craig Muldrew argues in The Economy
of Obligation (1998), such interpersonal transactions formed nodes in
the extended ‘chains of credit’ which in England grew ‘longer and more
complex’ from the mid-sixteenth century onward, as commercial activity
expanded.9 Exchange bound people at a more fundamental level, as well,
since the development of credit was ongoing and communal, a matter of
cultivating a profitable reputation and fostering relationships that could be
leveraged in times of economic need. Whitney’s own poem forms part of a
broader enterprise designed to obtain for the poet the kind of social credit
her ‘dying’ speaker lacks; Antipholus of Ephesus can commission a golden
chain—and his brother can receive it—without any cash changing hands,
because the first twin’s reputation grants him ‘credit infinite’ within the
community (5.1.6).10
Early Modern Debts looks at the lives and writing of early modern
people who found themselves enmeshed in the bonds of debt. In its
8 Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good (London:
Verso, 2011), 28–32.
9 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations
in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 3.
10 For the first point, see Hutson, Usurer’s Daughter, 122–128; for the second, see
Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 160.
1 INTRODUCTION 5
first two sections, it examines debt as it affected the various social struc-
tures from which Whitney’s un-indebted speaker stands apart. Part I,
‘Family, Household, Community’ considers debt both as it shaped rela-
tionships within families and between masters and servants, and as it
linked the household to the broader community, rendering it subject
to neighbourly surveillance and legal action. Part II, ‘Debt’s Networks’,
turns to the way debt structured urban life and legal systems, circu-
lated through merchant networks, and became a supple financial tool
for joint-stock corporations like the East India Company, and for colo-
nial enterprise. Part III, ‘The Language and Logic of Debt’, looks at
imaginative responses to debt, which—like Whitney’s poem and Shake-
speare’s play—use complex conceits and paradoxical constructions to
express the intricacies of mingled economic and social ties. Part IV, ‘The
Indebted Self’, consists of a substantial single chapter, which tracks how
the outward-facing practices of debt culture facilitated new mechanisms
for conscience-based self-regulation. These in turn changed how indi-
viduals related to their debts, and thus to their communities and the
world.
In an effort to track debt-driven exchange both as it worked locally
and in larger, interconnected networks, the volume spans both national
and disciplinary boundaries. Six of the chapters here are by historians; six
are by literary scholars; one is by a philosopher. Just over half of the essays
were presented at a 2017 conference held at Otto-Friedrich-Universität
in Bamberg, Germany in 2017. Bringing together scholars from Europe,
the UK and the US, working in social, legal and economic history, literary
studies and philosophy, this gathering made apparent the usefulness
of an international and cross-disciplinary framework for thinking about
borrowing and lending in the early modern world. Early Modern Debts
seeks to further the dialogue begun at that conference: a dialogue among
varied fields that share a common object of inquiry—even if they approach
that object differently—but whose practitioners all too often work in
ignorance of one another’s insights and methods. In order to foster cross-
disciplinary inquiry, the book is divided by topic rather than by discipline.
Each of the first three sections contains essays in both literary studies
and history, and in one case philosophy. Each also combines work on
England and the continent. Taken together, the essays included here
make the case that early modern debts can best be understood through
combined historical, literary and philosophical analysis—that is, through
careful recovery and interpretation of economic, legal and social practices,
combined with equally careful attention to the conceptual frameworks

and imaginative artefacts that rendered those practices legible by revealing
their complexity and exposing their contradictions.
1.2 Economies of Obligation, Then and Now

Since the early 2000s, debt has emerged as a category of particular
interest to scholars working at the intersection of literature, history and
economics. Debt’s increased prominence in early modern studies can be
traced, in large part, to the influence of Craig Muldrew’s study, The
Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in
Early Modern England (1998). At the time of the book’s publication,
Muldrew’s most obviously radical intervention was perhaps his account
of debt’s ubiquity. An expanding economy and cash shortages meant
that the vast majority of transactions ran on debt. Muldrew writes: ‘The
supply of gold and silver was never anywhere near large enough’ resulting
in ‘a credit economy in which everything was measured by monetary
prices, but where money itself was not the primary means of exchange’.11
The book aimed to unsettle persistent narratives of the rise of capitalism
and the break-up of traditional society. Even more generative for subse-
quent scholars, however, has been its portrait of England’s ‘culture of
credit’.12 Chapters on the sociability of credit and debt, the place of
public opinion in the cultivation of credit, and the rise of debt litiga-
tion offer richly detailed analyses of the impact widespread indebtedness
had on persons, households, communities and society broadly conceived.
Muldrew demonstrates that the ‘economy of obligation’ shaped a culture
in which reputation and credit were intertwined, and in which mutual
trust was both an economic necessity and the enabling condition of
the ‘chains of literally hundreds of thousands of intertwined credit rela-
tionships’ within which ‘millions of interpersonal obligations … were
continually being exchanged and renegotiated’.13
Beyond early modern studies, Muldrew’s work was important to
general economic history because—as David Graeber and others have
observed—it helped destroy the notion that in the early modern period
11 Muldrew, Economy, 100–101.

12 Muldrew, Economy, 2.
13 Muldrew, Economy, 3, 123.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
the world economy shifted from moralized exchange to impersonal

financial transaction. As Graeber summarizes:
The story of the origins of capitalism, then, is not the story of the
gradual destruction of traditional communities by the impersonal power
of the market. It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was
converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of
moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal – and often vindictive
– power of the state.14
Reconfiguring our sense of the past, Muldrew and Graeber create new
possibilities for understanding our present and future. The period covered
by this book is generally considered to be the era of nation-state emer-
gence or consolidation—and perhaps state intrusions into informal credit
networks during this time are best considered as technologies of state
development. Investigating the scope of these changes has obvious
contemporary relevance. China’s Social Credit System, already taking a
complete form as of this book’s publication, unifies a person’s record
system to create a single ‘honesty score’ that can lead to advantages and
disadvantages in economic and social life. Supposedly moral failings result
in diminished financial credit: the Social Credit System is ‘a disciplinary
technology that rewards those who are honest, trustworthy and virtuous,
while punishing those who display signs of dishonesty, corruption and
deception’.15
As this example suggests, debt networks and their technologies develop
together: problems of trust beget innovation and give rise to instru-
ments of credit. Bills of exchange, amicable letters, merchant courts, even
the false science of physiognomy: these were all technologies built to
address the difficulty of trusting within increasingly attenuated networks
of debt. Modern credit scoring is a further—and familiar—technology for
14 David Graeber, Debt. The First 5,000 Years (London: Melville House, 2011), 332.
15 Karen Li Xan Wong and Amy Shields Dobson, ‘We’re Just Data: Exploring China’s
Social Credit System in Relation to Digital Platform Ratings Cultures in Westernised
Democracies’, Global Media and China 4, no. 2 (June 2019): 220–232, 221. Also see
Yongxi Chen and Anne Cheung, ‘The Transparent Self Under Big Data Profiling: Privacy
and Chinese Legislation on the Social Credit System’, The Journal of Comparative Law
12, no. 2 (2017): 356–378.
facilitating debt relations within a geographically dispersed economy.16

Innovations continue to emerge: payment for services and goods using
biometric identification or even implanted biochips in the modern world
are also forms of credit technology. It seems likely that technological
advances this century will eventually permit the wholesale incorporation
of credit systems in the human body. Capital will then flow through our
bodies not metaphysically (as the older political economists held) but (in
some yet to be determined way) literally. Perhaps we will—like Whitney’s
speaker or Shakespeare’s twins—once more in a very real sense be our
ability to take on debt.
Explorations of how personal trust and institutional frameworks inter-
mingled and co-developed through early modernity—explorations, in
other words, that expose the origins of structures that may today seem
natural, or given—thus possess significant potential for uncovering the
economies of obligation that underpin our own world’s networks of infor-
mation and surveillance. Such projects are the more urgent given that the
revisions made to the history of debt finance by Muldrew and others are
still relatively recent.
1.3 Expanding the Horizons

of Early Modern Debts
The Economy of Obligation is itself a fairly interdisciplinary work, drawing
on a range of sources that includes not only probate inventories and
court records, but also poetry, ballads, instructional pamphlets, didactic
literature and life writing. It has in turn sparked critical conversations
within literary studies as well as in the fields of social, legal and economic
history. It is important to acknowledge, however, that it did not stand
alone and has not gone unchallenged. As Lorna Hutson writes in her
contribution to this volume, prior to its publication, ‘Literary studies
influenced by [Mikhail] Bakhtin and [J.C.] Agnew, as well as by anthro-
pologists and social historians on household honour and gender relations,
were already considering representations of early modern economic rela-
tions’, including debt, in concrete terms of sociability, language, law and
representation. Hutson’s own The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship
16 Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity

in America (New York: Columbia UP, 2017); Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt,
Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017), 55–98.
1 INTRODUCTION 9
and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (1994) documents

a cultural emphasis on instrumentalizing friendships between men, and
demonstrates that, within such friendships, debts functioned (alongside
gifts and women) as expressions of reciprocal affective and material
relations. In the two decades since the appearance of The Economy of Obli-
gation, critics including Amanda Bailey and David J. Baker have suggested
that Muldrew offers an overly optimistic view of credit relations. Signs of
social unity in source texts, they note, can often be interpreted instead
as traces of suspicion, fragmentation and predatory lending practices.17
Alexandra Shephard has also challenged the book’s emphasis on reputa-
tion in her own rich study of the material dimensions of early modern
worth.18 Drawing together these and other strands of thought, the
current volume represents both a look back to and a look beyond the
Economy of Obligation, breaking new paths for the study of early modern
debts.
These paths take the reader much further afield. Muldrew’s study
was limited to England, but his account of an economy of obligation—
intertwined chains of borrowers and lenders bound together by trust
but rendered terrifically fragile by the possibility of a single default—
has proven relevant to other places and even other times. In L’Économie
morale. Pauvreté, crédit et confiance dans l’Europe préindustrielle (2009),
translated as The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and Trust in Early
Modern Europe (2014), Laurence Fontaine found a comparably rich credit
culture in France; Sheilagh Ogilvie and others have explored similar
networks in early modern Germany.19 Muldrew’s work offers a produc-
tive framework for approaching any credit-driven economy defined more
by interpersonal, face-to-face exchanges than by impersonal, mediating
instruments and institutions, partly because it complicates the distinction
and moves the debate away from a problem of outright discontinuity and
17 Amanda Bailey, Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); David J. Baker, On Demand:
Writing for the Market in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009).
18 Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in
Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015).
19 See, e.g., Sheilagh Ogilvie, Markus Küpker and Janine Maegraith, ‘Household Debt
in Early Modern Germany: Evidence from Personal Inventories’, The Journal of Economic
History 72, no. 1 (2012): 134–167.
towards a richer, more coherent history of trust, its vicissitudes and medi-
ations. This volume’s essays reveal that economies of obligation existed
throughout early modern Europe, in commercial centres like Antwerp
and Nuremberg; in aristocratic households in Brandenburg and Saxony;
in the Armenian merchant diasporas that stretched from Poland to India;
and in William Shakespeare’s hometown.
Complex debt cultures were obviously not unique to Europe: ‘credit
in money as well as kind’ was used throughout the economy of pre-
colonial Asia;20 parts of pre-colonial Africa possessed credit systems
usefully comparable to ‘banking’;21 pre-colonial Oceania possessed over-
lapping, polysemous and changeable patterns of debt that may confute
the popular theoretical distinction between commodity and gift.22 The
list is indefinite. The subjugation and exploitation of other peoples and
lands by European states began in the period treated here. One effect of
colonialism was that non-European concepts and practices of obligation
were suppressed, and those developed in Europe were generalized and
globalized. Such a generalization has no theoretical value, but it does call
for more attention to the diversity of ways debt could be imagined and
reformed on a regional (i.e. European) scale before colonial exploitation
had become a world system. Encounters at social, economic and ethnic
boundaries created novel and consequential manifestations of debt.
One cause of the maturation of English credit instruments in the later
seventeenth century was the establishment and expansion of an Atlantic
slave-trade, which dramatically increased the size of the English credit
market.23 Colonial planters required significant credit before the profits
20 Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, Past & Present
98 (February, 1983): 30–95, 70.
21 See, e.g., A. G. Adebayo, ‘Money, Credit, and Banking in Precolonial Africa: The
Yoruba Experience.’ Anthropos 89, nos. 4/6 (1994): 379–400; Ray A. Kea, Settlements,
Trade and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
1982).
22 Shankar Aswani and Peter Sheppard, ‘The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Exchange
in Precolonial and Colonial Roviana: Gifts, Commodities, and Inalienable Possessions’,
Current Anthropology 44, no. S5 (2003): 51–78, esp. 67.
23 Joseph E. Inikori, ‘The Credit Needs of the African Trade and the Development of
the Credit Economy in England’, Explorations in Economic History 27, no. 2 (1990):
197–231.
1 INTRODUCTION 11
they accumulated became stable.24 As Benjamin VanWagoner discusses

in his chapter here, the East India Company reframed these debts early
on as ‘investment’. This reconfiguration of long-range debt enabled early
colonialists to evade responsibility and mesh ‘the corporation’s financial
burden with the political and military force applied to unacknowledged
peoples and their nations’. This epochal move foreshadowed the position
taken by later plantation-owners, who used slave labour to mediate their
debt and transform it into bargaining power. The scale of what London
and Liverpool creditors stood to lose if the slave trade were abolished
contributed to its longevity.25 Later, former slaves in the United States,
trying to establish their own lives, experienced what W. E. B. Du Bois
termed ‘the slavery of debt’.26 That history is still being lived.27 Such
facts underline how far-reaching and problematic the term ‘early modern
debts’ actually is. As VanWagoner suggests, early colonial efforts involved
representing imprisonment as a state of indebtedness. For if that adjust-
ment of language and perspective could be achieved and internalized,
domination could thereafter be represented as moral benefaction (debt
reprieve) or lawful enforcement (debt retrieval).
The impact of economies of obligation on imaginative literature like-
wise extends beyond the bounds of early modern England. As Hutson’s
essay in this volume shows us, ‘debt is the engine of comedy in Rome in
the first century BCE, but also in Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth
century CE and in England at the end of the same century’. In all
these varied settings, we find shared elements of economic and social
24 Ralph A. Austen, ‘Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India

Companies and Slave Plantations’, Critical Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (2017): 139–177,
173 and passim.
25 R. B. Sheridan, ‘The Commercial and Financial Organization of the British Slave
Trade, 1750–1807’, Economic History Review 11, no. 2 (1958): 249–263, esp. 260–263.
26 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 102.
27 To give just two examples: (1) Black households in the United States are dispropor-
tionately subject to foreclosure; see Bronwen Lichtenstein et al., ‘Cumulative Disadvantage
or Beating the Odds? Racial Disparities in Home Foreclosure by Neighbourhood Compo-
sition in the American Deep South’, Housing, Theory and Society 36, no. 4 (2019):
489–503. (2) The uncompensated or barely compensated labour of incarcerated Black
Americans, made possible by the Thirteenth Amendment, operates as a form of debt
peonage and modern slavery; see Michele Goodwin, ‘The Thirteenth Amendment:
Modern Slavery, Capitalism, and Mass Incarceration’, Cornell Law Review 102, no. 4
(2019): 899–990.
life: pressure on reputation, the need for trust among transactors (along
with its corollary, suspicion) and debt’s functioning as a binding agent
among persons and within communities. We also discover how debts in
one domain of life could be remade with reference to indebtedness and
credit in an apparently separate domain. Apparently distinct sorts of debt
could mine the same rhetorical or logical resources. For instance, as both
Hutson and John Kerrigan argue, financial debts might be recast as inti-
mate obligations, gambles, wins and losses—with consequences, in turn,
for public credit. Especially in later sections of this book, the impinge-
ment of social reformations of trust upon interior life and subjecthood
becomes more salient. Thus, as Andrew Zurcher shows, early modern
poets wrenched together debts personal and impersonal, spiritual and
worldly, in order to enjoy the paradox that staking or ceding the self could
sometimes be the same as taking fuller possession of it. Examining such
binds from a different angle, Alexander Douglas analyses the question
of whether the person who made the debt could reasonably be identified
with the person obliged to repay it. How can debt be considered naturally
or commonsensically binding when such simple questions cause trouble?
Presumptions of legal personhood underpin the social operations of
debt. The Economy of Obligation tracked the rise of debt litigation in
late sixteenth-century England; subsequent studies have likewise drawn
on court records as rich archives for the study of debt.28 This was a
time also of rapid doctrinal changes in law pertaining to obligations and
their enforcement. In England, this was especially true: by the end of the
sixteenth century, most credit disputes were no longer handled in terms
of ‘debt’ at all, but through the action known as assumpsit .29 The unpaid
creditor claimed that the debtor had done him an injury by breaking his
promise. This development in England maintained the moral content of
debt, but arose in combination with efforts to arrive at a more impersonal
law. Although the ‘promise’ was a legal fiction designed to enable expe-
dient resolution of disputes around debts and contracted services, it also
tied non-payment to an implicitly moral failure to keep one’s oath.
Although in civil law jurisdictions such arguments never arose in
the same way, changing social and economic circumstances likewise
28 See, among others, Shepard, Accounting and Cathryn Spence, Women, Credit, and
Debt in Early Modern Scotland (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016).
29 See A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Common Law of Contract: The Rise of the
Action of Assumpsit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
1 INTRODUCTION 13
demanded practical responses. In this volume, Christof Jeggle calls atten-

tion to a problem of special concern to merchants engaged in legal
disputes: the lack of a common commercial law, or lex mercatoria. This
was a problem of real urgency in European market towns, where local laws
might conflict with the expectations of long-distance traders. Jeggle tracks
the development of one instrument designed to resolve such conflict:
learned legal opinions, or parere, circulated among market downs. Litiga-
tion and other forms of dispute resolution are not the only ways in which
the law intervened in debt relations. As Dave De ruysscher’s chapter
argues, legal doctrine shaped financial behaviour at every level. Laws
not only ‘marked what could be considered as debt’ but also influenced
‘how market actors valued agreements and debt instruments’. Taking
the bylaws of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Antwerp as a case study,
De ruysscher calls attention to a legal structure of importance to several
essays in this volume: the hierarchy of debts. Debt hierarchies obtained
everywhere, but varied locally. As Nga Bellis-Phan and Sebastian Kühn
demonstrate, rent arrears owed to landlords in Paris and wages withheld
from servants in Brandenburg and Saxony were high-priority debts in
their respective locales. Along with De ruysscher, Bellis-Phan stresses the
use of material assets—‘movable’ or (as common law prefers) ‘personal’
properties—as security. The growth and centralization of law during our
period are obviously factors in state consolidation. Legal supplementa-
tion of credit agreements helped mingle moral claims with the apparently
impersonal logic used to bolster and manifest secular authorities.
The hierarchy of debts came into play during bankruptcy, when the
demands of multiple creditors needed to be ranked. It also mattered at a
more conclusive breaking point: death. As Kühn shows, moneys owed to
servants were often deferred until their master’s death, when they were
repaid not as debts but bequests. Lena Cowen Orlin has noted elsewhere
that when a will was executed debts had to be repaid before legacies could
be distributed; these debts were themselves ranked.30 Orlin’s chapter here
explores how debts mattered differently through the life cycle. Her essay
reveals that indebtedness affected ordinary people’s decisions about every-
thing from marriage and career to whether and when to be seen in public.
Taking William Shakespeare as an example of how debt might shape an
30 Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘Fictions of the Early Modern English Probate Inventory,’ in The
Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry
Turner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 51–81.
individual life, Orlin argues that the mundane economic condition of

family debt might explain ‘the very fact that Shakespeare became a poet
and playwright’.
In their attention to rhetorical tropes and literary genres, several chap-
ters embroider a passing suggestion in Muldrew’s book—that ‘material
well-being depended on … unstable language’. They also revisit a central
argument of The Usurer’s Daughter: that literary production both allego-
rized and facilitated credit relations.31 Some attend to the specific kinds
of language used in debt relations, like Laura Kolb’s chapter on rhetorical
tactics deployed in letters negotiating loans and Kühn’s investigation of
the very different names masters and servants applied to household finan-
cial obligations. Investigating the poetry of Thomas Wyatt and William
Shakespeare, Zurcher attends to poetic language as a sensitive register
of the intricacies of economic bonds. The figure of hypallage, Zurcher
argues, encodes ‘the paradox at the heart of debt relations’: that debtors
can have power over creditors. In a kaleidoscopic chapter on debts and
ventures both literary and financial, Kerrigan calls attention to the way
playwrights dramatized an emerging urban ‘economy of risk’ in the period
1625–1649. Onstage, the plot device of trying a woman’s sexual virtue
came to figure the risks and rewards of ‘a system of wealth and credit … in
which redemption is always possible by comic means’—even for usurers,
gamesters and indebted courtiers clothed in unpaid-for silks.
The question of what one should or could stake of oneself impinged,
often imperceptibly, on definitions and representations of the self. The
structure of Early Modern Debts roughly traces the arc towards inwardness
and individualism drawn by Muldrew’s contribution in the final section.
We begin on the public streets of Plautus’ Rome and Ariosto’s Ferrara. In
New Comedy and its Renaissance descendants, as Hutson argues, financial
standing as well as interior space and psychological depth is constructed
through the interplay of implication and inference. They are matters
of belief, or credit (from credo, credere, to believe), staked on outward
appearances. We end with a turn inward. Becoming ‘a thrifty householder
of the mind,’ Muldrew argues, allowed some people towards the end of
our period to break free of ‘chains of interpersonal obligations’ that had
for over a century defined both economic and social life. It is plausible
that stepping beyond debt in this way was secretly and thus more fully
31 The quotation is from Muldrew, Economy, 157.

1 INTRODUCTION 15
to accept a lasting indebtedness to the social structures responsible for

the regulation of social credit. Possibly, it was to endorse the existence of
such structures, and therefore the bondage of other groups, as the very
condition of conscience. Although these are questions outside our book’s
scope, Early Modern Debts does throw new light on the beginnings of
an epoch characterized by debt of a ubiquity and magnitude unknown to
any other society in history, an era of borrowed time.
References
Adebayo, A. G. ‘Money, Credit, and Banking in Precolonial Africa. The Yoruba
Experience.’ Anthropos 89, nos. 4/6 (1994): 379–400.
Aswani, Shankar, and Peter Sheppard. ‘The Archaeology and Ethnohistory of
Exchange in Precolonial and Colonial Roviana: Gifts, Commodities, and
Inalienable Possessions’. Current Anthropology 44, no. S5 (2003): 51–78.
Austen, Ralph A. ‘Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India
Companies and Slave Plantations’. Critical Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (2017):
139–177.
Bailey, Amanda. Of Bondage: Debt, Property, and Personhood in Early Modern
England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Baker, David J. On Demand: Writing for the Market in Early Modern England.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009.
Bartolovitch, Crystal. ‘“Optimism of the Will”: Isabella Whitney and Utopia’.
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32, no. 9 (2009): 407–432.
Chen, Yongxi, and Anne Cheung. ‘The Transparent Self Under Big Data
Profiling: Privacy and Chinese legislation on the Social Credit System’. The
Journal of Comparative Law 12, no. 2 (2017): 356–378.
Dienst, Richard. The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good.
London: Verso, 2011.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.
Goodwin, Michele. ‘The Thirteenth Amendment: Modern Slavery, Capitalism,
and Mass Incarceration’. Cornell Law Review 102, no. 4 (2019): 899–990.
Graeber, David. Debt. The First 5,000 Years. London: Melville House, 2011.
Gregerson, Linda. ‘Life Among Others’. Virginia Quarterly Review, 83, no. 1
(2007): 204–217.
Hutson, Lorna. The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women
in Sixteenth-Century England. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Inikori, Joseph E. ‘The Credit Needs of the African Trade and the Development
of the Credit Economy in England’. Explorations in Economic History 27, no.
2 (1990): 197–231.
Kea, Ray A. Settlements, Trade and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
Lauer, Josh. Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial
Identity in America. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.
Lichtenstein, Bronwen et al. ‘Cumulative Disadvantage or Beating the Odds?
Racial Disparities in Home Foreclosure by Neighbourhood Composition in
the American Deep South’. Housing, Theory and Society 36, no. 4 (2019):
489–503.
McClanahan, Annie. Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century
Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2017.
Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social
Relations in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998.
Ogilvie, Sheilagh, Markus Küpker, and Janine Maegraith. ‘Household Debt in
Early Modern Germany: Evidence from Personal Inventories’. The Journal of
Economic History 72, no. 1 (2012): 134–167.
Orlin, Lena Cowen. ‘Fictions of the Early Modern English Probate Inventory.’
In The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern
England, ed. Henry Turner, 55–81. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Perlin, Frank. ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’. Past &
Present 98 (1983): 30–95.
Sale, Carolyn. ‘The Literary Thing: The Imaginary Holding of Isabella Whit-
ney’s “Wyll” to London (1573)’. In The Oxford Handbook of English Law
and Literature, 1500–1700, ed. Lorna Hutson, 431–449. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2017.
Sandidge, Marilyn. ‘Urban Space as Social Conscience in Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll
and Testament”’. In Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern
Age, ed. Albrecht Classen and Marilyn Sandidge, 595–613. Berlin: de Gruyter,
2009.
Shakespeare, William. The Comedy of Errors, ed. R. A. Foakes. London: Methuen,
1968.
Shepard, Alexandra. Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order
in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.
Sheridan, R. B. ‘The Commercial and Financial Organization of the British Slave
Trade, 1750–1807’. Economic History Review 11, no. 2 (1958): 249–263.
Simpson, A. W. B. A History of the Common Law of Contract: The Rise of the
Action of Assumpsit. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
Spence, Cathryn. Women, Credit, and Debt in Early Modern Scotland. Manch-
ester: Manchester UP, 2016.
Strier, Richard. The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to
Milton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
1 INTRODUCTION 17
Whitney, Isabella. A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye. Contayning a Hundred and

Ten Phylosophicall Flowers. London: Richard Jones, 1573.
Wong, Karen Li Xan, and Amy Shields Dobson. ‘We’re Just Data: Exploring
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220–232.
PART I
Family, Household, Community
Drawing on English, French, German and Italian materials, the chapters

in Part I show that debt ‘reverberated through all early modern lives’, as
Lena Cowen Orlin puts it, but also that debt took a bewildering array
of forms and sometimes amounted to social being itself. The chapters
here stress debt’s constitutive importance to the chief imaginary of early
modern European society: the household.
Lorna Hutson’s chapter on humanism, comic assurance and erotic
uncertainty suggests a basic imbrication of debt and belief, credit and
credence. Believing, crediting and imagining are interwoven, because the
creditor must speculate upon the world of the debtor and the resources
hidden behind public-facing doors. As Hutson explains, this is why the
door became an important device of comic invention. For some, the door
itself could stand for the prospect of ‘broken assurances’. No wonder that,
as Nga Bellis-Phan shows, French creditors required more certainty about
what was behind it. Parisian law obliged renters to provide sufficient furni-
ture for rent collateral. Judges deemed furniture ‘sufficient’ if it provided
a ‘liveable environment’. The bed in which one slept and the table at
which one ate were not only part of the structure of domestic experience
but specific legal collateral.
Elsewhere, Sebastian Kühn shows how the aristocratic household in
parts of early modern Germany comprised a tissue of overlapping and
ambiguous debts. He details how debt between masters and servants
was reframed successively as household investment, security, savings,
micro-credit, benefaction, gifts and wage arrears. Orlin explores how, in
20 PART I: FAMILY, HOUSEHOLD, COMMUNITY
England, arrears could survive death and become legacy. Her chapter
closes with the suggestion that William Shakespeare’s personal papers may
have been lost to history when a later creditor broke through the door of
his old home to claim ‘diverse books, boxes, desks, monies, bonds, bills,
and other goods of great value’. Imagined worlds must have a material
existence in order to be shared—like desks and beds, utopias and histories
are liable to sudden distraint.
CHAPTER 2
Debt and Doorways in Renaissance Comedy
Lorna Hutson
2.1 Everyone Is Afraid of Giving

Credit (Metuont Credere Omnes)
‘Everyone is afraid of giving credit’ (metuont credere omnes ): these are
the words of Calidorus, a love-struck young man in Plautus’s Pseudolus ,
first performed in 191 BCE.1 Calidorus is talking to a pimp called Ballio,
standing just outside his door. Ballio has just taken a down payment from
a Macedonian soldier for the purchase of Phoenicium, a courtesan whom
Calidorus loves, but whom he hasn’t been able to raise the cash to buy. In
this scene, Ballio chides Calidorus for not finding some other way to come
by the money. If Calidorus was so much in love, Ballio argues, he could
have found a ‘friendly loan’ (mutuum), gone to a moneylender, added a
little interest to the loan (faenusculum) or even swindled his father. When
Calidorus professes, shocked, that ‘pietas ’ forbids him cheating his father,
Ballio quips that he’d better hug that filial pietas in bed at night instead
1 Plautus, Pseudolus, in The Little Carthaginian: Pseudolus —The Rope, ed. and trans.
Wolfgang de Melo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2012), line 304, p. 276.
L. Hutson (B)
Merton College, Oxford, UK
e-mail: lorna.hutson@ell.ox.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2020 21

L. Kolb and G. Oppitz-Trotman (eds.), Early Modern Debts,
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59769-6_2
22 L. HUTSON
of his girlfriend. Finally, Ballio suggests that Calidorus raise money by

buying oil on credit and selling it for cash. He can’t, Calidorus laments,
because he’s a minor and, anyway, ‘everyone’s afraid of giving credit’—
‘Metuont credere omnes ’ (295–304). Of course, we understand him to
mean that ‘everyone is afraid of lending money’. We might even, as Neil
Coffee does, read these words as referring to the economic crisis of 193–
192 BCE, when, apparently, ownership of Roman loans was transferred to
non-Roman citizens who could raise interest rates, leading to a ‘general
collapse in credit’.2
I don’t dispute the existence of a historic referent for ‘Metuont credere
omnes ’, but I would like to take Calidorus’s words and the impression
made by the scene in general, in a different direction. I’d like to put these
in the context of dramatic storytelling, connecting them to the power but
also the risk of theatre—the power of swaying an audience’s emotional
response as against the risk that the audience will be bored or censorious
and the play will not come to life. The dramatic situation here—the plight
of the young man who owes money for a courtesan and can’t pay on time,
or who needs to conceal debts from a returning father—is frequently the
engine of the Roman new comic plot, as well as its Renaissance humanist
imitations, such as the ‘Christian Terence’ prodigal son drama.3 Debt
is such a staple of the Roman comic plot that it is worth asking what
debt has to do with comedy’s particular achievement as a form. Comedy
cannot rely, as tragedy does, on the renown of a historic or mythic subject.
Concerning itself with the fictional disputes of very ordinary people, it
has nevertheless to make the audience feel engaged enough to enjoy the
way it brings about its (usually improbable) resolution. Such audience
engagement might be thought of as a suspension of scepticism, a disposi-
tion to be indulgent, to lend credit. Stories about the difficulty of getting
2 Neil Coffee, Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2017), 61–62. For a detailed account of banking, money-lending and finance in
Rome, see Jean Andreu, Banking and Business in the Roman World, trans. Janet Lloyd
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999).
3 The best-known sixteenth-century English version of ‘Christian Terence’ is John Pals-
grave’s translation of Guliemus Gnaphaeus’s Acolastus, printed by Thomas Berthelet in
1540 and used in grammar schools to teach Latin and good morals. On new comedy’s
impact on English drama, see Robert S. Miola, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The
Influence of Terence and Plautus (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994); on Plautus, in particular,
see Richard F. Hardin, Plautus and the English Renaissance of Comedy (Madison, NJ:
Farleigh Dickinson UP, 2018).
2 DEBT AND DOORWAYS IN RENAISSANCE COMEDY 23
credit might, then, seem to acknowledge, at the level of plot, the tech-
niques which engage the dramatist at the level of form. In this context,
we might construe ‘Metuont credere omnes ’ as ‘everyone guards against
being drawn in, everyone is afraid of believing ’. Credo, credere, after all,
means ‘I believe’, ‘to believe’.
What I am pushing towards might seem far-fetched—an analogy
between the finding of credit and the expansive possibilities of a verisim-
ilar, or credible fictional world. But the analogy is explicitly present in
Pseudolus itself. When Calidorus can’t think of any way to raise money to
buy Phaenicium before the Macedonian soldier returns with the balance
on his down payment, he turns to his slave, Pseudolus. Pseudolus confi-
dently boasts that he will perform a virtuoso act of ‘invention’—he will,
like a poet, find the necessary twenty bars of silver though they exist
nowhere on this earth:
Yet just as a poet, when he takes writing tablets, looks for something that
doesn’t exist anywhere, but finds it nonetheless and makes likely what is a
lie, I shall now become a poet: even though the twenty minas don’t exist
anywhere, I’ll find them nonetheless.
sed quasi poeta, tabulas quom cepit sibi,

quaerit quod nusquam est gentium, reperit tamen,
facit illud veri simile, quod mendacium est,
nunc ego poeta fiam: viginti minas,
quae nusquam nunc sunt gentium, inveniam tamen.4
The vocabulary here is that of rhetorical invention—Pseudolus says he

will ‘invent’—‘invenire’, that is, find or discover, using rhetorical tech-
niques—the money, though it doesn’t at the moment exist, objectively,
in the world (nusquam nunc sunt gentium). Literary critics will recog-
nize a likeness in Philip Sidney’s assertion that the poet disdains to be
tied to what is already in Nature and, ‘lifted up with the vigour of his
own invention’ (my italics) ‘doth grow in effect into another nature, in
making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or quite anew,
4 Plautus, Pseudolus, lines 401–408, pp. 288–289.

24 L. HUTSON
forms such as never were in Nature’.5 Of course, Pseudolus says the

poet makes verisimilar or truth-like, what is actually a lie—‘facit illud
veri simile, quod mendacium est ’—whereas Sidney argues that the poet
‘nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’.6 But the difference may not
be so great. Within the fiction, Pseudolus will impersonate and deceive,
and thereby deal in making lies plausible, but the effect for us as audience
will not be to deceive us into thinking the play is true, but rather to allow
us into the fiction’s expansive world, and particularly, into the change of
heart that reconciles father and son.
Cognitive approaches to literary studies make use of the ideas of ‘cog-
nitive fluidity’ and ‘epistemic vigilance’. We move fluidly between the
reality of the present and the alternative realities of dreams, hypotheses
and make-believe precisely because of the ‘epistemic vigilance’ that
enables us to tag alternative realities as such: as ‘comedies’ or ‘promises’ or
‘daydreams’. ‘If fiction demands an especially acute epistemic vigilance’,
writes Terence Cave, ‘that’s because it claims the right to imagine uncon-
strainedly … Epistemic vigilance is thus … a passport to other ways of
thinking about the world’.7 The conventional speech of the wily slave in
Roman new comedy, who announces that he will make a lie look like
truth, might be thought of as one of the forms taken by ‘epistemic vigi-
lance’ in classical and neoclassical comedy. Pseudolus’s boast foregrounds
the link between the techniques that engage an audience in believing in
the fictional play world and the techniques by which people may, in real
life, defraud us with false assurances. Self-contained fictions acquire imag-
inative reality when audiences are complicit in the playful and imaginative
acts of inferring causes and supplying connections, thereby projecting
a world ‘behind the scenes’. Classical comedies encourage such infer-
ences in plots of financial and erotic deception, which is why, of course,
moralists thought their art itself a lie.
Sidney was, of course, thoroughly versed in this debate: the example
he gives of the poet’s not lying is, suggestively, that of the doorway in the
5 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), ed. Geoffrey
Shepherd, revised and expanded by R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002),
85.
6 Ibid., 103.
7 Terence Cave, Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2016), 73.
neoclassical stage set that signals an imaginary location, beyond the mise-
en-scène: ‘What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes
written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?’8
And when advising how a play might ‘set forth a story, which containeth
both many places and many times’, Sidney famously advises the use of
rhetorical narration and description, the actor describing Calicut while
represented as being in Peru, for example.9 I have argued elsewhere that
we should see the sixteenth-century debate on the neo-Aristotelian unities
less as concessionary to the audience’s lack of imagination than as engaged
in creating opportunities for rhetorical representation of extramimetic
times and spaces—the whole ‘world of the play’ which we imagine as
continuous between scenes and behind the stage.10 It is clearly this
aspect of Italian neoclassical dramatic theory and practice that English
drama, including Shakespeare, needed to borrow from and develop, since
morality plays have few techniques for representing extramimetic time
and space, they produce no ‘world of the play’. Here I want to suggest
that the typical predicament of classical comedy—of needing credit for
erotic fulfilment—bears a kind of analogical relationship to comedy’s
skilful engagement of the audience’s imagination in supplementing the
mise-en-scène by filling in all that can’t be shown (extramimetic locations,
characters’ histories, implied motivations), so that the transformative
dénouement (the implausible recognition scene, or the change of heart
that reconciles father and son) receives not scorn, but applause.
My proposal will sound, I expect, not only implausible, but old-
fashioned. While there has been no explicit movement to discredit
work on genre or on the influence of literary achievements in other
languages, cultural histories of economic and legal developments now
enjoy much greater explanatory currency, as far as English drama goes,
than the old ‘source’ and ‘influence’ studies. This is not a develop-
ment to regret, generally speaking: literary approaches to early modern
representations of the marketplace were, from the 1980s on, greatly
enriched by Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Jean-Christophe Agnew’s analyses of
8 Sidney, Apology, 103.

9 Sidney, Apology, 111.
10 Lorna Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015).
26 L. HUTSON
the privileged marginality and moral ambivalence of the market as a ritu-

ally bounded place and time in pre-capitalist culture.11 Indeed, literary
studies influenced by Bakhtin and Agnew, as well as by anthropologists
and social historians on household honour and gender relations, were
already considering representations of early modern economic relations in
terms far less abstract than those of the histories of capitalism that Craig
Muldrew cites in the opening of his magisterial Economy of Obligation in
1998.12 Nevertheless, Muldrew’s study, revealing early modern England’s
vast web of interpersonal indebtedness and its consequent emphasis on
reputation, trust and new forms of litigation (such as ‘assumpsit ’), has
contributed to a new phase in English literary studies, in which atten-
tion has focused on the legal and ethical shape of interpersonal debt.
This includes Luke Wilson’s important work on early modern theatrical
representations of intentional action, which connects changes in literary
representations of intention to changes in contractual liability (‘assumpsit ’
once again) and Bradin Cormack’s correspondingly subtle, compelling
studies of ‘the affective dimension of holding land’.13 More recently,
Tim Stretton has described the ‘collective loss of contractual innocence’
dramatized in comedies tracing effects of a shift from the customary
‘dower’ to the contractual interest known as ‘jointure’, while Andrew
Zurcher has taken Wilson’s thinking about ‘assumpsit ’ further, tying the
pessimism of The Comedy of Errors to the legal shift from an ethical
concern with keeping promises to a material concern with compensating
promise-breach.14
11 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1968); Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Theater and the
Market in Anglo-American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986); Lorna Hutson,
‘The Displacement of the Market in Jacobean City Comedy’, The London Journal 14, no.
1 (1989): 3–16.
12 See, for example, Jonathan Haynes, The Social Relations of Jonson’s Theater
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992); Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friend-
ship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994);
Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in
Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998).
13 Luke Wilson, Theaters of Intention (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000); Bradin Cormack,
‘Strange Love: Or, Holding Lands’, Law and Humanities 2 (2007): 221–238.
14 Tim Stretton, ‘Contract and Conjugality’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Law
and Literature, ed. Lorna Hutson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017), 410–430, 420; Andrew
Zurcher, ‘Consideration, Contract and the End of The Comedy of Errors ’, in Shakespeare
As the English literary-critical focus has moved from taking a broad

view of the cultural history of the marketplace in early modern Europe
towards zooming in on the detail of legal-economic relations in early
modern England, a great deal has been gained in terms of analytical
nuance. Nevertheless, too exclusively a national and even local frame of
reference brings its own diminution of analytical power. The now instinc-
tive turn to the local material culture of early modern England as the
privileged explanatory framework has entailed diminishing awareness of
European culture more broadly and of the translation of poetic forms and
genres from one language and culture to another. Debt is the engine of
comedy in Rome in the first century BCE, but also in Italy at the begin-
ning of the sixteenth century CE and in England at the end of the same
century. If we look only at cultural histories of law and the marketplace,
we may miss the meaning of this perceived affinity between debt and the
dramatic imagination. A clue to that affinity, I will argue here, lies in the
part played, in sixteenth-century comedy, by the house door.
2.2 ‘Batti Quell’uscio’---‘Pound

on This Door’ (La Lena, 4.3.999)
In the third act of Ariosto’s final comedy, La Lena, performed in Ferrara
in 1528, 1529 and 1532, a creditor called Bartolo Bindello draws up,
with his beefy servant, Magagnino, outside the front door of the epony-
mous Lena. ‘Go and do your office’, he says to the sturdy Magagnino,
‘Pound on that door’ (Batti quell’uscio).15 ‘Why should I pound on that
door’, asks Magagnino, ‘if it hasn’t offended me?’ This kind of banter
about a door—another staple of classical and neoclassical comedy, which
Shakespeare imitates in Petruccio’s instruction to Grumio to ‘knock me
here soundly’—goes on, until the door avoids a beating and opens of
its own accord, to reveal numerous people pushing and jostling, already
deep in various altercations over the question of the value of the house
and the Law, ed. Paul Raffield and Gary Watt (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2008), 19–38,
31.
15 Ludovico Ariosto, La Lena, in Tutte Le Opere di Ludovico Ariosto, ed. Cesare Segre,
vol. 4, Commedie, ed. Angela Casella, Gabriella Ronchi, and Elena Varasi (Mondadori,
1974), IV.iii.2. Further references to act, scene and line number in this edition will appear
in the text. I have also benefited from The Comedies of Ariosto trans. Edmond M. Beame
and Leonard G. Sbrocchi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
28 L. HUTSON
and its contents.16 Into the mêlée shove Bartolo and his heavies—Maga-
gnino, Spagnuolo and Falcione, along with a couple of Sbirri, Ferrarese
policemen, who have come along to ‘help’. Already ‘inside the house’—or
issuing onto the stage set of the street—are Pacifico, Lena’s impecunious,
debt-ridden husband, Torbido, a surveyor taking measurements of the
house, and Giuliano, Pacifico’s relative and another creditor. Giuliano has
just been alerted to the fact that Pacifico’s goods are being seized by
debt-collectors and he’s worried about a barrel he lent Pacifico last wine
harvest. As soon as Bartolo gets into the doorway of the house, he spots
the barrel and tells Magagnino to haul it onto his shoulders. Giuliano
objects, laying claim to the barrel. Into the altercation then steps Fazio,
who lives next door and would be Pacifico’s landlord (except, for reasons I
will come on to, Pacifico pays no rent). Fazio in a sense, then, also tech-
nically has a claim to the barrel, but doesn’t press it—rather, he loftily
says that he will adjudicate the case and that the barrel should be left
in trust with him and he’ll give Giuliano two days to bring evidence of
ownership. ‘Roll it over here into my house’, says Fazio (spingetela/Qua
dentro in casa, IV.vi.1084–1085), and the barrel is trundled from Pacifi-
co’s house to Fazio’s, while a scuffle breaks out in Pacifico’s, as Torbido,
the surveyor, finds his cloak has been filched as a perk of the job by
Magagnino.
Without knowing more about the scene at this stage—and there is
more to tell—we know enough to see how vividly it depicts the economy
of obligation and indebtedness Muldrew describes, though the city it
depicts is not seventeenth-century London, but early sixteenth-century
Ferrara, under the house of Este’s despotic rule. Paul Larivaille and
Ronald Martinez have argued that the play’s vivid topographical realism
has a bold, satirical edge, criticizing Este tyranny and the economy it
creates.17 Martinez notes that while similar references to Ferrara can be
found in other plays by Ariosto, ‘in Lena the local references are selected
16 Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. Barbara Hodgdon (London: Methuen,
2010), 1.2.9.
17 Paul Larivaille, ‘Spazio Scenico e Spazio Cittadino ne La Lena’, in La Corte e lo
Spazio: Ferrara Estense, ed. Giuseppe Pagano and Amedeo Quondam (Roma: Bulzoni
Editore, 1982), 257–278, 262; Ronald Martinez, ‘Taking the Measure of La Lena: Pros-
titution, the Community of Debt and the idea of the Theater in Ariosto’s Last Play’,
California Italian Studies 6, no. 2 (2016): 1–35. I would like to thank Justin Steinberg
for alerting me to Martinez’s fine article, to which I am (the locution can’t be avoided)
greatly indebted.
to emphasize buying, selling, borrowing and lending: the implicit map of

Ferrara is an economic one’.18
The brilliant, illusionistic realism of Ariosto’s theatrical Ferrara had
been remarked by the poet’s contemporaries, too. In 1519, Tomaso
Lippomano wrote of Ariosto’s I Suppositi, ‘The comedy was such, that
it simulated a Ferrara as precise as the real one’.19 How is Ferrara so
precisely simulated? Partly because of new developments in the sort of
stage set described by Elena Povoledo as the ‘citta ferrarese’. As well as
a raised stage, with houses and doors, sets for Ariosto’s comedies seem
to have involved perspective city views.20 But Ferrara was also precisely
simulated in speeches made by characters about their actions and where-
abouts in between their appearances onstage—in other words, by a kind
of ‘reporting’. So, for example, the wily servant, Corbolo (who explicitly
compares himself to Plautus’s Sosia, from Amphitryon) comes onstage
at III.ii, describing his travails in seeking, among the delicatessen shops
(pizzicagnoli) in front of the Palazzo Ducale, some nice fat quails or
pigeons for a feast. The pigeons were all so scrawny, he says, they looked
as though they’d had the quartan fever, but then, at the porta del Cortile,
the archway now known as the Volto del Cavallo, some of the Duke’s
gamekeepers (uccellatori) were waiting to go into the Gorgadello—the
local pub—and one of these sold Corbolo a pair of nice fat pheasants,
on the condition that he would keep the transaction secret. The statue
of Duke Borso won’t be quieter than me, promises Corbolo (‘Non è la
statua / Del duca Borso là di me più tacita’, II.iii.487–488), referring to
the statue of the Este Duke towering above the very Volto del Cavallo
beneath which we imagine this conversation to take place.21
The very audacious joke here is that it is the silence of the Este family—
in the form of the complicity of the Ducal decrees which prohibit the
sale and consumption of game—that creates the dearth of edible fowl in
18 Martinez, ‘Taking the Measure of La Lena’, 11.

19 Cited by Sergio Costola, ‘Ludovico Ariosto’s Theatrical Machine: Tactics of Subver-
sion in the 1509 Performance of I Suppositi’, PhD thesis, University of California, Los
Angeles, 2002 (UMI microform 3078154), 56.
20 See chapters II. 2 and II. 3 of Nino Pirrotta and Elena Povoledo, Music and Theatre
from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), esp. 302 and 316–317
and Plate 21.
21 See Thomas Tuohy, Herculean Ferrara: Ercole d’Este (1471–1505) and the Invention
of a Ducal Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 55, 58, 268.
30 L. HUTSON
the shops by the Palazzo and fuels the lucrative black market exploited
by the Duke’s gamekeepers. Corbolo’s narration of his voyage in search
of the ingredients for the feast therefore presents, to the Este family
seated before the stage in the Sale Grande of the Palazzo Ducale, not ‘an
opulent, well-regulated Ferrara’, but a city ‘inferior to all others’, corrupt
and full of secrets. This vivid, imaginary scene, incidentally revelatory of
the squalor of the Ferrarese economy, emerges, as Larivaille observes, ‘out
of the concatenation of causality which supports and helps progress the
plot of the comedy’.22 But in this respect, of course, Corbolo’s ‘true’
account of how he came by his brace of pheasants is no different, tech-
nically speaking, from the lies he spins in order to conjure up money,
or credit, on behalf of his young man. Corbolo, like Pseudolus, is the
servant of an amorous young man (Flavio) who hasn’t the money he
needs to be able to bed down with his girl. In one scene, then, Corbolo,
consciously imitating a Plautine slave, alarms Flavio’s father, Ilario, with a
long, vivid story of how Flavio has been beaten up and robbed by ruffians
by the pawnbrokers’ shops in portico opposite San Stefano (III.ii). The
narrative again jokingly alludes to the financial nature of Flavio’s wounds
at the pawnbrokers, but for a while Ilario is taken in, he credits the
story. For there is, as sixteenth-century English anti-theatrical moralists
observed, no technical difference (since the play world is the product of
rhetorical make-believe) between the poet’s conjuring of an extramimetic
scene and the duplicitous character telling a lie that looks like truth.23
Or, as Erasmus put it with respect to ‘the narratives of messengers in
tragedies’, speeches of this kind are rich in enargeia, vividness, because
‘they are presented instead of the spectacle’. ‘[A]ll tragedies abound in
narrations of this kind’, Erasmus goes on, ‘Nor does it matter for this
purpose whether they are true or false, as in the Electra of Sophocles, the
old man tells Clytemnestra falsely how Orestes had perished in battle’.24
22 Larivaille, ‘Spazio Scenico’, 262. My translation.

23 In England, these included the former playwright, Stephen Gosson, whose School
of Abuse, which he dedicated to Philip Sidney in 1579, invoked Plautus as model for
contemporary stage plays which, he thought, encouraged young men to engage in both
prodigality and lewd behaviour in the playhouse. See Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse
(London: 1579), sig. B5r.
24 Erasmus, On Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix
(Milwaukee: Marquette UP, 1999) 48–49.
The revival of theatre in early sixteenth-century Ferrara was a revival

of theatre and rhetoric. The ‘insistent externality’ of the Renaissance
stage—the fact that the comic mise-en-scène is always ‘outdoors ’, in the
street, before the doors of houses—goes with a new awareness of rhetor-
ical opportunities for creating verisimilitude or truth-likeness, or eliciting
‘credit’ or belief in all that isn’t ever going to be mimed or represented
onstage.25 Rudolph Agricola’s work on dialectical invention—drawn upon
by Italian neoclassical theorists, such as Lodovico Castelvetro—explained
how listeners and audiences contribute to the credibility of successful lies,
lies that look like truth. Sinon’s lies to the Trojans in Virgil’s Aeneid, says
Agricola, contain nothing in the words that ‘fidem faciat ’, that compel
or coerce belief, but the listener collects and compares them, considers
their order and congruence or agreement within themselves, and thus
persuades him or herself to believe.26 This is, of course, how the Renais-
sance comic plot persuades us of its truth-likeness, too. Giovambattista
Giraldi Cinthio proposed that comic verisimilitude or credibility was the
effect of the audience’s feeling that events had come about ‘either neces-
sarily or probably’.27 The most important thing in writing comedy, he
wrote, was the ‘knot’ and its ‘solution’, and he glossed ‘knot’ (nodo) as
‘the fabric, or the composition of the fable’ and ‘solution’ as its explica-
tion. Ranking Ariosto’s comedies, he gave second place to La Lena for
‘the natural explication of the knot which is found in that play’ (‘la natu-
rale esplicazione del nodo che in essa si ritrova’); it was this that made La
Lena more ‘verisimile’ said Cinthio, than I Suppositi.28
In comedy, this emphasis on the listener’s or audience’s contribution
to the making of belief or credit goes, I suggest, with an emphasis on
25 I borrow the phrase ‘insistent externality’ from Peter Womack, ‘The Comical Scene:
Perspective and Civility on the Renaissance Stage’, Representations 101 (Winter 2008):
32–56, 43.
26 Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric
and Dialectic (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 193–194. For Castelvetro’s interest in Agricola,
see Claudia Rossignoli, ‘“Dar Materia di ragionamento”: strategie interpretative della
Sposizione’, in Lodovico Castelvetro, Filologia acesi, ed. Roberto Giliucci (Rome: Bulzione
Editore, 2007), 91–113.
27 Cited in Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), I:436.
28 Giovambattista Giraldi Cintio, De’ Romanzi, delle Comedie e delle Tragedie Ragion-
amenti, ed. Eugenio Camerini (Milan: G.Daelii, 1864; facsimile reprint A. Forni, 1975),
II.18–22.
32 L. HUTSON
the door as symbol of occlusion, of all that we’re never going to see. The
listener’s contribution to the invention of proofs, to provisional (if play-
fully sceptical and indulgent) assent that x or y is somehow happening
or has happened ‘behind the scenes’, is one of inference. The listener
infers causal connections, imagines supplementary scenes and supplies a
coherence that explains away representational discontinuities in the mise-
en-scène. Characters may disappear into doorways and never be seen again,
yet we’re persuaded to imagine their actions. In La Lena, the amorous
young man, Flavio, enters Lena’s doorway in scene 1, yet, despite never
appearing again onstage, continues to play a crucial role. This can be
seen in the scene described above from the fourth act, where everyone is
arguing over who owns the barrel. In this instance, the scene’s hysterical
undertone—nervous laughter erupting from the audience as the barrel
is rolled into Fazio’s house for adjudication—comes from the fact that
Flavio is hiding inside the barrel. At least, this is what the audience credits
or believes or ‘knows to be true’, in spite of not seeing it. And the audi-
ence knows that the object of Flavio’s desire is Fazio’s daughter, Licinia.
So, Fazio’s insouciant rolling of the barrel into his own house while he
vacates it to go to the pub is a hilarious or terrifying own goal against the
credit or reputation of his own house.
In classical and neoclassical comedy, there can be no interior scenes.
‘All conversations, including the most private’, as Alan Nelson says, ‘must
occur outdoors’. Nelson writes that ‘[f]ixed-locale staging restricts the
action in certain ways’.29 However, we could reverse the implication
of Nelson’s thinking. While we tend to think of the neo-Aristotelian
unities—expressed in fixed-locale staging and temporal precision—as
merely prohibitive, comedies like Ariosto’s show that limiting the staged
scene to a fixed locale and duration had the effect of encouraging
the dramatist’s ingenuity in the matter of getting audiences to imagine
offstage times and locations in relation to causality and to human moti-
vation and feeling. The native dramatic traditions of the European stage
were sophisticated in many ways, but offered little, as Charles Whitworth
has written, ‘in terms of techniques for conveying offstage action and
29 Alan H. Nelson, ‘The Universities: Early Staging in Cambridge’, in A New History

of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia
UP, 1997), 59–67, 64.
extramimetic locations’.30 So when Larivaille and Martinez praise Lena

for conjuring a dystopian effet de réel in presenting Ferrara’s markets,
brothels and streets, they respond to an achievement linked to that which
Cinthio commended in the play—the apparent naturalness of its plot
solution, which requires that we infer, or imagine (or give credit to) a
complex historical and spatial hinterland, a series of connections that
aren’t enacted, and that we will never ‘see’. I propose that if ‘debt’ as
the young man’s predicament registers the temporal compression of the
neo-Aristotelian comic plot, then the ‘door’ may be taken to register a
corresponding pressure on the resources of spatial imagining exercised by
fixed-locale staging. The consistent externality of the mis-en-scène requires
the audience to work hard at inferring the causes and connections by
which unseen elements of the action all fit together.
In Plautus’s comedies, writes Elizabeth Haight, ‘everything … takes
place on the street near the door or in the doorway’.31 Plots, she goes
on, are developed by characters’ frustrations with bolted doors or suspi-
cions about activities behind closed doors.32 Characters are designated
‘janitors’ or doorkeepers, like the drunken ianitrix Laena in Plautus’s
Curculio, drawn out onto the threshold by the smell of wine being poured
in the entranceway.33 Peter Womack, likewise, writes that Italian neoclas-
sical comedy is physically focused on the door: ‘the hero must find a
way of getting himself in through it. And … the audience are invited to
imagine what the young couple are doing on the far side of it … under-
lying these energies and jokes is the opposition between the houses as
separate and private and the street as communal and public’.34
Womack links the door’s structural centrality to the libidinal imagina-
tion—the audience imagines what happens once the young man finds the
30 Charles Whitworth, ‘Reporting Offstage Events in Early Tudor Drama’, in Tudor

Theatre: ‘Let there be Covenants ’, ed. André Lascombes (Berne: Peter Lang, 1977), 45–66,
58.
31 Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, The Symbolism of the House Door in Classical Poetry (New
York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1950), 69–91.
32 Haight, Symbolism of House Door, 76–77
33 Plautus, Curculio, in Casina. The Casket Comedy. Curculio. Epidicus. The Two
Menaechmuses, ed. and trans. Wolfgang de Melo (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011),
lines 80–109; see also Robert C. Ketterer, ‘Stage Properties in Plautine Comedy:
Introductory Analysis: Curculio’, Semiotica 59 (1986): 193–216.
34 Womack, ‘Comical’, 43.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“Why, I happened to have in my knapsack one of my pamphlets on
the Reef-building Serpulæ; so I went back to the school, and gave it
to the mistress to include in her curriculum.”
ARCADES AMBO
Miguel and Nicanor were the Damon and Phintias of Lima. Their
devotion to one another, in a city of gamblers—who are not, as a
rule, very wont to sentimental and disinterested friendships—was a
standing pleasantry. The children of rich Peruvian neighbours, they
had grown up together, passed their school-days together (at an
English Catholic seminary), and were at last, in the dawn of their
young manhood, to make the “grand tour” in each other’s company,
preparatory to their entering upon the serious business of life, which
was to pile wealth on wealth in their respective fathers’ offices.
In the meanwhile, awaiting a prosaic destiny, they continued
inseparable—a proverb for clean though passionate affection.
The strange thing was that, in the matters of temperament and
physique, they appeared to have nothing in common. Nicanor, the
younger by a few months, was a little dark, curly-haired creature,
bright-eyed as a mouse. He was, in fact, almost a dwarf, and with all
the wit, excitability, and vivaciousness which one is inclined to
associate with elfishness. At the same time he was perfectly formed
—a man in miniature, a little sheath crammed with a big dagger.
Miguel, on the other hand, was large and placid, a smooth,
slumberous faun of a youth, smiling and good-natured. He never
said anything fine; he never did anything noteworthy; he was not so
much admirable as lovable.
The two started, well-equipped in every way, on their tour. The
flocks of buzzards, which are the scavengers of Lima, flapped them
good-bye with approval. They were too sweetening an element to be
popular with the birds.
Miguel and Nicanor travelled overland to Cayenne, in French
Guiana, where they took boat for Marseilles, whence they were to
proceed to the capital. The circular tour of the world, for all who
would make it comprehensively, dates from Paris and ends there.
They sailed in a fine vessel, and made many charming
acquaintances on board.
Among these was Mademoiselle Suzanne, called also de la
Vénerie, which one might interpret into Suzanne of the chase, or
Suzanne of the kennel, according to one’s point of view. She had
nothing in common with Diana, at least, unless it were a very
seductive personality. She was a fashionable Parisian actress,
travelling for her health, or perhaps for the health of Paris—much in
the manner of the London gentleman, who was encountered touring
alone on the Continent because his wife had been ordered change
of air.
Suzanne, as a matter of course, fell in love with Miguel first, for his
white teeth and sleepy comeliness; and then with Nicanor, for his
impudent bright spirit. That was the beginning and end of the trouble.
One moonlight night, in mid-Atlantic, Miguel and Nicanor came
together on deck. The funnel of the steamer belched an enormous
smoke, which seemed to reach all the way back to Cayenne.
“I hate it,” said Nicanor; “don’t you? It is like a huge cable paid out
and paid out, while we drift further from home. If they would only stop
a little, keeping it at the stretch, while we swarmed back by it, and
left the ship to go on without us!”
Miguel laughed; then sighed.
“Dear Nicanor,” he said; “I will have nothing more to do with her, if
it will make you happy.”
“I was thinking of your happiness, Miguel,” said Nicanor. “If I could
only be certain that it would not be affected by what I have to tell
you!”
“What have you to tell me, old Nicanor?”
“You must not be mistaken, Miguel. Your having nothing more to
do with her would not lay the shadow of our separation, which the
prospect of my union with her raises between us—though it would
certainly comfort me a little on your behalf.”
“I did not mean that at all, Nicanor. I meant that, for your sake, I
would even renounce my right to her hand.”
“That would be an easy renunciation, dear Miguel. I honour your
affection; but I confess I expect more from it than a show of yielding,
for its particular sake, what, in fact, is not yours to yield.”
Miguel had been leaning over the taffrail, looking at the white
wraiths of water which coiled and beckoned from the prow. Now he
came upright, and spoke in his soft slow voice, which was always
like that of one just stretching awake out of slumber—
“I cannot take quite that view, Nicanor, though I should like to. But I
do so hate a misunderstanding, at all times; and when it is with you
——!”
His tones grew sweet and full—
“O, Nicanor! let this strange new shadow between us be dispelled,
at once and for ever. I love Mademoiselle Suzanne, Nicanor.”
“I love Mademoiselle Suzanne, Miguel.”
“Very well. Then I yield her to you.”
“O, pardon me, Miguel! but that is just the point. I wanted to save
you the pain—the sense of self-renunciation; but your blindness
confounds me. More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows.
Your infatuation for Mademoiselle Suzanne is very plain to very
many. What is plain only to yourself is that Mademoiselle Suzanne
returns your devotion. You are not, indeed, justified in that belief.”
“Why not?”
“She has confessed her regard, in the first place, for me.”
“But she has also confessed to me that I have won the leading
place in her affections.”
“That is absurd, Miguel. She is the soul of ingenuousness.”
“Perhaps, Nicanor—we are only boys, after all—she is a practised
coquette.”
“You must not say that, Miguel, if you want me to remain your
friend. You, perhaps, attach too much importance to your looks as an
irresistible asset in matters of the heart.”
“Now I shall certainly quarrel with you.”
“You are mistaken, I think. Mind, to women of intellect, is the
compelling lure.”
“It remains to be proved.”
“You are determined to put it to the test, then? Good-bye, Miguel.”
“This is not a real breach between us? O, Nicanor!”
“We must come to a definite understanding. Until we do, further
confidence between us is impossible.”
He strutted away, perking his angry head, and whistling.
But Suzanne had accomplished the amiable débacle for which she
had been intriguing. She had, paradoxically, separated the
inseparables. It was a little triumph, perhaps; a very easy game to
one of her experience—hardly worth the candle, in fact; but it was
the best the boat had to offer. It remained only to solace the tedium
of what was left of the voyage by playing on the broken strings of
that friendship.
It was Nicanor who suffered most under the torture. He had
always been rather accustomed to hear himself applauded for his wit
—a funny little acrid possession which was touched with a
precocious knowledge of the world. Now, to know himself made the
butt of a maturer social irony lowered his little cockerel crest most
dismally. As for good-natured Miguel, it was his way to join, rather
than resent, the laugh against himself; and his persistent moral
health under the infliction only added to the other’s mind-corrosion.
In a very little the two were at daggers-drawn.
The “affair” made a laughable distraction for many of the listless
and mischievous among the passengers. They contributed their little
fans to the flame, and exchanged private bets upon the probable
consequences. But Suzanne, indifferent to all interests but her own,
worked her oracles serenely, and affected a wide-eyed
unconsciousness of the amorous imbroglio which her arts had
brought about. First one, then the other of the rivals would she
beguile with her pensive kindnesses, and, according to her mood or
the accident of circumstances, reassure in hope. And the task grew
simpler as it advanced, inasmuch as the silence which came to fall
between Miguel and Nicanor precluded the wholesome revelations
which an interchange of confidences might have inspired.
At last the decisive moment arrived when Suzanne’s more intimate
worldlings were to be gratified with her solution of the riddle. It was to
end, in fact, in a Palais Royal farce; and they were to be invited to
witness the “curtain.”
A few hours before reaching port she drew Miguel to a private
interview.
“Ah, my friend!” she said, her slender fingers knotted, her large
eyes wistful with tears, “I become distracted in the near necessity for
decision. Pity me in so momentous a pass. What am I to do?”
“Mademoiselle,” said poor Miguel, his chest heaving, “it is resolved
already. We are to journey together to Paris, where the bliss of my
life is to be piously consummated.”
“Yes,” she said; “but the publicity—the scandal! Men are sure to
attribute the worst motives to our comradeship, and that I could not
endure.”
“Then we will make an appointment to meet privately—somewhere
whence we can escape without the knowledge of a soul.”
“It is what had occurred to me. Hush! There is a little
accommodating place—the Café de Paris, on the Boulevard des
Dames, near the harbour. Do you know it? No—I forgot the world is
all to open for you. But it is quite easy to find. Be there at eight
o’clock to-morrow morning. I will await you. In the meantime, not a
hint, not a whisper of our intention to anyone. Now go, go!”
He left her, rapturous but, once without her radiance, struck his
breast and sighed, “Ah, heart, heart! thou traitor to thy brother!”
And at that moment Suzanne was catching sight of the jealous
Nicanor, angrily and ostentatiously ignoring her. She called to him
piteously, timidly, and he came, after a struggle with himself,
stepping like a bantam.
“Is it not my friend that you meant, mademoiselle? I will summon
him back. Your heart melts to him at the last moment.”
“Cruel!” she said. “You saw us together? I would not have had a
witness to the humiliation of that gentle soul—least of all his brother
and happier rival.”
“His——! Ah, mademoiselle, I entreat you, do not torture me!”
“Are you so sensitive? Alas! I have much for which to blame
myself! Perhaps I have coquetted too long with my happiness; but
how many women realize their feelings for the first time in the shock
of imminent loss! We do not know our hearts until they ache,
Nicanor.”
“Poor Miguel—poor fellow!”
“You love him best of all, I think. Well, go! I have no more to say.”
“Suzanne!”
“No, do not speak to me. To have so bared my breast to this
repulse! O, I am shamed beyond words!”
“But do you not understand my heartfelt pity for his loss, when
measured by my own ecstatic gain?”
“Well?”
“Suzanne! I cannot believe it true.”
“I feel so bewildered also. What are we to do?”
“You spoke once of a journey to Paris together.”
“You and I? Think of the jests, the comments on the part of our
shipmates! We are not to bear a slurred reputation with us. I should
die of shame.”
“What if we were to meet somewhere, unknown to anybody, by
appointment, and slip away before the world awoke?”
“Yes, that would do; but where?”
“Can’t you suggest?”
“I know of a little Café de Paris. It is on the Boulevard des Dames,
near the harbour. Say we meet there, at eight o’clock to-morrow
morning, in time to catch the early mail?”
“O, yes, yes!”
“Hush! We have been long enough together. Do not forget; be
silent as the grave.”
“Brains triumph!” thought Nicanor, as he went. “Alas, my poor,
sweet, simple-minded comrade!”
De la Vénerie carried betimes quite a select little company with her
to the rendezvous. They were all choking with fun and expectation.
“The dear ingénus!” said Captain Robillard. “It will be exquisite to
see the fur fly. But precocity must have its lesson.”
They had their rolls and coffee in a closet adjoining the common
room. There was a window overlooking the street.
“Hist!” whispered the tiny Comte de Bellenglise. “Here they come!”
Nicanor was the first to arrive. He was very spruce and cock-a-
hoop. His big brown eyes were like fever-spots in his little body. He
questioned, airily enough, the proprietor, who had been well
prompted to answer him.
“No, monsieur; there is no lady at this hour. An appointment? Alas!
such is always the least considered of their many engagements.”
As he spoke, Miguel came in. The two eyed one another blankly
after the first shock. At length Nicanor spoke: the door between the
closet and the café opened a little.
“You have discovered, then? Go away, my poor friend. This is,
indeed, the worst occasion for our reconciliation.”
“I did not come to seek you, Nicanor. I came to meet
Mademoiselle Suzanne alone, by appointment.”
“And I, too, Miguel. I fear you must have overheard and
misconstrued her meaning. It was I she invited to this place.”
“No, Nicanor; it was I.”
“She has not come, at least. We must decide, at once and for
ever, before she comes.”
“I know what you mean, Nicanor. This, indeed, is the only end to a
madness. Have you your pistol? I have mine.”
“And I have mine, Miguel. You will kill me, as you are the good
shot. I don’t know why I ever carried one, except to entice you to
show your skill at breaking the floating bottles. But that was before
the trouble.”
“Dear Nicanor!”
“But let it be à l’outrance. I want either to kill you or to be killed.”
“If she were only out of the way, you would love me again.”
“Amen to that, dear Miguel!”
“Yet we are to fight?”
“To the death, my brother, my comrade! Such is the madness of
passion.”
The paralyzed landlord found breath for the first time to intervene.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen! for God’s sake! consider my reputation!”
Miguel, starting away, and leaving Nicanor with his back to the
closet, produced and pointed his weapon at the trembling creature.
These South Americans were a strange compound of sweetness
and ferocity.
“If you interfere,” he said, “I will shoot you instead. Now, Nicanor,
we fire at discretion, one shot to each.”
The bang of Nicanor’s pistol shattered the emptiness. Miguel was
down on the floor. Nicanor cast away his reeking weapon, and,
running to his friend, raised his body in his arms. The door of the
closet opened, and Suzanne, radiant and gloating, stood in the entry.
“That was a good shot, Nicanor,” said Miguel, smiling weakly. “You
are better at men than bottles.”
“Miguel! Miguel! you have your pistol undischarged. Faint as you
are, you cannot miss me at this range.”
“Stand away, then, Nicanor.”
Nicanor stood up, tearing his coat apart.
“Here, here! to my heart, dearest!”
Miguel, supporting himself on his left hand, raised his pistol swiftly,
and shot Mademoiselle Suzanne through the breast. Then he fell
back to the floor.
“That is the short way to it, Nicanor. Confess, after all, I am the
better shot. Now we are reunited for ever.”
Suzanne had not a word to say to that compact. She lay in a heap,
like the sweetest of dressmaker’s dummies overturned.
The landlord raised a terrible outcry.
“Messieurs! I am ruined, unless you witness to the truth of this
catastrophe!”
“I, for one, will witness,” said de Bellenglise, very white.
“Mademoiselle, it is plain to the humorist, has only reaped what she
sowed. But I do not envy M. Nicanor his survival.”
Heaven, however, did, it appeared, from the fact of its claiming him
to the most austere of its foundations, La Trappe, in Normandy,
where men whom the law exonerates may suffer, voluntarily, a
lifelong penal servitude.
And, in the meanwhile, Miguel could await his friend wholehearted,
for he had certainly taken the direct way of sending Mademoiselle
Suzanne to a place where her future interference between them was
not to be dreaded.
OUR LADY OF REFUGE
When Luc Caron and his mate, whom, officially, he called Pepino,
plodded with their raree-show into the sub-Pyrenean village of San
Lorenzo, their hearts grew light with a sense of a haven reached
after long stress of weather. Caron sounded his bird-call, made of
boxwood, and Pepino drummed on his tabor, which was gay with
fluttering ribbons, and merrily they cried together:
“Hullo, gentles and simples! hullo, children of the lesser and the
larger growth—patriots all! Come, peep into the box of enchantment!
For a quarter-real one may possess the world. See here the anti-
Christ in his closet at Fontainebleau, burning brimstone to the
powers of evil! See the brave English ships, ‘Impérieuse’ and
‘Cambrian,’ dogging the coast from Rosas to Barcelona, lest so little
as a whiff of sulphur get through! Crowd not up, my children—there
is time for all; the glasses will not break nor dim; they have already
withstood ten thousand ‘eye-blows,’ and are but diamonds the
keener. Come and see the ships—so realistic, one may hear the
sound of guns, the wind in the rigging—and all for a paltry quarter-
real!”
Their invitation excited no laughter, and but a qualified interest,
among the loafing village ancients and sullen-faced women who
appeared to be the sole responsible inhabitants of the place. A few
turned their heads; a dog barked; that was all. Not though Caron and
Pepino had come wearifully all the way from Rousillon, over the
passes of the mountains, and down once more towards the plains of
Figueras, that they might feel the atmosphere of home, and claim its
sympathetic perquisites, was present depression to be forgotten at
the call of a couple of antics. Twelve miles away was not there the
fort of San Fernando, and the cursed French garrison, which had
possessed it by treachery, beleagured in their ill-gotten holding by a
force of two thousand Spaniards, which included all the available
manhood of San Lorenzo? There would be warrant for gaiety,
indeed, should news come of a bloody holocaust of those defenders;
but that it did not, and in the meanwhile, blown from another quarter,
flew ugly rumours of a large force of French detached somewhere
from the north, and hastening to the relief of their comrades. True, a
fool must live by his folly as a wise man by his wisdom; but then
there was a quality of selection in all things. As becoming as a jack-
pudding at a funeral was Caron in San Lorenzo at this deadly pass.
Not so much as a child ventured to approach the peep-show.
The two looked at one another. They were faint and loose-lipped
with travel.
“Courage, little Pepa!” said Caron. “There is no wit-sharpener like
adversity. The hungry mouse has the keenest scent.”
It was odd, in the face of his caressing diminutive, that he held
himself ostentatiously the smaller of the pair. He seemed to love to
show the other’s stature fine and full by comparison. Pepino, in fact,
was rather tall, with a faun-like roundness in his thighs and soft olive
face. He was dressed, too, the more showily, the yellow
handkerchief knotted under his hat being of silk, and his breeches,
down the seams of which little bells tinkled, of green velvet. Caron,
for his part, shrewd and lean and leather-faced, was content with a
high-peaked hat and an old cloak of faded mulberry. His wit and
merriment were his bright assets.
Pepino, for all his weariness, chuckled richly.
“Sweet and inexhaustible! I could feed all day on thy love. Yet, I
think, for my stomach’s sake, I would rather be less gifted than the
mouse. What is the use to be able to smell meat through glass when
the window is shut?”
“Wait! There are other ways to the larder than by the door. In the
meanwhile, we will go on. There are two ends to San Lorenzo, the
upper and lower: we will try the lower. North and south sit with their
backs to one another, like peevish sisters. What the one snubs the
other may favour.”
He swung the box by its strap to his shoulder, closed the tripod,
and, using it for a staff, trudged on dustily with his comrade. Half way
down the village, a man for the first time accosted them. He was
young, vehement, authoritative—the segundo jefe, or sub-prefect of
San Lorenzo.
“Wait!” he said, halting the pair. “I know you, Caron. You should be
de Charogne—a French carrion-crow. What do you here, spying for
your masters?”
“Señor,” said the showman, “you are mistaken. I am of your
people.”
“Since when? I know you, I say.”
“Many know me, caballero, in these parts, and nothing against me
but my nationality. Now that is changed.”
“Since when? I repeat it.”
“Since the Emperor tore my brother from his plough in Rousillon to
serve his colours, and our father was left to die of starvation. We are
but now on our way back from closing the old man’s eyes, and at the
foot of the hills we recovered our chattels, which we had hid there,
on our journey north, for security. I speak of myself and my little
comrade, Pepino, who is truly of this province, señor, having been
born in Gerona, where he made stockings.”
The sub-prefect looked at Pepino attentively, for the first time, and
his dark eyes kindled.
“And wore them, by the same token,” he murmured.
He swept off his hat, mockingly courteous.
“Buenos dias, señora!” he said.
Caron jumped.
“Ah, mercy, caballero!” he cried. “Can you, indeed, distinguish so
easily? Do not give us away.”
“Tell me all about it,” said the sub-prefect. “Truly this is no time for
masquerading in San Lorenzo.”
“But it was the most obvious of precautions to begin with,” pleaded
Caron. “Over the mountains is not safety for a woman; and since
——”
“And since, you are in San Lorenzo,” said the other.
“It is true, señor. Pepa shall re-sex herself to-night. Yet it is only a
few hours since we found our expedient justified.”
“How was that?”
“Why, in the hills, on our way back, we came plump upon a French
picket, and——”
He leapt, to the sudden start and curse the other gave.
“What have I said, señor?”
“Dolt, traitor!” thundered the sub-prefect. “French! and so near!
and this is the first you speak of it! I understand—they come from
Perpignan—they are Reille’s advance guard, and they march to
relieve Figueras. O! to hold me here with thy cursed ape’s chatter,
while——”
He sprang away, shouting as he went, “To arms! to arms! Who’ll
follow me to strike a blow for Spain! The French are in our
vineyards!” The whole village turned and followed him as he ran.
Caron, in great depression, led Pepino into a place of shade and
privacy.
“I am an ass, little one,” he said. “You shall ride me for the future.
And this is home!”
She threw her arms about his neck, with a tired spring of tears.
“But I am a woman again, dear praise to Mary!” she cried, “and
can love you once more in my own way.”
This befell in 1808, when the ferment which Napoleon had started
in Spain was already in fine working. The French garrison in
Figueras—one of those strongholds which he had occupied at first
from the friendliest motives, and afterwards refused to evacuate—
being small and hard beset by a numerous body of somatenes from
the mountains, had burned the town, and afterwards retired into the
neighbouring fort of San Fernando, where they lay awaiting succour
with anxious trepidation. And they had reason for their concern,
since a little might decide their fate—short shrift, and the knife or
gallows, not to speak of the more probable eventuality of torture. For
those were the days of savage reprisals; and of the two forces the
Spaniards were the less nice in matters of humanity. They killed by
the Mass, and had the Juntas and Inquisition to exonerate them.
But Figueras was an important point, strategically; for which
reason the Emperor—who generally in questions of political
economy held lives cheaper than salt—had despatched an express
to General Reille, who commanded the reserves at Perpignan, on
the north side of the mountains, ordering him to proceed by forced
marches to the relief of the garrison, as a step preliminary to the
assault and capture of Gerona. And it was an advance body of this
force which Luc and his companion had encountered bivouacking in
the hills.
It was not a considerable body as the two gauged it, for Colonel de
Regnac’s troops—raw Tuscan recruits, and possessed with a panic
terror of the enemy—were showing a very laggard spirit in the
venture, and no emulation whatever of their officers’ eagerness to
encounter. In fact, Colonel de Regnac, with his regimental staff,
some twenty all told, and few beside, had run ahead of his column
by the measure of a mile or two, and was sitting down to rest and
curse, below his breath, in a hollow of the hills, when the two
captured vagabonds were brought before him.
There had been no light but the starlight, no voice but the
downpouring of a mountain stream until the sentry had leaped upon
them. Chatter and fire were alike prohibited things in those rocky
ante-rooms of hate and treachery.
“Who are you?” had demanded the Colonel of Caron.
“A son of France, monsieur.”
“Whither do you go?”
“To attend the death-bed of my old father in Rousillon,” had
answered Luc, lying readily.
The Colonel had arisen, and scanned his imperturbable face
keenly.
“His name?”
Luc had told him truthfully—also his father’s circumstances and
misfortunes.
The officer had grunted: “Well, he pays the toll to glory. Whence,
then, do you come?”
“From Figueras.”
“Ha! They have news of us there?”
“On the contrary, monsieur; your coming will surprise them
greatly.”
“It is well; let it be well. Go in peace.”
A little later the sentry, confiding to one who was relieving him,
was overheard to say: “Ventre de biche! I would have made sure first
that those two rascals went up the hill!”
He was brought before the Colonel.
“My son, what did you say?”
The sentry, scenting promotion for his perspicacity, repeated his
remark, adding that, if he were right in his suspicions of the
vagabonds’ descent towards San Lorenzo, there would be trouble on
the morrow.
He was soundly welted with a strap for his foresight, and thereafter
degraded—to his intense astonishment, for a private was not
supposed to volunteer counsel. But his prediction was so far
vindicated that, in the course of the following morning, a well-aimed
shot, succeeded by a very fusillade, vicious but harmless, from the
encompassing rocks, laid low a member of the staff, and sent the
rest scattering for shelter. They were, at the time, going leisurely to
enable the main body to come up with them; but this stroke of
treachery acted upon men and officers like a goad. Re-forming, they
deployed under cover, and charged the guerrillas’ position—only to
find it abandoned. Pursuit was useless in that welter of ridges; they
buckled to, and doubled down the last slopes of the mountain into
San Lorenzo.
“If I could only encounter that Monsieur Caron!” said the Colonel
sweetly.
And, lo! under the wall of a churchyard they came plump upon the
very gentleman, sitting down to rest with his comrade Pepino.
It seemed a providence. The village, for all else, appeared
deserted, depopulated.
Luc scrambled to his feet, with his face, lean and mobile, twitching
under its tan. The Colonel, seated on his horse, eyed him pleasantly,
and nodded.
He was hardly good to look at by day, this Colonel. It seemed
somehow more deadly to play with him than it had seemed under the
starlight. He had all the features of man exaggerated but his eyes,
which were small and infamous—great teeth, great brows, great
bones, and a moustache like a sea-lion’s. He could have taken Faith,
Hope, and Charity together in his arms, and crushed them into pulp
against his enormous chest. Only the lusts of sex and ambition were
in any ways his masters. But, for a wonder, his voice was soft.
“Son of France,” he said, “thou hast mistaken the road to
Rousillon.”
Luc, startled out of his readiness, had no word of reply. Pepino
crouched, whimpering, unnoticed as yet.
“What is that beside him?” asked the Colonel.
A soldier hoisted up the peep-show, set it on its legs, and looked
in.
“Blank treason, Colonel,” said he. “Here is the Emperor himself
spitting fire.”
“It is symbolical of Jove,” said Caron.
“Foul imps attend him!”
“They are his Mercuries.”
“No more words!” said the Colonel. “String the rascal up!”
That was the common emergency exit in the then theatres of war.
It had taken the place of the “little window” through which former
traitors to their country had been invited to look.
Pepino leapt to his feet, with a sudden scream.
“No, no! He is Caron, the wit, the showman, dear to all hearts!”
Colonel Regnac’s great neck seemed to swell like a ruttish wolf’s.
His little eyes shot red with laughter. He had as keen a scent as the
sub-prefect for a woman.
“Good!” he said; “he shall make us a show.”
“Señor, for the love of God! He spoke the truth. His father is dead.”
“He will be in a dutiful haste to rejoin him.”
“Señor, be merciful! You are of a gallant race.”
“That is certain,” said de Regnac. “You, for your part, are
acquitted, my child. I take you personally under my protection.”
“Good-bye, comrade!” cried Caron sadly. “We have gone the long
road together, and I am the first to reach home. Follow me when you
will. I shall wait for you.”
“Fie!” said the Colonel. “That is no sentiment for a renegade.
Heaven is the goal of this innocence, whom I save from your
corruption.”
They hung him from the branch of a chestnut tree, and lingered
out his poor dying spasms. Pepino, after one burst of agony, stood
apathetic until the scene was over. Then, with a shudder, correlative
with the last of the dangling body’s, she seemed to come awake.
“Well,” she said, “there goes a good fellow; but it is true he was a
renegade.”
The Colonel was delighted.
“They have always a spurious attraction,” he said, “to the sex that
is in sympathy with naughtiness in any form. But consider: false to
one is false to all, and this was a bad form of treachery—though,” he
added gallantly, “he certainly had his extreme temptation.”
“The French killed his father,” she said indifferently.
“The French,” he answered, “kill, of choice, with nothing but
kindness. You, though a Spaniard, my pet, shall have ample proof if
you will.”
“I am to come with you?”
“God’s name! There is to be no enforcement.”
“Well, you have left me little choice. Already here they had looked
upon us with suspicion, and, if I remained alone, would doubtless kill
me. I do not want to die—not yet. What must be must. The king is
dead, live the king!”
He was enchanted with her vivacity. He took her up before him on
his saddle, and chuckled listening to the feverish chatter with which
she seemed to beguile herself from memory.
“These jays have no yesterday,” he thought; and said aloud, “You
are not Pepino? Now tell me.”
“No, I am Pepa,” she said. “I am only a man in seeming. Alack! I
think a man would not forget so easily.”
“Some men,” he answered, and his hand tightened a little upon
her. “Trust me, that dead rogue is already forgathering with his
succuba.”
By and by he asked her: “How far to Figueras?”
“Twelve miles from where we started,” she answered.
A thought struck him, and he smiled wickedly.
“You will always bear in mind,” he said, “that the moment I become
suspicious that you are directing us wide, or, worse, into a guet-
apens, I shall snap off your little head at the neck, and roll it back to
San Lorenzo.”
“Have no fear,” she said quietly; “we are in the straight road for the
town—or what used to be one.”
“And no shelter by the way? I run ahead of my rascals, as you
see. We must halt while they overtake us. Besides”—he leered
horribly—“there is the question of the night.”
“I know of no shelter,” she said, “but Our Lady of Refuge.”
“An opportune title, at least. What is it?”
“It is a hospital for the fallen—for such as the good Brotherhoods
of Madrid send for rest and restoration to the sanctuary of the quiet
pastures. The monks of Misericorde are the Brothers’ deputies there
—sad, holy men, who hide their faces from the world. The house
stands solitary on the plain; we shall see it in a little. They will give
you shelter, though you are their country’s enemies. They make no
distinctions.”
De Regnac pulled at his moustache, frowning, pondering.
“Where these monks forgather are fat kids and old Malaga—a
tempting alternative to the munching of cold biscuit under the stars.
But—sacré chien! one may always take in more with the gravy than
ever fell from the spit. What, then!”
He jerked his feet peevishly in the stirrups, and growled—
“Limping and footsore already come my cursed rabble—there you
are, white-livered Tuscan sheep! The bark of a dog will scare them;
they would fear a thousand bogies in the dark. It is certain I must
wait for them, and bivouac somewhere here in the plains.”
Indeed, the first of them came on as he spoke—a weary,
stumbling body of laggards, trailing feet and muskets.
“Halte-là!” he thundered; and the men came to a loose-kneed
stand, while the corporals went round prodding and cursing them
into a form of discipline. De Regnac grumbled—
“Are we to have this cold grace to our loves? God’s name! my
heart cries out for fire—fire within and without. These monks!”
“Shall I slip before, and sound them? You may trust me, for a
Spanish girl, who has learned how to coax her confessor.”
“Ha! You!” He held her, biting his great lips. “What are you good for
but deceit, rogue! No, no; we will go together.”
He called his staff about him, and they went forward in a body.
Presently, topping a longish slope, they saw, sprung out of the plain
before them, a huddled grey building, glooming monstrous in the
dusk. Its barred windows stared blindly; twin towers held the portico
between them, as it were the lunette of a vast guillotine; a solitary
lamp hung motionless in the entrance. Far away across the flats a
light or two twinkled over ruined Figueras, like marsh-candles over a
swamp. The place seemed lifeless desolation embodied—Death’s
own monument in a desert. Gaiety in its atmosphere shivered into
silence.
But at length a captain rallied, with a laugh.
“Peste!” he cried; “a churchyard refuge! Let us see if the dead
walk!”
He battered with his sword-hilt on the great door. It swung open, in
staggering response, and revealed a solitary figure. Cowled,
spectral, gigantic—holding, motionless, a torch that wept fire—the
shape stood without a word. It was muffled from crown to heel in
coarse frieze; the eyelets in its woollen vizor were like holes
scorched through by the burning gaze behind—the very rims of them
appeared to smoulder. Laville, the captain, broke into an agitated
laugh.
“Mordieu, my friend, are the dead so lifeless?”
“What do you seek?”
The voice boomed, low and muffled, from the folds.
“Rest and food,” answered Laville. “We are weary and famished.
For the rest, we ask no question, and invite none.”
“So they come in peace,” said the figure, “all are welcome here.”
The Colonel pushed to the front, carrying his burden.
“We come in peace,” he said—“strangers and travellers. We pay
our way, and the better where our way is smoothed. Take that
message to your Prior.”
The figure withdrew, and returned in a little.
“The answer is, Ye are welcome. For those who are officers, a
repast will be served within an hour in the refectory; for the rest, what
entertainment we can compass shall be provided in the outhouses. A
room is placed at the disposal of your commander.”
“It is well,” said de Regnac. “Now say, We invite your Prior to the
feast himself provides, and his hand shall be first in the dish, and his
lip to the cup; else, from our gallantry, do we go supperless.”
Once more the figure withdrew and returned.
“He accepts. You are to fear no outrage at his hands.”
The Colonel exclaimed cynically, “Fie, fie! I protest you wrong our
manners!”—and, giving some orders sub voce for the precautionary
disposal of his men, entered with his staff. They were ushered into a
stone-cold hall, set deep in the heart of the building—a great
windowless crypt, it seemed, whose glooms no warmth but that of
tapers had ever penetrated. It was bare of all furniture save benches
and a long trestle-table, and a few sacred pictures on the walls.
While the rest waited there, de Regnac was invited to his quarters—
a cell quarried still deeper into that hill of brick. No sound in all the
place was audible to them as they went. He pushed Pepino before
him.
“This is my servant,” he said. “He will attend me, by your leave.”
The girl made no least demur. She went even jocundly, turning
now and again to him with her tongue in her cheek. He, for his part,
was in a rapture of slyness; but he kept a reserve of precaution.
They were escorted by the giant down a single dim corridor, into a
decent habitable cell, fitted with chairs, a little stove, and a prie-Dieu;
but the bed was abominably rocky. De Regnac made a wry face at it
for his companion’s secret delectation.
The ghostly monk, intimating that he would await outside the señor
commandante’s toilet, that he might re-escort his charge to the
refectory, closed the door upon the two. De Regnac cursed his
officiousness, groaning; but Pepino reassured his impatience with a
hundred drolleries. However, when the Colonel came out presently,
he came out alone; and, moreover, turned the key in the door and
pocketed it.
“Merely a prudential measure,” he explained to his guide. “These
gaillards are not to be trusted in strange houses. I will convey him his
supper by and by with my own hands.”
The figure neither answered nor seemed to hear. De Regnac,
joining a rollicking company, dismissed him from his mind.
And alone in the cell stood mad Pepino.
But not for long. A trap opened in the floor, and from it sprouted,
like a monstrous fungus, the head and shoulders of the giant monk.
Massively, sombrely he arose, until the whole of his great bulk was
emerged and standing in a burning scrutiny of the prisoner. A minute
passed. Then, “Whence comest thou, Pepa Manoele? With whom,
and for what purpose?” said the voice behind the folds.
His question seemed to snap in an instant the garrotte about her
brain. She flung herself on her knees before him with a lamentable

Early Modern Debts 1550 1700 Laura Kolb Full Chapter

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Early Modern Debts: 1550–1700 Laura

Early Modern Debts

More information about this series at

Early Modern Debts

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics

We wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, as well

Part I Family, Household, Community

2 Debt and Doorways in Renaissance Comedy 21

3 Masters as Debtors of Their Servants in Early Modern

4 Debt Culture in Shakespeare’s Time 83

5 A Legal Remedy Against Rent Arrears:

Part II Debt’s Networks

6 Crafting the Hierarchy of Debts: The Example

6.4 Hesitation around the Dowry and Bills Obligatory 143

7 Debt, Trust and Reputation in Early Modern

8 How to Deal with Obligations? Contentious Debts

9 Capillary Obligations: Fletcher’s Island Princess

Part III The Language and Logic of Debt

10 Hypallactic Debt Management: The Rhetoric

11 Caroline Debt: Shakespeare to Shirley 271

12 Debt Letters: Epistolary Economies in Early Modern

12.4 Conclusion: Beyond Manuals 324

13 Debt and Paradox in the Early Modern Period 331

Part IV The Indebted Self

14 Self-Love and the Transformation of Obligation

Nga Bellis-Phan University Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, Paris, France

Fig. 2.1 Bodleian Library Arch. G.c7, fol.H3v (Source Photo:

Laura Kolb and George Oppitz-Trotman

1.1 Debt Connects

When dayes of paiment did approch,

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Rather then any Creditor,

5 Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay, sig. E4r.

combined with equally careful attention to the conceptual frameworks

1.2 Economies of Obligation, Then and Now

11 Muldrew, Economy, 100–101.

the world economy shifted from moralized exchange to impersonal

facilitating debt relations within a geographically dispersed economy.16

1.3 Expanding the Horizons

16 Josh Lauer, Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity

and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (1994) documents

they accumulated became stable.24 As Benjamin VanWagoner discusses

24 Ralph A. Austen, ‘Monsters of Protocolonial Economic Enterprise: East India

demanded practical responses. In this volume, Christof Jeggle calls atten-

individual life, Orlin argues that the mundane economic condition of

31 The quotation is from Muldrew, Economy, 157.

to accept a lasting indebtedness to the social structures responsible for

Whitney, Isabella. A Sweet Nosgay, or Pleasant Posye. Contayning a Hundred and

Family, Household, Community

Drawing on English, French, German and Italian materials, the chapters

Debt and Doorways in Renaissance Comedy

2.1 Everyone Is Afraid of Giving

© The Author(s) 2020 21

of his girlfriend. Finally, Ballio suggests that Calidorus raise money by

sed quasi poeta, tabulas quom cepit sibi,

The vocabulary here is that of rhetorical invention—Pseudolus says he

4 Plautus, Pseudolus, lines 401–408, pp. 288–289.

forms such as never were in Nature’.5 Of course, Pseudolus says the

8 Sidney, Apology, 103.

the privileged marginality and moral ambivalence of the market as a ritu-

As the English literary-critical focus has moved from taking a broad

2.2 ‘Batti Quell’uscio’---‘Pound

to emphasize buying, selling, borrowing and lending: the implicit map of