La Rivoluzione Finanziaria a teatro: la rappresentazione del credito (e il credito come rappresentazione) in alcune commedie inglesi fra Sei e Settecento

By drawing upon J.G.A.Pocock’s studies on the Financial Revolution and its controversial reception in contemporary debate, the essay analyses three plays (Shadwell’s The Volunteers, Taverner’s The Female Advocates, and Chetwood’s The Stock-Jobbers), whose main theme is credit and tries to demonstrate that, behind its moralistic condemnation, there are ambiguities and contradictions that replicate the instability of the public debate. In Taverner’s and Chetwood’s plays, though, the dramatic climaxes of the plot disclose the very nature of credit as ‘representation’, together with its subversive effects in the private sphere, epitomised in the agency of the female protagonists. However, by repressing them with the canonical happy ending, these plays reveal the actual truth behind the ambiguities of the public debate, that is, its unwillingness to fill the gap between History and morality according to the radical epistemology of credit.