SOURCE: Lander, Jesse M. “‘Crack'd Crowns’ and Counterfeit Sovereigns: The Crisis of Value in 1 Henry IV.” Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 137-61.

[In the following essay, Lander presents an economic reading of Henry IV, Part 1 as the dramatic representation of a crisis of value in which monetary concerns exert their influence on monarchical authority and legitimacy.]

Money has the advantage of presenting me immediately the lurid face of the social relation of value; it shows me value right away as exchange, commanded and organized for exploitation … money has only one face, that of the boss.

—Antonio Negri

A pervasive atmosphere of venality has often been noted in 1 Henry IV. The denizens of Eastcheap are not exceptional in their focus on pecuniary matters: the play opens with a dispute between the King and Hotspur over the payment of ransom that soon blossoms into rebellion. King Henry, as Hotspur reminds Blunt, “Knows at what time to promise, when to pay” (4.3.53), and Prince Hal uses the same language when he plans to “pay the debt I never promised” (1.2.204).¹ Worcester argues that the king's strict accounting makes reconciliation an impossibility: “The King will always think him in our debt … Till he hath found a time to pay us home” (1.3.280-83). This language does more than suggest that certain characters are adept at calculating their debts—it connects the language of economic value to the question of disputed sovereignty.

Rather than consider the admittedly obtrusive language of credit and debt, I want to examine a set of specifically numismatic images that serve to focus attention on the relationship between the monarch and economic value in a particularly acute manner. The language of coins and coinage, informed by the history of the English currency with its debasements, enhancements, and reforms as well as the daily practices associated with the circulation of coin, is animated by the peculiar and shifting nexus of sovereign power and economic value found in a coin.² As Posthumus remarks in Cymbeline: “'Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp; / Though light, take pieces for the figure's sake” (5.4.24-25).³ Though David Scott Kastan has observed, with some justice, that the play is “about the production of power,” it is also about the production of value.⁴ While the discourse of sovereignty and the proliferation of power are now familiar themes (especially in readings of the history plays), questions of value, particularly economic value, have been given less attention.⁵ However, an examination of the relationship between power and value made visible by the language of coinage reveals 1 Henry IV, and the history play more generally, to be an aesthetic response to the crisis of value that roiled the world of late sixteenth-century England.

The principal element in this crisis was an acceleration in inflation, an economic fact that had real consequences for all those who participated in monetary transactions. But to this mysterious and disorienting price spiral, one must add the dislocations caused by three changes in official religion all in the course of a single generation, an increasing awareness of what was called the New World, the early stirrings of modern science, and the advent of novel technologies. The playhouses themselves, where Shakespeare made his living by entertaining a paying audience, were both a product of this ferment and a contributor to it. “A collective Stock Exchange of ideas,” as well as, “a laboratory of and for the new social relations of agricultural and commercial capitalism,” the new professional theater was able to profit from make-believes.⁶ It is not surprising, then, that the crisis in value that might be said to be the enabling condition of the theatrical enterprise became, at times, its subject.⁷

Lacking a philosophical concept of value, never mind a fully formed theory of value, the culture of early modern England deployed the term value in a range of religious, ethical, economic, and political contexts.⁸ The complexity of this situation is well illustrated by an example from the Geneva Bible. The Gospel of Matthew, which sets out to establish the transcendent value of the kingdom of heaven, the “perl of great price,” consistently supplies marginal notes giving the English values of the coins mentioned. “A piece of twentie pence” mentioned at 17.27 is glossed: “The worde is (Statera) w[hi]c[h] co[n]teineth two didrachmas, & is valued about 5 grotes of olde sterling.”⁹ Strictly speaking, one does not need to know the contemporary value of a talent in order to understand the parable, nor presumably does it greatly clarify matters to know the present-day value of the silver paid to Judas. A rigorous account of the absolute gap between earthly and heavenly value might well render such attempts at translation otiose, and yet the producers of the Geneva Bible clearly thought this information important.

This is in large part because the Geneva translators do not recognize a conceptual divide between economics and religion (a distinction that serves to organize knowledge in the modern world): they treat value as an attribute that operates continuously and extensively across the universe. According to such a theological vision, values are commensurate and therefore translatable. A classic statement of this vision, the subject of Tillyard's much derided Elizabethan World picture, is provided by Raleigh in the preface to The History of the World; having asserted the transcendent value of things heavenly, he asks rhetorically, “Shall we therefore value honour and riches at nothing?” (C4r). His emphatic defense of honor and riches depends upon a description of the universe as arranged into divinely ordained hierarchies, a place in which avidity, the pursuit of the best things, can be redescribed as a form of worship. A similar commitment to a total structure of divinely established value leads the Geneva translators to set up a textual apparatus insisting on the proper rate of exchange between biblical and English currency. They become, in effect, moneychangers on the page if not in the temple. Though this is most obviously a comprehensive act of translation, an effort to transpose the ancient truths of the Bible into a modern, vernacular idiom, the reference to “olde sterling” suggests that the conversion is belated, if not impossible—the contemporary standard has itself already been superseded. The attempt to establish commensurate value only succeeds in revealing that present-day sterling is an uncertain standard.

This editorial attention to currency also reveals a more narrow scholarly and archaeological interest in the specificities of coin, for the discovery of ancient coins had contributed greatly to the development of Renaissance antiquarianism, a development that in turn influence the philological work of the humanists.¹⁰ The first two papers offered to the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries, treating the “antiquity of sterling money and of noble titles,” indicate the importance placed on coins by the emerging historiography.¹¹ An interest in the material and mechanics of coinage produces a numismatic language that constantly invokes value as a contested attribute, juxtaposing a natural economy of rare metals against a political economy of monarchical prerogative. As Foucault observes: “In the sixteenth century, economic thought is restricted, or almost so, to the problem of prices and that of the best monetary substance.”¹² These two concerns are intimately bound together: fluctuations in price provoke attention to coinage, changes in coin and the supply of precious metals are adduced as explanations for rising prices. Arguing that a Renaissance understanding of money as precious substance is decisively eclipsed in the Classical age by an account of the money form that focuses on its representative quality, Foucault somewhat overstates the case for discontinuity between the two periods, and, although his description of the powerful role of analogy in Renaissance thinking remains instructive, it exaggerates the degree of cohesiveness characteristic of the age.¹³ Even the solid, imposing structure of a monolithic and monotheistic value system admits the possibility of conflict between God and king, king and gold. In other words, the harmonious ideal established by analogical thinking creates a standard that can then be used to criticize the inadequacies of actuality, serving, under certain conditions, to delegitimate rather than to legitimate the status quo. The language of coinage, attuned to the potential contradiction between the sovereign's stamp and the coin's alloy, conveys the complex intertwining of value and legitimacy.

Hotspur's contention that Douglas deserves such recognition that “not a soldier of this season's stamp / Should go so general current through the world” (4.1.4-5) employes the imagery of coinage to suggest an analogy between the chivalric realm and the economic sphere. Hotspur's commendation invokes the coin's stamp as certain accreditation, a guarantee of value. But where the stamp ordinarily functions to guarantee the equivalence of a particular group of coins, here Douglas is identified as superior to his fellow soldiers. More intriguing is Hotspur's assertion to Kate that “We must have bloody noses and crack'd crowns, / And pass them current too” (2.3.94-95). Crown as head, as monarchy, and as coin all coalesce in a fantastic boast that points to a connection between violence and both economic and political systems of value. The usually surreptitious act of passing cracked or deficient coin is here presented as an act of coercive, masculine force: Hotspur imagines himself imposing a new currency of wounds. This recurrent use of numismatic language articulates, in the aesthetic terms of the history play, a crisis of value that impinges upon both the economic world and the political realm. However, the complexities of value registered by the play are ultimately resolved by a return to an aristocratic dispensation that grounds itself on the possibility of violence. By returning to an earlier historical moment in which value and sovereignty were contested, the play attempts to manage the crisis of inflation as well as the unsettling history of the Tudor coinage.

Henry VII, who acceded to the throne after dispatching his rival Richard III at Bosworth Field, was responsible for the introduction of the heaviest gold coin ever minted by an English monarch: the sovereign, as it came to be called, was a magnificent piece of royal propaganda.¹⁴ Painfully aware of the need to legitimate his reign, the king saw the coinage as a way in which to accumulate the symbolic wealth of prestige. Henry VII was also responsible for another change in the English coinage: the introduction of profile portraiture. Inspired by ancient Roman examples, profile coins celebrated the monarch as a recognizable individual with a distinctive physiognomy, a possibility that may have held special attractions for a king who was plagued by pretenders. In contrast, earlier English coins had rendered the monarch from the front as an iconic image of royalty. It was not clear that such a change would be welcomed, and it has been argued that Henry VII produced a number of experimental coins to test public reaction.¹⁵ Though profile coins proved a success and were used by later English monarchs, subsequent linguistic developments suggest that Henry VII was well advised to proceed with caution.

The negative associations surrounding the profile coin are registered at the conclusion of Hotspur's speech extolling the heroic and solitary quest for honor: “But out upon this half-fac'd fellowship!” (1.3.206). Principally Hotspur is rejecting the “corrival” who would demand a share of honor's “dignities,” but the expression “half-fac'd fellowship” suggests something more than disdain for collaborative action. “Half-fac'd” refers to the profile stamped on a coin. In King John, the Bastard rails against his brother:

Because he hath a half-face, like my father.
With half that face would he have all my land.
A half-faced groat five hundred pounds a year!

(1.1.92-94)

In both cases the expression connotes the puny and the petty, that which is not to be relied upon, the untrustworthy. The switch from a full-face to a profile portrait involved a trade-off: the king was able to personalize his image, but only by halving it. The profile coin presents the king's image as something to be recognized and worshiped; the monarch does not return the subject's gaze. In contrast, the full-face, iconic image of the king meets gaze with gaze. This change is emblematic of the transition from a feudal kingship, with its emphasis on reciprocity between king and subject, to a new form of monarchy with imperial ambitions (Henry VII also substituted a closed imperial crown for the open English crown that had appeared on earlier coins). However, the phrase “half-faced” suggests that the depiction of such ambition was subject to aesthetic, as well as political, criticism. Though Sydney Anglo admits that “the coinage was, beyond comparison, the most far-reaching medium for the display of royal portraiture, dynastic badges and political epigraphy,” he concludes that “it remains the most striking example of its limited efficacy.”¹⁶ Nonetheless, Henry VII clearly attempted, as Elizabeth would during her reign, to use the coinage to bolster the prestige and legitimacy of his reign.

Henry VIII shared his father's imperial ambitions but, emboldened by a smooth succession, he was notoriously opportunistic in his search for revenue. Neglecting his father's strategic use of the coinage to increase the monarchy's symbolic wealth, Henry VIII exploited it as a source of revenue. Not content with the profits yielded by the Mint, Henry VIII debased the coin: the pureness of the alloy used to mint coins was decreased, the actual weight of various coins was decreased, and certain coins were “called up” or given a higher nominal value by royal fiat.¹⁷ This last operation was made possible by the existence of two separate systems of money: money of exchange and money of account. Money of exchange refers to the actual coin in circulation: such as sovereigns, angels, nobles, groats, and testons. Money of account was a standard used for bookkeeping: pounds, shillings, and pence. Though setting the equivalences between money of exchange and money of account as well as the weight and fineness of the coin was a royal prerogative, there is no question that Henry's manipulation of the Mint was subsequently seen as foolish and destructive. Arguing against debasement in 1626, Robert Cotton remarked: “When Henry 8. had gained as much of power and glory abroad, of Love and Obedience at home, as ever any; he suffered shipwrack of all on this Rock.”¹⁸ Indeed, the effects of Henry's debasement continued to be felt throughout the reigns of Mary and Edward VI.

When Elizabeth came to the throne she was faced with a currency that was still suffering from the consequences of Henry's adulteration. In a letter to the queen dated 1558, Sir Thomas Gresham begins, “Ytt may pleasse your majesty to understande, thatt the firste occasion off the fall of the exchainge did growe by the Kinges majesty, your latte ffather, in abasinge his quoyne.”¹⁹ Topping Gresham's list of remedies is a restoration of the coinage. Elizabeth did in fact restore the predebasement standards of purity and weight, returning to the sterling standard of 11 ounces, 2 pennyweights of fine silver in the pound.²⁰ But before this old standard could be reintroduced it was necessary to take the debased money out of circulation. This was done by “calling down” the base coinage to its “true” value. Obviously such instability has a corrosive effect on the coin's ability to function as a standard of value. When Falstaff jokingly tells Hal, “thou cam'st not of the blood royal, if thou darest not stand for ten shillings” (1.2.136-37), he is punning on the fact that a royal was worth, or stood for, ten shillings. However the joke does more, it reverses the conventional view that the sovereign establishes the relationship between coin and value, suggesting instead that it is this immutable equivalence that determines true royalty. In other words, if Hal refuses to endorse the equation between 10 shillings and a royal, then his own royalty is suspect. Correct monetary policy—the proper equivalence between coin and value—now determines the true king. Of course, the wonderful thing about this pun is that it offers up another and opposite meaning: Falstaff is teasing Hal for his reluctance to engage in robbery. In this case, it is cowardice that calls his royalty into doubt, and somehow we arrive at the disturbing conclusion that to be a courageous robber is to be truly royal, a joke that glances knowingly at the Lancastrians Henry IV and Henry VII.

The orthodox notion in which the monarch stands at the center of the socioeconomic system guaranteeing both equivalence and identity is put under significant pressure when an adjustment is made to the coinage. In a world deeply committed to the normative value of stability, any change is suspect: “Hurlyburly innovation” is, according to Henry IV, rebellion. The only way such orthodoxy can accommodate change is as a return. Consequently, Protestants defended the Reformation as a return to the truth of the primitive church rather than a new departure, just as humanists explained their attack on the scholasticism of the schools as a reversion to the pristine standards of classical antiquity. Thus when, on 27 September 1560, Elizabeth issued a proclamation devaluing base coin,²¹ the action was justified as a return to the true, old standard. This recoinage was carefully planned to spare the queen any expense; in fact, she appears to have made a profit because the “called down” value of the base coin was lower than the actual average metallic value of the coins collected by the Mint.²² Her subjects were given a limited amount of time to exchange their old coins (with a new nominal value) for new coins. At the same time, they were warned that it was a felony to melt down any of the queen's coin. These reminders, along with the secrecy that surrounded the plans for recoinage and the speed with which it was effected, were all intended to keep entrepreneurs from exploiting the differential between nominal and metallic value by buying up “called down” coins and realizing a profit by converting them into bullion.

Shortly after the appearance of this proclamation, the government published The Summarie of Certain Reasons which have moved the Queenes Maiestie to procede in reformations of here base & corse movies. At the center of this justification for the recoinage is an articulation of what is now called Gresham's law. The tract explains that base and counterfeit money has driven all the good money out of circulation; for despite the fact that fine coins were minted in the later part of Edward's reign, during Mary's reign, and in the first years of Elizabeth's reign, “yet no part thereof is sene comonly currant; but, as it may be thought, some part thereof is caryed hence, and some, percase, by the wyser sort of people, kepte in store, as it were to be wished the whole were” (Sig. A2v). The rise in prices is described as a direct result of this state of affairs:

For every man, of the least understanding, by one means or other, knew that a teston was not worth six-pence … and therfore no man woulde gyve gladly that thing which was and ever had ben worth six-pence, for a teston, but would rather require two testons.

(Sig. A2v)

This theory is not without support among economic historians, but it is at best a partial explanation of the Tudor inflation. The text assumes that a “thing” has a permanent price and that the problem lies entirely in the coin's failure to be worth six pence. “Every man” is eventually able to see through the imposture and conclude that a teston is no longer worth six pence. If the coin is reformed, prices will return to their prebasement level:

And, consequently, every man ought to thank Almyghtye God, that he may lyve to see the honour of his countrey thus partely recovered; sylver to come in place of cooper, pryces of thynges amende, all people more able to lyve of theyr wages, every man's purse, or coffer, made free from the privie thefe, which was the counterfaytour.

(Sig. A3v-A4r)

The past tense applied to that insidious figure, the “privie thefe, which was the counterfaytour,” reveals the scope of this fantasy of reformation. The counterfeiter is seen as an especially insidious figure, able to penetrate the enclosed spaces of purse and coffer by adulterating the coin. However, the plan offers no compelling reason for supposing that the recoinage will stop the activities of the counterfeiter. Admittedly a wide discrepancy between a coin's nominal and metallic value encourages counterfeiting, since a counterfeiter may manufacture coins that are metallically equivalent to those produced by the Mint and still profit. Nevertheless, even a close correlation between metallic and nominal value will not end counterfeiting. Argument is replaced by assertion: “And fynally, no maner of person in the whole Realme shall have after one or two monethes hurt hereby, except onely the traytour which hath lyved by counterfaictying” (Sig. A3v). The demonic presence of the “counterfaictour,” the traitor responsible for adulterating the monetary system, is a rhetorical device; it diverts attention away from that royal counterfeiter, Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII. It may appear oxymoronic to speak of a royal counterfeiter; counterfeiting was treason precisely because it was an offense against the person of the king, an example of lese-majesty. The coinage was part of the royal prerogative, and consequently the king was deemed incapable of counterfeiting. As Lear says, “No, they cannot touch me for coining. I am the King himself” (4.6.83). However, as early as the mid-fourteenth century, Nicholas Oresme had argued that the coinage is the property of the community and that, therefore, the monarch does not have an absolute right to debase it.²³ Though this line of argument was not prevalent in the sixteenth century, the anxious rhetoric of The Summarie reveals that, whatever the legal situation, a change in the coinage needed to be legitimated in terms of the common good.

The most vexing problem facing the queen and her coinage in the 1590s was the persistence of inflation. The rate of inflation did not remain constant: it accelerated in the middle of the sixteenth century, dropped off in the 1560s and 1570s, and sped up again at the close of the century.²⁴ The recurrence of steep inflation during the 1590s made it clear that Mint reform alone was not enough to guarantee price stability. The social dislocation that attended the inflation of the 1590s, especially in and around London, has often been designated a crisis by historians, though recently scholars have downplayed the disruption caused by high inflation, focusing instead on the effectiveness and elasticity of social institutions. Nonetheless, Ian Archer is surely correct in “asserting the reality of a perceived crisis in the 1590s.”²⁵ This perceived crisis, in turn, served to put enormous strain on the language of value in its various forms. The impressive cultural efflorescence of the 1590s—a development not limited to the rarefied world of literary production—was in part a response to the unsettling sense that inherited values no longer had purchase in the world.

1 Henry IV was written sometime between 1595 and 1598, a period of especially severe dearth and inflation, yet it reveals none of the anger and confusion so visible in the prose tracts written to address the economic situation.²⁶ The one important exception is the Carrier's rueful remark that Robin Ostler “never joyed since the price of oats rose, it was the death of him” (2.1.11-12), an observation recalled by the inclusion amongst Falstaff's recruits of “ostlers trade-fallen” (4.2.29). In general, however, the play celebrates those characters adroit enough to thrive in a world of change and uncertainty, a reeling world insistently figured through numismatic language. Though the play's consideration of value is complex, it is unconvincing to describe Shakespeare as a celebrant of the immutable truths of customary practice.²⁷ Such readings tend to make Shakespeare into an anticapitalist avant la lettre, a percipient and conservative writer who saw the chaos and pain that would come to a society ruled by the market. For the very same reasons, it would be rash to recruit Shakespeare as a proto-liberal advocate of laissez-faire economics.²⁸ Both positions anachronistically operate within a framework based on a fully modern economic history.²⁹ Attending to the language of coinage as it resonates within 1 Henry IV and late Elizabethan culture reveals a more complex situation.

The language of coinage provides a historically specific conceptual constellation: it is one prominent vocabulary in which a range of problems that we identify as economic get thought out in the early modern period. And yet the language of coinage is also used to articulate the peculiar relationship between authority and value in contexts far removed from the world of money and trade. John Hayward, recounting an episode in which a proposal of his was rejected only to be approved when put forth in the “very same words” by another, remarks: “speech (I perceiued) was oftentimes like unto come, which passed for currant, not in regard of the mettal onely, but chiefely in regard of the stampe that was set upon it” (B1v).³⁰ The authority of the source or origin of an idea is, according to Hayward, usually more important in determining its acceptance than the substance of the claim. But it is important to remember that the metal also matters; in fact, Hayward gently criticizes the intellectual timidity of the majority who refuse to assess claims on their merits. Intrinsic worth is here opposed to the distortions imposed by deference in a hierarchical social world.

Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV operates in a similar fashion: it recognizes the overwhelming importance of the social world as a terrain riven by conflicting evaluative claims and yet it does not renounce the notion of intrinsic value. 1 Henry IV certainly subjects the official discourse of true and false that characterizes The Summarie to careful scrutiny, using the terminology of coinage and counterfeiting to depict an England that has become, in Bacon's phrase, “a very labyrinth of cozenages and abuses.”³¹ But rather than offering a simple return to the true old standard (whether it be the legitimate line or the proper pound sterling), the play imagines an alternative return to aristocratic chivalry. Elaborating on the possibilities and dangers offered by a secular world in which value and authority are revealed to be both provisional and improvisational, 1 Henry IV suggests that value emerges through a specifically historical process of strife and contention.³² The play offers an agonistic vision of history that refuses to see victory as merely adventitious: Henry and his sons succeed because they are prepared and fully committed to their cause. The decisiveness, or even ruthlessness, that led Hazlitt to accuse Henry V of having “no idea of any rule of right or wrong, but brute force,”³³ is also evident in Prince Hal, but this ethical deficiency is precisely what allows him to succeed in a time of tumultuous change.

The troubled (and troubling) connection between prince and coin is visible in Hal's first scene when he reminds Falstaff that he has always paid the tab, “so far as my coin would stretch, and where it would not I have used my credit” (1.2.52-53). The metaphor of stretched coin used by the heir apparent suggests a disturbing elasticity that recalls debasement. Despite the availability of financial credit, Hal yearns for a more inclusive credibility, and his soliloquy at the end of the scene outlines his intended strategy: he will allow the “base contagious clouds” to obscure his magnificence only so that he may be “more wonder'd at” when he breaks forth in his full glory (the sort of maneuver the Elizabethans condemned as forestalling). He plans to obscure his true qualities so that

… like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.

(1.2.207-10)

This image suggests that value is enhanced through the comparative or “foil,” and that this differential must be represented and recognized, attracting “more eyes.” Hal here claims that people and precious metals both are evaluated by the appraising gaze of an audience or society and that because context affected evaluative judgments, approbation can be advantageously manipulated. Both Hal and the king make the connection between rarity and value, but the king describes the quality of kingliness as if it were a substance to be conserved and not “swallow'd.” Hal sees it as something to be produced. The difference between the two is in part a result of their relative positions. Bolingbroke established his own value by using Richard II as a “foil”; in contrast to Richard's frequent appearances, he appeared rarely, “like a comet,” and won men's hearts. Hal first differentiates himself from his father, by playing the prodigal, but plans soon to make manifest the difference between his “old” and “new” selves.

The success of Hal's strategy is first revealed in Vernon's description of the reformed Hal and his troops armed for battle, “Glittering in golden coats like images” (4.1.100). The immediate allusion is to religious icons, saints wrapped in gold leaf, but the collocation of “golden” and “image” also suggests a coin, a line of thought that is reinforced by Vernon's subsequent remark that Hal appeared as “an angel” (4.1.108). This language, at once religious and numismatic, points insistently at the glamorous spectacle of Young Harry armed for battle but also raises the troubling possibility of a merely meretricious appearance—an inefficacious idol, a counterfeit coin, an empty suit of armor. The image of Hal on horseback presents a resplendent emblem of chivalry, but there is no immediate reason to conclude that this is not simply another pose.

The problem of deceptive appearances has, after all, been raised by Hal himself, who rather than accept a static vision of the world that equates a person's worth or dignity with a particular place in a fixed social hierarchy, sees honor, the coin of social capital, as fungible, something that can be both alienated and appropriated.³⁴ He promises his father: “For the time will come / That I shall make this northern youth exchange / His glorious deeds for my indignities” (3.2.144-46). He speaks of honor as a commodity, describing Hotspur as his “factor” who has been allowed to “engross up glorious deeds” but who will be called to “strict account” and forced to make the proper “reckoning.”³⁵ Falstaff expresses a similar sentiment, suggesting that social capital is convertible, when he remarks, “I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be brought” (1.2.80-81). Hal will do even better, rather than pay, he will seize Hotspur's good name: “O Harry, thou hast robb'd me of my youth! / I better brook the loss of brittle life / Than those proud titles thou hast won of me” (5.4.76-78). 1 Henry IV displays a world in which honor is seen to be corrupted by economic calculation, and value, whether in Eastcheap or at court, is subject to manipulation.

Falstaff, despite his cynicism, appreciates the way the honor and reputation of the coin confer purchasing power. This sensibility is visible in his insult to Bardolph: “if I did not think thou hadst been … a ball of wildfire, there's no purchase in money” (3.3.39). The expression “purchase in money” is used as incontestable fact, supporting the outlandish assertions that precede it; nevertheless, the effect is to suggest that money has a will o' the wisp quality, something in common with the spectacular and pyrotechnical. By drawing attention to the purchasing power of money, Falstaff identifies money as a means of exchange, though it might be more accurate to say that he regards money as a means to consumption. When Bardolph warns Falstaff to prepare, because, “there's money of the King's coming down the hill, 'tis going to the King's exchequer,” he immediately responds: “You lie, you rogue, 'tis going to the King's tavern” (2.2.54). Falstaff simply wants to reroute the king's money, inserting himself into a circuit of exchange without making any proprietary claims. As Hal points out, the purse snatched on Monday night is spent by Tuesday morning: “got with swearing ‘Lay by!’, and spent with crying ‘Bring in!’” (1.2.35-36). Falstaff's view is diametrically opposed to that of the king, who asks, “Shall our coffers then / Be empty'd to redeem a traitor home?” (1.3.84). The king considers money to be a stable store of value and speaks in terms of its conservation and retention, while Falstaff, who sees money as a medium of exchange, speaks the language of expenditure and consumption.

Falstaff's seemingly limitless appetite predictably leads to fantasies about limitless coining. Attempting to avoid settling his bill at the tavern, he tells the Hostess to seek payment from Bardolph: “Look upon his face. What call you rich? Let them coin his nose, let them coin his cheeks” (3.3.75-78). All the coin spent on sack has magically been preserved in Bardolph's rubicund flesh, which is now grotesquely figured as proper matter for the Mint. When Bardolph apprises him of his debt—“This bottle makes an angel” (4.2.6)—he answers: “And if it do, take it for thy labour—and if it make twenty, take them all, I'll answer the coinage” (4.2.7-8). Both these jokes revolve around the curious way in which coins combine form and matter, image and metal. Is coinage defined by its substance (Bardolph's nose) or by the authority of the figure (Falstaff) who agrees to “answer” for it? Falstaff's punning take on coinage, as well as his more general skepticism, reveals a lack of confidence in the coin's ability to act as a stable measure of value. Indeed, his very corpulence figures inflation, and his profligate attitude is one perfectly suited to an inflationary economy in which consumption is a sensible strategy.

Falstaff's refusal to grant a stable value to coinage is accompanied by an appreciation for the elasticity of prices. As a result of the rebellion, he claims, “you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel” (2.4.355-56). Certainly the main thrust of this comment is that rebellion has turned the world upside down, but one cannot escape the implication that price, even that of land always depends on expectation. Hal responds, “Why then, it is like if there come a hot June, and this civil buffeting hold, we shall buy maidenheads as they buy hob-nails, by the hundreds” (57-59). This cynical remark anticipates a similar collapse in the price of female bodies, revealing that the means of both sexual and agrarian reproduction are subject to the fluctuations of the market and the contingencies of war. Later Falstaff proves adept at trading in men's bodies: “I have got in exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers three hundred and odd pounds” (4.2.13-14). This “commodity of warm slaves” quickly buy out of service, leaving Falstaff to pocket the proceeds. Falstaff himself acknowledges that he has “misused the King's press damnably” (4.2.12), and one finds in this episode not only further evidence of the convertibility of various forms of capital, but a recognition that the state is, in the last resort, able to extract value with the threat of violence.

Though Falstaff is an accomplished entrepreneur with a well-developed sense of the market, he is not above using the language of intrinsic value when it suits him. Urging Hal not to turn him over to the sheriff, Falstaff implores: “Never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit. Thou art essentially made without seeming so” (2.4.486-87). The purport of the first sentence seems clear enough: I, Falstaff, am genuine and not to be repudiated, a claim that applies both to Hal's indictment of him as “old white-bearded Satan” and to the immediate threat raised by the sheriff. A piece of gold is a coin, but by ignoring denomination the formulation erases the coin's stamp, focusing instead on its substance, true gold. The difficulty raised by the next sentence concerns the force of the adverb “essentially,” which could be read as an intensifier meaning “in fact,” a possibility that places an emphasis on Hal's constructed nature, the fact that he is made up. Reading “essentially” as “according to an essence,” produces an almost opposite meaning: Hal, like the true piece of gold, has a substantial essence, admittedly unspecified, that has, for whatever reason, been obscured. The unresolved ambivalence of this claim about Hal is in keeping with the play's exploration of the problem of value. What appears to be a nicely ironic reversal—the man who consistently claims that the false is true is forced by circumstance to make a plea for the truth—is simultaneously an acknowledgement that the counterfeiter must uphold the standard of value in order to exploit it.

The rapacious appetite of Falstaff's economic vision is never corrected within the play, which concludes with the battle of Shrewsbury. It is here on the battlefield that the personages of Eastcheap confront the denizens of the court: Falstaff, Hal, and the king are brought together for the first time. Rather than precipitating an immediate and definitive separation of the noble and heroic from the base and venal, the episode reveals a persistent confusion of categories. Though Hal has often been seen as mediating between two “worlds” with Falstaff and King Henry standing at the center of their respective spheres, such a polarization misleadingly suggests that there is an enormous gulf between Falstaff and the king. In fact, the battle of Shewsbury reveals that both characters are counterfeiters. The figure of the royal counterfeiter, repressed by The Summarie, returns in the person of Bolingbroke.

That Falstaff resorts to counterfeiting is hardly a surprise. He displays irreverence toward most conventional values, delighting in their insubstantiality. His famous speech on “honour” provides a succinct statement of this skeptical attitude: honor is “A word … Air. A trim reckoning!” (5.1.135). The emphasis on language and breath reveals honor to be a social fact, conferred by the recognition of others. However, Falstaff's nominalism does not entirely deny the value of honor. The sarcasm of “trim reckoning” implies a notion of calculable value, and Falstaff's attempt to win honor through subterfuge reveals that he is quite aware that honor may lead to financial reward, that the social capital of honor may be converted into monetary form. And money, of course, can be transformed into sack.

Falstaff's stratagem depends on an act of counterfeiting:

'Sblood, 'twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had paid me, scot and lot too. Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit: to die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man, who hath not the life of a man: but to counterfeit dying, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.

(5.4.112-19)

Falstaff's quibble employs two competing definitions of “counterfeit.” It is first used as a verb meaning “to imitate,” and then as a noun signifying an imitation that is superficially similar to but lacks the essential quality of the original, in this case, life. Life is the essence of being human; a body without life is a corpse. This claim allows Falstaff to “counterfeit” without becoming a “counterfeit.” Pretending does not make one false. However, Falstaff's logic never escapes from the problem of representation: his final assertion is that pretending to die is to be “the true and perfect image of life.” This punning defense of cowardice—which also serves as a defense of theatrical impersonation—expresses the vitality that many critics have found central to his character: no pretence is too craven or humiliating for Falstaff if it preserves life.

Falstaff's voluble cynicism, however, is proclaimed in the midst of battle, as others fight and die. Mistaking Blunt for the king, Douglas tells him, “The Lord Stafford dear today hath bought / thy likeness” (5.3.7-8). Blunt soon pays the same price for wearing the king's garb. Douglas's triumph is short-lived; Hotspur informs him that he has not killed the king, but Blunt, “furnished like the King himself” (5.3.21), explaining that “The King hath many marching in his coats” (5.3.25). In a rage, Douglas swears that he will kill all the king's “coats,” murder all his “wardrobe,” until he comes to the king himself. What might seem an absurd and comic image is given grim substance by the presence of Blunt's body on the stage; no magic animates these coats, they contain real people. Bolingbroke, in effect, engages in a strategic debasement: he puts a multitude of false sovereigns into circulation. Reversing his earlier attitude of conservation, Henry IV is now prodigal with his “presence.”

When he next encounters a figure dressed as the king, Douglas is incredulous:

Another King! They grow like Hydra's heads:
I am the Douglas, fatal to all those
That wear those colours on them. What art thou
That counterfeit's the person of a king?

(5.4.24-27)

The image of the Hydra's many, multiplying heads, a favorite Elizabethan emblem of rebellion, identifies the king's strategy as monstrous. In addition, the accusation of counterfeiting, with its true/false binary, is particularly troubling when leveled against Bolingbroke. He is the king Douglas seeks, and yet the rebellion is itself motivated by the claim that he is not the legitimate king. Despite Bolingbroke's assertions of majesty, Douglas remains skeptical, though he does remark, “thou bearest thee like a king” (5.4.35). This variation on a familiar romance motif (nobility, however disguised, will shine forth) hints at continued uncertainty; Douglas seems unable to decide whether he is in the presence of majesty or merely its imitation.³⁶

The word counterfeit that circulates through act 5, scene 4 is not the same counterfeit that appears in Elizabeth's The Summary of Certain Reasons. It is not primarily concerned with the problem of false coin, nor does it consistently operate as a moral term onto which a whole host of economic difficulties are displaced. The play reveals the counterfeit to be both more problematic and more productive. The king, like Falstaff, authorizes “counterfeiting” but claims not to be a counterfeit himself. The ubiquity of counterfeiting presents the vertiginous possibility that value is merely an effect of representation. In such a world, the remark attributed to Marlowe in the infamous Baine's libel—that he had “as good Right to coin as the Queene of England”—sounds less like an outrageous assault on the very idea of sovereignty, and more like an astute recognition that all coins are counterfeit.³⁷

The play does not, however, completely confound the idea of value. Value is recuperated in the form of martial action by Hal. By cultivating an image of inadequacy, Hal, who begins the play as the “shadow of succession,” is able to stage a transformation that obscures the problem of usurpation with a triumphal assumption of the role of prince and heir apparent. An exclusive focus on the power of representation obscures the degree to which Hal's performance includes heroic deeds. The violent overthrow of Hotspur is fundamental to the play's account of value: a decisive action in a world of uncertainties that establishes Hal's value and valor in the eyes of the audience. Hal may be a master manipulator, able to “drink with any tinker in his own language,” but this facility is accompanied by a ready ability with the sword. Arguably the play's careful attention to the elaboration and manipulation of value, in the end, concludes with an atavistic scheme according to which a fundamental act of violence secures the standard of value. However, this possibility is immediately tempered by Hal's subsequent behavior.

Having long planned to seize Hotspur's honor, Hal instead goes along with Falstaff's mendacious attempt to take credit for the killing. Hal's willingness to “gild” Falstaff's actions with a lie reveals a degree of magnaminity that appears to be beyond calculation; indeed, this episode serves to distance Hal from the calculative rationality that informs his thinking throughout the play. By repudiating his interest in Hotspur's death, Hal, who has “a truant been to chivalry,” effectively restores the tarnished image of heroism.³⁸ Hal's aristocratic pose of indifference in the face of Falstaff's fabrication solidifies his claim to magnanimity: having achieved victory, to argue over credit would betray a petty mind.

A similar dynamic is visible in his treatment of his prisoner Douglas. In an episode that contrasts with the squabble over ransom that opens the play, Hal, after receiving the king's permission to dispose of the prisoner, gives to his younger brother the privilege of delivering Douglas, “ransomless and free” (5.5.28). This refusal of calculation and exchange asserts the transcendent value of the “high deeds” (5.5.30) for which Douglas deserves his freedom, while establishing Hal as a giver of gifts that cannot be reciprocated. The release of Douglas pointedly contrasts with the killing of Hotspur, the third and last in a series of three coercive exchanges, which includes the robbery at Gadshill and Falstaff's abuse of the press-gang. The final two scenes of the play, depicting Hal as willing to give Falstaff credit for killing Hotspur and ready to recognize the “valours” of Douglas, introduces a new dynamic, a form of exchange that appears to repudiate exchange itself, the gift. Between coercion and gift, what Natalie Zemon Davis refers to as the “mode of sales,” which features so largely in the play and contributes so much to the impression that value in this world has become unfixed, fades into obscurity.³⁹

The metaphysics of blood that would equate social value and status with genealogy, making royal or noble blood the irrefutable standard, is not replaced by a happy celebration of the market as a mechanism for the production of consensus; rather, an ancient aristocratic commitment to the value of violence stages a return in the form of a smiling and benevolent Prince Hal. A man's worth, according to this masculine understanding, is commensurate with his ability to fight, a vision neatly epitomized by the Archbishop, who, anticipating the coming battle, remarks that “ten thousand men / Must bide the touch” (4.4.9-10). Similarly, Hal is able to overcome his lineal deficiency and the taint of his father's usurpation by proving himself to be a “true piece of gold” on the field at Shrewsbury.

The same questions of royal lineage troubled Elizabeth's accession, and, because she was without an immediate heir, threatened her succession. Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV responds to this moment of economic and political instability, and yet the history it depicts only succeeds in rearticulating the crisis of legitimacy precipitated by continuing economic difficulties and uncertain dynastic politics. As I have claimed, the coinage, both as a material practice and a fertile set of metaphors, is one place where political and economic concerns meet: a new monarch inevitably meant new coinage. Elizabeth was after all remembered for her recoinage—the epitaph on her tomb declares it her third greatest accomplishment—but even before her death Thomas Tymme noted, in his account of the English monarchs: “Amongst all other her most rare vertues, she hath reformed religion, she hath reduced all base comes (which were currant here before her dayes) into perfect gold and siluer, so that there is no other mony lesse or more curra[nlt within her dominions: which is not to be seene at this day else where under any Prince Christian or Ethnicke.”⁴⁰ Designed to warn against the dangers of debasement, such declarations are as much admonitory as they are epideictic. Evidence that there was concern about the possibility of future debasement appears in the section of Fulbecke's A Parallele (1601) that treats borrowing and lending. Here the host, Nomomathes, asks whether a debt can be repaid in debased coin and is told that “if the debasement were before the day of paime[n]t the debtor may pay the det in the coine embased” (54-54v). In strictly legal terms this point is beyond dispute, and yet the very question betrays a fundamental uncertainty about the fairness of such an outcome. Indeed, the word debasement, used to describe an act that is at once legal and illegitimate, indicates that the extensive royal prerogative concerning coinage provoked fundamental questions about the establishment of value.

It is not surprising, then, that the language of numismatics in 1 Henry IV reveals an insistent preoccupation with the way in which value is established and maintained. The play refuses to settle into the easy binaries of true and false, stable and changing, legitimate and illegitimate, and yet this does not mean that it depicts “a world drained of intrinsic value.”⁴¹ Instead, the play insists that value is complex, a source of conflict and struggle, but not therefore illusory. The tension between the monarch and the market that appears in the Tudor coinage is obviously not a conflict between divine right and liberal democracy; it is, rather, the exposure of the possibility of contradiction within a seemingly coherent and hierarchical universe, a possibility recognized by Sir Robert Cotton, who remarks that monies of gold and silver have two values: “The one, the Extrinsick quality, which is at the King's pleasure. … The other the Intrinsick quantity of pure mettal, which is in the Merchant to value.”⁴² The point to be made here is that intrinsic value is based on the market price of the quantity of bullion contained in the coin. For Cotton, the coin is a perfect instance of the uneasy alliance between the Crown and its merchants, a fitting emblem of what would come to be called mercantilism. It is, therefore, precipitous to hear in this, and similar claims, an anticipation of the amoral, rationalized market of nineteenth-century economic theory. However, the simultaneous recognition of market forces or general estimation and intrinsic value entails complicated and conflicted thinking, a problem brilliantly exemplified by Gerard de Malynes:

And concerning pearles and precious stones, is it not straunge, that some men do despise and account them as glistering toyes & trifles, considering the diuersitie of mens opinions, which made the auncient Philosophers to say: That the world was gouerned by opinions. But if these men should wel consider the pure creation and vertue of the stones, they would fudge otherwise; and their owne opinion (opposite to most men) would condemne their errour: seeing that a generall estimation doth approue the value of things.⁴³

De Malynes initially acknowledges the diversity of opinion concerning value, a circumstance that led the ancient philosophers to assert that the world is governed by opinion. However, his invocation of “the pure creation and vertue of the stones” is an affirmation of a divine order that entails a hierarchy of values in the face of classical skepticism. If the doubters would only consider the virtue, or intrinsic qualities, of the stones, they would revise their opinion. Furthermore, even granting that the world is “governed by opinions,” those who despise “precious stones” are guilty of rejecting common wisdom for individual idiosyncrasy since “a generall estimation Both approue the value of things.” Deploying common sense to rebut skepticism and the possibility of pluralism, de Malynes provides a typical early modern account of value in which disagreement over value is acknowledged while the idea of intrinsic value is maintained. He is untroubled by the potential contradiction between “vertue” or intrinsic value and “generall estimation” because he is confident that the two will inevitably coincide.

In Troilus's question, “What's aught but as 'tis valued?” (2.2.51), one hears a clear echo of Falstaff. But while Falstaff's soliloquy goes unanswered, Troilus is given a reply by Hector: “But value dwells not in particular will; / It holds his estimate and dignity / As well wherein 'tis precious of itself / As in the prizer” (52). Hector sees that Troilus's skepticism may be used to support an autocratic or idiosyncratic theory of value, he denies this possibility by asserting that value is a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic value. However, the only way in which the intrinsic (“wherein 'tis precious in itself”) can act as a curb on the wayward individual is when it eventuates in a collective judgment. Like Troilus and Cressida, 1 Henry IV is intensely concerned with the establishment of value in a diminished world. The play is neither an embrace of the burgeoning market nor is it a ratification of the existing order; rather, it asks a diverse audience that has paid “good” money to see a counterfeit king to consider the manner in which both coin and king are valued.⁴⁴

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys (New York: Methuen, 1960), 174. All references are to this edition. An account of the play's economic language, focusing on the figure of contract, is provided by Sandra K. Fischer, “‘He means to pay’: Value and Metaphor in the Lancastrian Tetralogy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 149-64. More recently, Nina Levine, “Extending Credit in the Henry IV Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 40331, reads credit relations within the play as providing a benign vision of mutual reciprocity that competes with the high discourse of politics. For a broad survey of Shakespeare's economic language, see Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985).

2. For a related account of the way in which the language of coinage operates in Troilus and Cressida, see Stephen X. Mead, “‘Thou art chang'd’: Public Value and Personal Identity in Troilus and Cressida,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992): 237-59. Mead persuasively demonstrates the way in which the language of coinage registers “contemporary anxieties concerning the very substance of wealth and value” (237). However, Mead's conclusion “Troilus and Cressida asserts that when a value system becomes corrupt or ceases to be meaningful, it falls upon the individual—in the face of the general will—to determine worth as well as he or she can” (258)—credits the play with an unconvincing individualism.

3. For plays other than 1 Henry IV, I cite from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (New York: Longman, 1997).

4. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare After Theory (New York: Routledge, 1999), 129.

5. For an important exception arguing that “the contingency of evaluation served as a recurrent enabling irritant for Shakespeare's creativity,” see Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Engle's book, as he is aware, courts the charge of anachronism by attempting to identify Shakespeare's work as an antecedent of philosophical pragmatism. As he points out, this claim could work itself out in at least two ways. First, an argument could be made that Shakespeare is an unacknowledged source for modern pragmatism. Engle, however, chooses a second route, one that involves taking seriously William James's description of pragmatism as “a new name for some old ways of thinking” (7).

6. Victor Kiernan, Eight Tragedies of Shakespeare: A Marxist Study (London: Verso, 1996), 25; Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), xi.

7. The relationship between the theatrical enterprise and the new economic order has recently been examined, from very different perspectives, by Douglas Bruster, Drama and the market in the age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, Finance and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

8. On this claim, see Claude Lefort, Writing: the Political Text, trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Lefort points out that “taken in its philosophical acceptation, the concept of value pertains to a modern way of thinking … so long as the idea of a standard of human conduct is affirmed in reference to nature, reason, or God, the notion of value couldn't take on any meaning” (142).

9. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), sig. 2C2v.

10. The proliferation of publications treating coins and their history is impressive. For a comprehensive bibliography, see C. E. Dekesel, Bibliotheca Nummaria: Bibliography of 16th Century Numismatic Books (London: Spink, 1997).

11. Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 18. This coincidence of interest in both coinage and lineage suggests the degree to which the antiquaries were attempting to ground value.

12. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 168. Foucault goes on to argue that sixteenth-century reforms that demanded equivalence between nominal and metallic value were intent on fixing the two functions of the coin as common measure of commodities and as means of exchange. In his narrative, this metallist theory is disrupted by the recognition that money is a commodity. As a consequence, the earlier understanding according to which money has an intrinsic character (metal is precious) that underwrites its function as measure and means of exchange is reversed so that the exchanging function is seen as the basis for the other two (measure and capacity to receive a price). No longer does the coin's value derive from its metal; instead the stamp or form is seen as guaranteeing the value.

13. For instance, the suggestion that money signifies wealth because it is a real mark (i.e., is itself a precious substance), while common enough during the Renaissance, was contested by the Aristotelian idea that money takes its value from its issuing authority. For an argument that Foucault's Renaissance episteme relies too heavily on Platonist writers, see Ian Maclean, “Foucault's Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian Counterblast,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 149-66.

14. C. H. V. Sutherland, English Coinage: 600-1900 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1973), 117.

15. W. J. W. Potter and E. J. Winstanley, “The Coinage of Henry VII,” British Numismatic Journal 31 (1962): 109.

16. Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: Seaby, 1992), 118.

17. For a recent and helpful account of the debasement that situates it within the long institutional history of Mint, see A New History of the Royal Mint, ed. C. E. Challis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 228-44. See also J. D. Gould, The Great Debasement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

18. Robert Cotton, Cottoni posthuma: divers choice pieces of that renowned antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, Knight and Baronet, preserved from the injury of time, and expos'd to public light, for the benefit of posterity, by J. H. Esq (London, 1651), sig. T8r.

19. John William Burgon, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Gresham (London, 1839), 1:484.

20. Sir Albert Feavearyear, The Pound Sterling: A History of English Money (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 79.

21. Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969) vol. 2, #471.

22. Feavearyear, Pound Sterling, 83.

23. Peter Spufford, Money and Its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 301. See also, Andre Lapidus, “Metal, Money, and the Prince: John Buridan and Nicholas Oresme after Thomas Aquinas,” History of Political Economy 29 (1997): 21-53.

24. D. M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth (New York: Longman, 1983), 142.

25. Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14.

26. See Mark Thornton Burnett, “‘Fill Gut and Pinch Belly’: Writing Famine in the English Renaissance,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 21 (1995): 21-44.

27. See, for example, the argument made by Fischer, Econolingua: “While Shakespeare depicts a dramatic world in which values are changing from medieval to mercantilist economic ethics, his sympathetic characters do not find the new system satisfying. His plays reaffirm the operation of ‘natural’ economics established in the sonnets: bounty, reciprocal obligations defined by service and tradition, and benevolent social use of material increase” (30). Without denying that Shakespeare privileges such virtues, I belief that Fischer has framed the position in a misleading fashion by suggesting that it is possible to choose between two systems.

28. See, for example, Frederick Turner, Shakespeare's Twenty-First-Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Turner makes the rather astounding claim that Shakespeare provides a blueprint for the modern global economic system: “Shakespeare was a key figure, perhaps the key figure in creating that Renaissance system of meanings, values, and implicit rules that eventually gave rise to the modern world market and that still underpin it” (11).

29. It is the result of a long historiographical tradition that pits the acquisitive individual pursuing profit in the market against the community and its customs. For a helpful account, see Craig Muldrew, “Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England,” Social History 18; no. 2 (1993): 163-83.

30. John Hayward, A reporte of a discourse concerning supreme power in affaires of religion (London, 1606), sig. Blv.

31. In a dialogue written around 1592, Bacon makes the following observation: “For who knoweth not (that knoweth anything in matter of state) of the great absurdities and frauds that arise of the divorcing of legal estimation of monies from the general and (as I may term it) natural estimation of metals; and again, the uncertain and wavering values of coins, a very labyrinth of cozenages and abuses, and yet such as great princes have made their profit of towards their own people?” Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 40.

32. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” Glyph 8 (1981): 40-61, is the most influential account of “improvisational power” in the play. The subtlety and insight of Greenblatt's reading is undeniable; however, his emphasis on a labile yet constraining conglomeration of power, representation and theatricality tends to downplay the possibility of ideological contradiction.

33. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (London: George Bell and Sons, 1899), 144.

34. The concept of social capital is elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu. A succinct account is provided by Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241-58, which defines social capital as “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition,” adding that “the title of nobility is the form par excellence of the institutionalized social capital which guarantees a particular form of social relationship in a lasting way” (248, 251). Though Bourdieu emphasizes the durability of social capital and its arbitrary distribution, his account also suggests that social capital can be gained, maintained, or lost. However, it is certainly worth noting that the title of nobility, which Bourdieu sees as the quintessence of social capital, appears, in 1 Henry IV, to be extremely fragile.

35. This point is made by Michele Willems, “Misconstruction in 1 Henry IV,” Cahiers Elisabethains 37 (1990): 48.

36. My reading of this encounter is indebted to the analysis of David Kastan, who concludes that “even Henry can only bear himself ‘like the king’; he has no authentic royal identity prior to and untouched by representation” (142).

37. A. D. Wraight, In Search of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Vanguard Press, 1965), 309.

38. In this regard, I agree with Tillyard, who sees the play as an affirmation of chivalry. However, Tillyard reads Hal's willingness to credit Falstaff's lie as a farewell to arms, an indicator that he is already turning to what Tilyard considers to be the subject of 2 Henry IV: civil virtues. See E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 265.

39. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 9. Davis begins her discussion by distinguishing between three “relational modes”: the gift mode, the mode of coercion, and the mode of sales.

40. Palliser, 139; Thomas Tymme, A Booke Containing The True Portraiture of The Countenances and Attires of the Kings of England (London, 1597).

41. H. R. Coursen, The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 3.

42. Robert Cotton, Cottoni posthuma: divers choice pieces of that renowned antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, Knight and Baronet, preserved from the injury of time, and expos'd to public light, for the benefit of posterity, by J. H. Esq (London, 1651), sig. V1v.

43. Gerard de Malynes, Englands view in the unmasking of two paradoxes: with a replication unto the answer of Maister John Bodine (London: 1603), sig. G3v-G4r.

44. I would like to record my thanks to the friends and colleagues whose comments helped in the preparation of this paper, especially David Kastan, Alan Nelson, Dan Vitkus, and Graham Hamill; and thank Linda Woodbridge and the seminar of the Shakespeare Association for whom an early version of this essay was prepared.