Marvelously altered -- Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, and the demon of consumption -- William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida : credit risks -- "Allegory of a china shop" : Ben Jonson's Entertainment at Britain's Burse and Volpone -- "Idleness is an appendix to nobility" : the preface -- To Robert Burton's The anatomy of melancholy -- Coda : butter buyers
Summary
In early modern England, while moralists railed against the theatre as wasteful and depraved, and inflation whittled away at the value of wages, people attended the theatre in droves. This book draws on recent economic history and theory to account for this puzzling consumer behaviour. The author shows that during this period, demand itself, with its massed acquisitive energies, transformed the English economy
