In Fortune S Theater

This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking in Renaissance Italy argues that a new concept of the future as unknown and unknowable emerged in Italian society between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Exploring the rich interchanges between mercantile and intellectual cultures underpinning this development in four major cities - Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan - Nicholas Scott Baker examines how merchants and gamblers, the futurologists of the pre-modern world, understood and experienced their own risk taking and that of others. Drawing on extensive archival research, this study demonstrates that while the Renaissance did not create the modern sense of time, it constructed the foundations on which it could develop. The new conceptions of the past and the future that developed in the Renaissance provided the pattern for the later construction a single narrative beginning in classical antiquity stretching to the now. This book thus makes an important contribution toward laying bare the historical contingency of a sense of time that continues to structure our world in profound ways.

Proud and solitary, Eel Marsh House surveys the windswept reaches of the salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway. Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, the house's sole inhabitant, unaware of the tragic secrets which lie hidden behind the shuttered windows. It is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold, a feeling deepened by the reluctance of the locals to talk of the woman in black.

How were understandings of chance, luck, and fortune affected by early capitalist developments such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration? And how could the recognition that fortune wielded a powerful force in the world be squared with Protestant beliefs about theall-controlling hand of divine providence? Was everything pre-determined, or was there room for chance and human agency? Globalizing Fortune addresses these questions by demonstrating how English economic expansion and global transformation produced a new philosophy of fortune oriented arounddiscerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities. The popular theater played an influential role in dramatizing the new prospects and dangers opened up by nascent global economics and fostering a set of ethical practices for engaging with fortunes unpredictable turns. While largely derided as asinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune made a comeback on the English Renaissance stage as a force associated with valiant risks, ennobling adventures, and purposeful action. The early modern stage also reveals how a new philosophy of fortune led toeconomic exploitation and racialized exclusions.Offering in-depth discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the history of the English commercial theaterlike that of English seaborne expansionwas also a history of fortune. The public theater not only shaped popularunderstandings of fortunes role in a culture undergoing economic transformation, but also addressed this transformation from a unique position because of its own implication in London commerce, its reliance on paying customers, and its vulnerability to the risks and contingencies of liveperformance. Drawing attention to an archive of plays dramatizing maritime travel, trade, and adventure, this book shows how the popular stage shaped evolving understandings of fortune by cultivating new viewing practices and mechanisms of theatrical wonder, as well as modeling proper ways of actingin the face of unknown outcomes and contingency. In short, Globalizing Fortune demonstrates how the public theater offered the first modern understanding of fortune as a globalizing commercial and ethical phenomenon.

Vol. for 1888 includes dramatic directory for Feb.-Dec.; vol. for 1889 includes dramatic directory for Jan.-May.