Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 (Vol. 56) - Christopher Pye (essay date 1994)
Christopher Pye (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: “The Theater, the Market, and the Subject of History,” in ELH, Vol. 61, No. 3, Fall, 1994, pp. 501-22.
[In the essay below, Pye focuses on Act I, scene 4 of 1 Henry VI in order to study the economic and historical dimensions of subjectivity presented in the play.]
Nothing has so consistently underwritten recent efforts to historicize the study of Renaissance drama as a perceived correspondence between economic commodification and representation. In Worlds Apart, Jean-Christophe Agnew suggests how implicated the worlds of the theater and the market were during the early modern period. With the advent of exchange-value as a property independent of use-value, the market-place evolved from a localized institution to a supervening process capable of reconstituting the very society that set it in motion. “To those caught up in this expanded circulation of commodities of the early...
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