SOURCE: Levine, Nina. “Extending Credit in the Henry IV Plays.” Shakespeare Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2000): 403-31.

[In the following essay, Levine discusses how Shakespeare employed the concept of credit and mercantile exchange in the Henry IV plays as a metaphor for the Lancastrian dynasty's claim to the English throne. The critic also explores how this perspective of royal political discourse—a mode of speech that involves “promises and payments” to maintain power—parallels the everyday financial dealings of Elizabethan playgoers, who relied on credit and mercantile exchange to maintain a complex community held together by commerce.]

Credit terms are habitual among the Lancastrians, associated with both the king, who, as Hotspur puts it, “Knows at what time to promise, when to pay,” and the prince, who cryptically assures the audience at the start of 1 Henry IV that he will eventually “pay the debt I never promised” (4.3.53; 1.2.209).¹ Reading credit as a metaphor for Lancastrian problems with royal legitimacy, most discussions of economics in 1 and 2 Henry IV understand the terms within a moral and political framework reminiscent more of Tillyardian orthodoxy than of current historicist and materialist heterodoxies. In contrast to recent work on carnival festivity, focused on the tavern's “second world” of freedom and abundance, considerations of economics have centered almost exclusively on the monarchy and its supposed fall into commercialism.² The Lancastrian “purchase” of the crown, the argument goes, results in a new society governed by “‘economic determinism’” where characters “compete with each other ruthlessly in a world drained of intrinsic value.”³ The sacred trust of feudal rule has been replaced by the modern state founded on an ethic of self-interest, calculation, and betrayal. Whether this ethic is identified as capitalist exploitation or, more benignly, as pragmatism, the assumption is that for Shakespeare's audience, and perhaps for us, a market economy is incompatible with notions of community and good government.⁴

In this essay I want to reopen questions about economics in the Henry IV plays within the specific context of early modern credit relations and, in the process, to complicate our understanding of Lancastrian political discourse by grounding it in financial practices that are both historical and material. As much scholarship on the plays' economics attests, the language of credit and exchange is central to Shakespeare's staging of dynastic politics. But fiscal metaphors are only part of a story that can also be recounted in material goods and economic practices. Attending to these goods and practices, this essay considers the promises and payments of the Lancastrians alongside the daily reckonings that structure the lives of those outside the Lancastrian court—and in Shakespeare's audience. If we follow the money in these plays, then we follow Hal's progress from prodigal to king within a framework of everyday dealings in which the royal discourse of power parallels credit practices that extend from the stage to the streets of late-sixteenth-century London. Cutting across boundaries of space, time, and social status, the need for credit involves far more than the king's political and moral debts or his son's tarnished reputation. Credit also comes into play with the actual exchanges of currency and goods—the marks and angels, sugar and satin, and “little tiny kickshaws” (2 Henry IV, 5.1.28)—that link princes with apprentices and the disparate communities of city, court, and countryside in an economic network that ultimately reaches, in a metadramatic sleight-of-hand at the play's end, from the past into the present to include the playwright and his audience. Taking early modern credit practices as my starting point, rather than Lancastrian political discourse alone, will generate a model of community that, in deriving its authority from everyday exchange rather than from aristocratic ideals or from chronicle history, is both more fluid and more heterogeneous than a “sceptred isle” of sacred rule.⁵

Scholars have long acknowledged that the Henry IV plays bring sixteenth-century commerce into play with fifteenth-century history, but in keeping attention on the Crown, they have tended to subordinate the material economy to the discursive politics of the court. This move either reinforces traditional notions of hierarchy and authority or, as in more recent criticism, elucidates a coercive poetics of monarchical power.⁶ Accordingly, the marketplace, rather than constituting a community in its own right, serves merely as a position from which to critique Lancastrian politics. Even Lars Engle, who locates Shakespeare's pragmatism in the transactions of the market economy, attends primarily to matters of kingship, arguing that the plays show how “royal power is pragmatically produced in, and to some extent by, an economy of credit and negotiation.”⁷ Though he acknowledges the importance of actual economic conditions, Engle's concern is with general and abstract economies, with the contingencies of value generated by a “placeless market.”⁸ The advantage of Engle's pragmatism is that it avoids a reductive moral critique of the economic, but in shifting the ground from the material to the metaphorical, he loses much of the resonant interplay between economic and political credit. I, too, am concerned with how royal power is produced in “an economy of credit and negotiation,” but I want to reverse Engle's emphasis and begin with the economic practices themselves, practices that are connected to but also separate from dynastic authority and political discourse. By first considering the historical specificity of material practices, I hope to bring specificity to the reading of economic discourse in the political realm as well and, in the process, to identify what is at stake in the credit economy for both commoners and kings. The economic and political exchanges of the Henry IV plays, when read in conjunction with the fluid relations of early modern credit, point to the possibility of a more inclusive and more equitable community, even within the framework of chronicle history that culminates in the death of one king and the crowning of another.

This is not to claim that the Henry IV plays present an unmediated celebration of credit that links commerce to community in a kind of protodemocratic politics or free-market capitalism. Nor is it to ignore the very real effects of power and privilege on credit relations. Commoners do not trade with the same freedom as kings, and the plays are filled with instances of failed credit, bad faith, and corrupt judgment. But if credit is not a panacea for social injustice, either on Shakespeare's stage or in early modern London, it does provide a structure for negotiating equality in political as well as economic exchanges. One of the central principles of this structure is rooted in credit's identification with trust. Then, as now, credit may be defined as the “reliance or trust on the unperformed part of some arrangement or exchange.”⁹ In sixteenth-century England credit was tied to one's reputation to make good on promises, to be true to one's word, to pay off debts. As a form of social trust used in mediating exchange within a community, early modern credit was also important because of its connection with the developing notion of contract. Whether in the form of verbal arrangements or written bonds, contracts depend on an assumption of mutual consent. As William West explains, consent is what binds the contracting parties in obligation, “so they … out of diuers motions of the mind doo consent into one, that is do concur and condiscend into one selfe sentence and meaning.”¹⁰

Centered on the moment of mutual agreement, West's definition is in many ways typical of late-sixteenth-century discussions of exchange, which, as Jean-Christophe Agnew points out, emphasize the conclusions rather than the negotiations involved in economic transactions.¹¹ At the same time, however, West's language, in characterizing consent as discursive in nature—when “diuers motions of the mind doo … concur and condiscend into one selfe sentence and meaning”—does give form to the processes by which interested parties might mediate their differences. My concern here is with the economic and political effects of the mediating processes of credit relations, both as represented on Shakespeare's stage and as enacted in his theater.¹² Without diminishing the harsh realities of credit's role in early forms of capitalism, I want to consider its potential for liberation as well as exploitation within London's increasingly heterogeneous culture, a potential that Shakespeare's theater used to advantage.

A CULTURE OF CREDIT

“[T]here is nothing in the world so ordinarie, and naturall vnto men, as to contract, truck, merchandise, and trafficque one with an other,” declared John Wheeler, a great merchant and former secretary to the Merchant Adventurers, “so that it is almost vnpossible for three persons to converse together two houres, but they wil fall into talke of one bargaine or another, chopping, changing, or some other kinde of contract.”¹³ Wheeler's interests, and those of his company, were no doubt served by an argument that naturalizes trade as a social and economic practice, but his praise of commerce nonetheless points to the importance of contractual arrangements within England's rapidly expanding economy. In the absence of a public banking system, and with gold and silver currency in short supply, the nation's economy was becoming more dependent on borrowing; all ranks—noble men and women, merchants, retailers, playwrights, farmers, and even housewives—entered into credit arrangements, whether in the form of sealed bonds, tradesmen's bills, or the verbal agreements that secured the exchanges of everyday life. As Thomas Tusser put it in his best-selling Fiue hundreth pointes of good husbandrie: “Who liveth but lends: and be lent to they must, else buieng and selling, might lie in the dust.”¹⁴ The popularity of Tusser's homespun advice—his pamphlet was reprinted more than twenty times in the next fifty years—tells us something about credit's place in the lives of ordinary people. It also bears witness to the widespread acceptance of credit as fundamental to the welfare of the individual and the community.

Attitudes toward credit were hardly uniform, however; and if Elizabethans profited from the increase in credit and trade, many voiced concerns about the social consequences of an expanding economy. As might be expected, these concerns were articulated with particular force in sixteenth-century debates over usury. The conservative position, which viewed lending at interest as a religious rather than an economic issue, was motivated in part by a genuine concern for sharp practices and the plight of the poor. Refurbishing the classical and Christian critique of greed, clergymen castigated money-lending as uncharitable and anti-Christian. In the words of the preacher in Sir Thomas Wilson's 1572 A Discourse Upon Usury, as self-interest replaced neighborliness, men lent money more to “seeke their owne gain, than anything the benefit of theire Christian neyghbour.”¹⁵ Creditors were “worse than Iewes,” went the common refrain, and posed a threat to the Christian community that should not go unpunished.¹⁶ The assumption in these arguments is that individual profit destroys the common welfare. Or, as Wilson succinctly put it, “private gaine thrust[s] oute common profite.”¹⁷ Criticism of lending was not limited to concerns about charity, however. Also at issue was the fact that the need for credit was changing established structures of social hierarchy and community.

One measure of the economy's potential to alter social position may be found in the period's shifting definitions of credit. By the late-sixteenth century the term had acquired a double meaning, referring to reputation, or character, as defined not only by social standing but also by wealth or financial solvency.¹⁸ It is this doubleness that Shakespeare plays on in Shylock's assertion that “Antonio is a good man” (Merchant, 1.3.12); the moneylender means Antonio's ability to pay, but Bassanio takes him to mean character. As this slippage suggests, in early modern England, as in Shakespeare's Venice, credit relations not only involved all ranks but, more significantly, had the potential to cut across hierarchies of rank and status. And just as the spendthrift aristocrat turns to the merchant to raise money for his Belmont venture, and the merchant, short of cash, in turn tries his credit with the Jew, borrowing in England often extended downward from the Crown and the aristocracy, who turned to London's powerful financiers and merchants for ready money, as well as horizontally among tradesmen, artisans, and rural neighbors. For many, credit's ability to traverse social boundaries represented a dangerous threat to moral order, and conservative critics began to speak of the need to protect the aristocracy as well as the poor from wealthy urban creditors who would “eate our English Gentrie out of house and home.”¹⁹ Even members of the clergy began to speak on behalf of the upper ranks, as is illustrated by Roger Hacket's 1591 sermon warning that the usurer “gnaweth and teareth out his gaine, out of the lands and lively-hoodes not onely of the commonalty, but gentry, yea nobilitye of this land.”²⁰

Yet these views were by no means universal, especially in London, where clergymen complained of parishioners who protested against anti-usury sermons by withholding their tithes.²¹ The discrepancy between religious discourse and actual practice was especially visible at St. Paul's, where outside, at Paul's Cross, preachers railed against lending while inside, at the font, creditors and debtors met regularly for the “tendering and making of payment.”²² By the 1590s some Puritan clergymen defended lending under certain conditions. Speaking out in the same year as Hacket, Charles Gibbon went so far as to sanction interest solely on the basis of social status—“Lend to thy better for a benefite, but to the poore for a blessing,”²³ he counseled; and Miles Mosse, in a series of influential sermons, justified lending in the form of investment as a business partnership, profitable to all parties involved.²⁴ Still others pointed to the unfairness of allowing profits from land but not from money.²⁵ By the beginning of the seventeenth century defenses of credit and commerce began to appear in print, as London merchants and tradesmen attempted to justify their place within the changing economy. Countering objections that private gain was always at the expense of the common welfare, these defenses shrewdly linked the individual's profit with that of the community. “What else makes a Common-wealth,” Edward Misselden wrote in 1623, “but the private-wealth … of the members thereof in the exercise of Commerce.”²⁶ For Misselden and other defenders of trade, what was good for the individual was good for the City. Indeed, as William Scott later declared in An Essay of Drapery, the citizen was “made compleat” by his “just, pleasing, profitable wayes.”²⁷

The emphasis on private gain and common welfare, employed by both sides in the sixteenth-century credit debate, anticipates later assessments of the marketplace as driven by self-interest and profit. Indeed, from Adam Smith forward, self-interest has figured prominently in social and economic theory, whether the term is construed negatively, as in arguments about rights, property, and “possessive individualism,”²⁸ or more positively, as in liberal thinking about economic independence and individual freedoms. Recently, however, some scholars have begun to question the validity of self-interest as the dominant explanation of early modern markets.²⁹ Craig Muldrew, for example, objects to arguments that the expansion of trade and credit occurred at the expense of charity and neighborliness. Rather than encouraging self-interest, the need for credit during this period instead fostered alliances within communities, as the general population became involved in networks of economic dependency. “Individual profit and security were important,” he contends, “but neither could be achieved without the direct co-operation of one's neighbours which trust entailed.”³⁰ Though self-interest tends to disappear in Muldrew's model of community relations, his emphasis on credit as a form of trust maintained by contractual relations suggests a way in which self-interest and trust might reinforce one another.

In contrast to the polarized debates about private profit and community welfare, sixteenth-century definitions of contract imply that the need for credit fostered both cooperation and self-interest, trust and betrayal. Since credit rested on the promise of future payment or performance, the kinds of contractual arrangements by which credit was negotiated required trust between parties. Secured by mutual agreement, these arrangements were also important in assuming a certain equality between consenting parties—in theory if not always in practice—an assumption having the potential to refigure social relations as credit came to be associated more with financial standing than with social position. Defined as early as the fifteenth century by Johannes Nider in a commentary on Roman law, transfers of goods and money must be conducted “‘in accordance with an agreement’” involving mutual consent: “in the giver be both the will to give, or consent, and similarly the power, and in the receiver the will to receive and the power so to do,” Nider writes, his balanced terms implying equality on both sides.³¹ Within the context of English common law, Christopher St. Germain's 1531 Doctor and Student explicitly defines a contract as a bargain or sale “made by assent of the partyes vppon agrement betwene theym.”³² In The boke named the Governour, Thomas Elyot further elevates the importance of mutual consent by identifying it with justice: “Trewely in every covenaunt, bargayne, or promise aught to be a simplicitie, that is to saye, one playne understandinge or meaning betwene the parties. And that simplicitie is properly justice.”³³ The anonymous author of A Godlie Treatice Concerning The Lawfull use of ritches similarly emphasizes the imperative of equality in contractual arrangements, explaining that if a contract is to have “plainnes, and excludeth double dealyng: so it requireth equalitie betweene those whiche bargayne.”³⁴ By definition, then, a contract necessitated mutual agreement, and, as West's Symbolaeographia plainly asserts, “bare promises by worde without mutuall consent are nothing worth.”³⁵

Despite the insistence on the principle of mutuality, however, the bargaining power of consenting parties was frequently unequal, and popular literature and court records—like the Henry IV plays—document the pervasiveness of failed credit and bad faith. Indeed, as the doctor in Wilson's Discourse on Usury rightly argues, “what equalytye is in bargaynynge, I praye you, when the one partie is famished, and the other is hoggesty fed? Iustice is none other thinge then a certeine evenhode or equalitie, and therefore they that do not in their dealings use an equal property, do not use Iustice.”³⁶ Urban literature from the period trades on the inequities of credit, as illustrated in the popular tales of the London prodigal who, in the attempt to clear himself of one debt, takes on additional debt until he is finally coerced into signing away his lands.³⁷ Henslowe's account books suggest the reality of this pattern of spiraling debt, coercion, and ruin for the lower orders as well, detailing the degree to which credit enabled the entrepreneur to control the playwrights and actors in his pay. As Henslowe himself was said to admit, “‘Should these fellows come out of my debt, I should have noe rule with them.’”³⁸

But if the evidence does not justify an idealization of credit practices, neither does it support a conclusion that “mutual agreements” were simply a means of justifying what were in effect coercive practices. According to C. W. Brooks's study of central court records, the number of debt cases rose significantly in the latter half of the sixteenth century, with the plaintiffs coming from a wide social spectrum, many of them bringing suit against their social betters.³⁹ While the increase in litigation may reflect both the expansion of credit as well as the extent to which credit relations broke down, it also, and perhaps more accurately, points to the expanding role of the courts in enabling the recovery of debts and, we might assume, thereby promoting both equality and trust within the community.⁴⁰ The same figures also indicate that self-interest might indeed function as an incentive to trust in the mediation of difference across ranks, even though that trust might sometimes fail. To engage in credit relations may be to risk loss and betrayal. But when credit is grounded in mutual consent and mutual gain, it is also to participate in opportunities for economic and political agency.⁴¹

In allowing for the possibility of social and political equality within economic exchange, early modern credit relations offer a useful model for understanding the complicated interplay between economics and politics in the Henry IV plays. Credit relations not only provide a means of materializing and historicizing Lancastrian economic language in ways that open up its political implications; they also direct attention to an alternate locus of authority within the plays and, with it, an alternate form of obligation, centered not in the lineal succession of dynastic rule but in the heterogeneous networks of the economic community. In their movement between the court and the City, between Westminster and Eastcheap, the plays indeed recall Mervyn James's description of England's shift from a lineage society to a civil society and from status to contract during the sixteenth century. As Muldrew explains the argument, in a lineage society stability within the community depends on bonds of obligation based on “extended kinship and loyalties to great aristocratic households, and where contracts [are] subordinated to clientage”; in a civil society stability rests more on contractual obligations, “on the equality of bargaining and contract, and on access to the courts to maintain the right of such equality.”⁴² One way to understand this movement within the Henry IV plays has been to focus on the Crown's appropriation of economic practices and to read this turn to commercialism as necessitated by the Lancastrian violation of lineage society in usurping Richard II's throne. While this is clearly part of the story, it fails to give attention to the way in which the political advantages of a credit economy move in two directions, downward as well as upward on the social scale. For in borrowing their political strategies from a market economy, the Lancastrians effectively endorse the principles of civil society and thereby generate opportunities for political agency extending beyond the royals themselves. In this case, what serves the interests of the Crown has the potential to change political structures for commoners as well. It is this dialectical relationship between economics and politics in the Henry IV plays that early modern credit relations make available.

RECKONINGS

Item, a capon	2s. 2d.
Item, sauce	4d.
Item, sack, two gallons	5s. 8d.
Item, anchoves and sack after supper	2s. 6d.
Item, bread	ob.
	(1 Henry IV, 2.4.535-39)

A reckoning, discovered by the prince and Peto when they pick Falstaff's pockets in the tavern after the Gadshill robbery, supplies the only material evidence of credit in 1 Henry IV, a play that turns on problems of debt and obligation. In addition to what the accounting tells an Elizabethan audience about Falstaff's taste for luxury imports (this passage contains the earliest reference to anchovies cited in the Oxford English Dictionary), it enables the prince to continue his sport at Falstaff's expense. “O monstrous! but one half-penny-worth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!” (ll. 540-41), the prince sermonizes, announcing his newfound patriotism with the promise that the money they have stolen from the king's exchequer “shall be paid back again with advantage” (ll. 547-48). The prince makes good on his promise, but Falstaff's debt to the Hostess is never paid—at least not in 1 Henry IV. “I'll not pay a denier,” Falstaff later boasts, insisting that to clear the debt is to become a too-trusting prodigal, victimized by a grasping creditor: “What, will you make a younker of me? Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn but I shall have my pocket pick'd?” (3.3.79-81), he counters, reversing the charges on his hostess. The sum of his appetites, Falstaff's debts increase exponentially over the course of 1 and 2 Henry IV until at the end, with Henry V's coronation, the old knight is hauled off to Fleet prison, presumably for bad debts. More than simply a running gag in the plays, Falstaff's indebtedness connects the economic and political worlds of Eastcheap and Westminster, bringing material obligations into play with the moral and political debts of the Lancasters. As a particular instance of material culture, the tavern reckoning also supplies a resonant point of reference for the world outside the play, in relation to London audiences in the habit of calculating their own appetites for both business and pleasure, including their place within the theater, in terms of shillings, pence, and the itemized accounts of everyday exchange.

That the play identifies credit with a tavern reckoning and not with a merchant's bond, say, considerably extends the boundaries of the economic community to include society's middling and lower ranks. The identification is also important in establishing an alternate authority within the plays, one governed less by fixed hierarchies of dynastic power than by flexible and contingent relations of credit. A place of exchange and change, where princes drink with tinkers and fat knights take the part of kings, the tavern has been profitably understood in terms of carnival festivity, as an alternate world of “celebration and critique” which stages the uncrowning of royal authority that constitutes the official world of these plays.⁴³ It may also be understood in terms of everyday as well as holiday, however. For if we think of the tavern as a place of both business and pleasure, then the holiday world in which some take their leisure overlaps with the everyday world in which others, like the Hostess and Francis, work for their living.⁴⁴ The tavern thus delineates a world whose ethics are rooted as much in the business practices of London's middling sort as in the holiday festivities of popular culture. Within this world, normative values require not only that credit be extended, to commoners as well as to kings, but also that debts be paid and contracts honored. And it is in this sense that the economic relations of Eastcheap can be said to provide a model for political relations in Westminster, a model potentially available to all who engage in credit and contract, whether apprentices or princes. Like carnival's second world, the economic community is also based in material culture, but this community is ostensibly generated as much by consent as by dissent, by everyday exchange as by popular holiday. And it is also, like Shakespeare's theater, a community that acknowledges the profit that credit enables.

It could be objected, of course, that Falstaff's unpaid bill is hardly evidence of credit's potential to generate equality and mutuality within communities and across ranks. In Falstaff's case the need for credit sacrifices community to self-interest and results in a hardening of rank and privilege. A stage version of the grasping men of business railed against by preachers and moralists during the period, Falstaff takes pride in his bad faith, pointing to his unpaid debts as a mark of gentlemanly distinction: “paid money that I borrow'd—three or four times” (3.3.18). To be sure, there is much humor in Falstaff's outrageous flouting of commercial expectation. But in the world outside the tavern, and outside the play, it provides a grim reminder of the cost of self-interest and bad faith to the community's welfare, a reminder with particular resonance when the play was first produced. Falstaff's appetite for luxury foodstuffs would, in fact, have bordered on the criminal in the dearth years of 1596-97, when, under orders from the Privy Council, London citizens were instructed to curb their “excessive dyet” and “be contented with fewer dishes” so that the excess could be distributed to the poor.⁴⁵ Other signs of the dearth, which many at the time blamed on engrossers manipulating the grain market, are to be found in the image of poor Robin Ostler, who “never joy'd since the price of oats rose, it was the death of him” (2.1.12-13), and in Falstaff's “totter'd prodigals” and “trade-fall'n” ostlers, “food for powder” (4.2.34, 29, 66) simply because they are too poor to buy their way out of service.⁴⁶ Rather than reinforcing reciprocity and equality within the community, these examples suggest, the market economy and its circulation of credit only increase the potential for exploitation, especially when bargaining takes place between parties of unequal status.⁴⁷

But Falstaff's bill for sack and anchovies is not the only instance of reckoning in 1 Henry IV, nor is his bad faith its only ethics of credit. The first reference to reckoning occurs, tellingly, in a scene of verbal sparring, of give-and-take across ranks, when Falstaff, in response to the prince's question—“Why, what a pox have I to do with my hostess of the tavern?”—replies, “Well, thou hast call'd her to a reckoning many a time and oft” (1.2.47-50). The ensuing wordplay depends on credit's multivalence in early modern London and puts into play its potential to promote both self-interest and trust within communities, all the while blurring traditional distinctions within social and political hierarchies. The term slips, for example, between the material and the moral, between what can be counted and what can only be divined, depending on whether the reckoning is interpreted as a financial accounting—in this case another tavern bill—or a moral accounting—as Williams employs the term in Henry V, “if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make” (4.1.134-35). With this punning comes a slippage in power and privilege as the fixed categories of prince and subject, reconstituted as customer and hostess, dissolve into the contingent, and exchangeable, positions of debtor and creditor. Falstaff's retort—“thou hast call'd her to a reckoning”—may at first suggest that the Hostess is indebted to the prince, either morally or financially, but their positions shift when Falstaff admits that the prince has been the debtor, though he has “paid all there” (1 Henry IV, 1.2.52-53), including the knight's part. As one who pays his debts, the prince might appear to offer a counterexample to Falstaff, and in many ways he does. Most important, he knows that “to pay” is not to become a “younker” but to gain power. But if the prince prides himself on his credit here and elsewhere in the play, his payments are anything but straightforward. In this instance the prince finesses his debt to the Hostess by shifting from economic to erotic currency, claiming to have paid, “Yea, and elsewhere, so far as my coin would stretch, and where it would not, I have us'd my credit” (ll. 54-56).

Linked to the prince's credit, the play on “reckoning” in this scene initiates a pattern of exchange between economics and politics that turns on the slippage between material and metaphorical obligation. The prince's credit, especially as it depends on his position as “heir apparent” (l. 58), as Falstaff reminds him, is not without problems, of course. Royal credit may work to Hal's advantage in the taverns of Eastcheap, but within the political realm, its powers are less assured. Compromised by his father's moral and political debts, Hal might well lament, with Falstaff, “I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought” (ll. 82-83). And it is, in fact, to the marketplace and not to his heritage that the prince turns to redeem his name, renegotiating a troubled inheritance within the flexible structures of credit and commerce. While the shift to commercialism may be construed negatively, as evidence of Hal's “steely sense of opportunism,”⁴⁸ its political implications go beyond the interests of the Lancastrians. Hal may adapt market practices for his own gain, but in translating these practices back into court politics, he opens up the possibility for a new mode of political relations.

Evidence of the prince's commercial practices comes early in 1 Henry IV, in his promise to restore his credit by casting off his tavern mates, a promise that ties trust to betrayal and community to self-interest in ways that have long troubled commentators. Here, as elsewhere in the play, the idea of credit complicates these contradictions even while it offers a means of resolving them. Reimagining his succession as a kind of contract, the prince opens up a line of credit with the audience that rests on his implicit promise that at some time in the future, “when he please again to be himself,” he will “throw off” his “loose behavior” and “pay the debt [he] never promised” (ll. 200, 208-9). What is especially troubling about Hal's contract, of course, is that his good-faith promise depends on multiple acts of betrayal. The prince calculates his reformation as a double deception, one practiced against his friends and the other against his enemies, “falsify[ing]” their “hopes” for his continued “loose behavior,” hopes that he himself falsely created by playing the prodigal (ll. 211, 208). Like Falstaff's reckonings, Hal's contract appears to use credit simply as a mask for self-interest and to exploit rather than mediate differences within a community. Given the taint surrounding his father's acquisition of the throne, however, Hal's use of contract is also crucial to ensuring a stable succession: it allows him to renegotiate his responsibilities as Henry IV's inheritor, to pay his father's moral debts without accepting them as his own and, at the same time, to translate passive inheritance into active consent—“to be himself” in majesty.

This is not to argue that, in rewriting his reformation and eventual succession in contractual terms, Hal resolves the contradictions of this soliloquy or of early modern credit. Indeed, as this passage famously illustrates, the need for credit does not guarantee trust. Credit does, however, require a mechanism whereby trust can be negotiated. And as Hal's turn to contract suggests, this mechanism has political as well as economic implications, however much it is abused. Engaging in, and thereby endorsing, common credit practices, even as he exploits them, the prince thus complicates the recent analysis of the play's machiavellian politics, in which, as Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, “the founding of the modern state, like the self-fashioning of the modern prince, is shown to be based upon acts of calculation, intimidation, and deceit.”⁴⁹ For Shakespeare's London audience the prince's turn to credit and exchange may well represent a descent from “sacramental to commercial premises,”⁵⁰ but in relocating authority to the everyday affairs of city business, it also constitutes a significant widening of the political community. For if contractual arrangements allow the prince a means of renegotiating his credit, these same strategies of power were also available to the London citizen, whose livelihood depended on negotiating his own credit and contracts on a daily basis. To be sure, Hal is hardly on the same level as the earnest Francis, who will swear “upon all the books in England” (2.4.49-50) to honor the terms of his indenture. But just because the drawer, whose “eloquence” is “the parcel of a reckoning” (ll. 100-101), cannot imagine running out on his master does not mean that an Elizabethan audience would have seen an apprenticeship of clinking pewter as an “oppressive order,” as Greenblatt contends.⁵¹ Some at least might have recognized an economic protection and even a freedom in the contractual terms of the indenture.⁵²

The prince returns to the language of contract and exchange when he again promises to reform and be “more myself” (3.2.93), this time in response to the king's accusation that his son fights against him “under Percy's pay” (l. 126). Turning his father's commercial terms to advantage, Hal here transforms himself from a spendthrift prodigal into a great merchant engaged in a circle of commerce, a move that allows him the freedom to manipulate both the market and his place within it. In Hal's account, it is Percy who is in his pay, hired as his “factor,” or agent, to “engross up glorious deeds on my behalf” (ll. 147, 148). But rather than turning the “glorious deeds” over to the prince, Hotspur has kept them for himself, in a clear violation of their arrangement that demands redress. Within this mercantile context, the prince renews his promise for reform, and his credit with his father, with the vow to make Percy pay what he owes:

And I will call him to so strict account
That he shall render every glory up,
Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(ll. 149-52)

Promising to call his factor to “strict account” or else “tear the reckoning from his heart,” the prince situates justice firmly within an economic sphere. And as it is structured by credit and contract, the shift from moral to commercial debt works to the prince's advantage, transposing obligations into material forms that are both exchangeable and recoverable. The shift to commerce and credit allows him to transfer to Percy his own debt to his father, in a reversal of the changeling substitution the king had imagined at the start of the play. It also allows him to cancel his father's debt to the Percies. By demanding that Hotspur pay what he owes, Hal clears both his own name and his father's.

That the prince first imagines his defeat of Percy not as the scene of single combat the play eventually stages but as a balancing of accounts—or a reckoning—between merchant and factor again introduces everyday credit practices into affairs of state, and again the politics are mixed. One effect, clearly, is to commercialize heroic action so that honor becomes, as Engle has argued, “an exchangeable commodity which, like money, can move all at once from one person's possession to another's.”⁵³ In Hal's accounting, however, honor is more than simply a fungible commodity. It is also a commodity whose value fluctuates with the market and can, therefore, be manipulated by skillful merchants and retailers. In this sense the economic model has the potential to confer political agency not only on the prince, allowing him to recover his credit within the realm, but on all those who buy and sell. No longer the domain of the aristocratic warrior, honor now belongs to those who have good credit within the marketplace, to those who pay what they owe, or to those, like Falstaff, who can manipulate the market. In a world governed by commerce, community welfare depends as much, if not more, on honoring contracts as on battlefield heroics, a shift in value that ranks tradesmen alongside princes. As elsewhere in the play, however, the expansion of economic and political opportunity carries with it the potential for abuse, as suggested by Hal's use of the term “engross” to censure Hotspur's valorous acts.⁵⁴ As the prince sees it, rewriting Percy's chivalry in economic terms that transform heroic valor into crass self-interest, Percy's holding on to the “glorious deeds” constitutes an abusive monopolistic practice that initiates a crisis in credit threatening the kingdom as a whole. He must be forced to pay.

With the prince's subsequent transformation to chivalric warrior, the play might appear to abandon its own promise of economic justice, exchanging the rigorous accounting practices of London merchants for the battlefield heroics of chronicle history. But even at Shrewsbury, where the prince is mythologized as a “feathered Mercury” (4.1.106), an ethics of credit and contract continues to structure dynastic relations, as the Lancastrians persist in defining justice as a settling of accounts, a reckoning. The reformed prince announces his newfound identity not as the godlike warrior feared by his enemies but as a man of credit, one who makes good on his promises and pays what he owes. As he proclaims to Douglas: “It is the Prince of Wales that threatens thee, / Who never promiseth but he means to pay” (5.4.42-43). In promising the Percies payment, the prince exploits the metaphorical resonance of commercial language. In one sense Hal's talk of payment is highly conventional: the prince will become “himself” by stepping into his role as noble justicer and inflicting bodily chastisement on the wicked. At the same time, however, the language has a decidedly contemporary ring: Hal becomes “himself” and redeems his name much as those in Shakespeare's audience did, by proving his ability to pay his debts and to honor contractual agreements. In casting himself not only as the divinely sanctioned ruler who dispenses punishment but also as a man who pays his reckonings, the prince participates in a heterogeneous community bound together by the practices of everyday commerce. In contrast to his father's aristocratic fantasy of a crusade in which “mutual well-beseeming ranks, / March all one way” (1.1.14-15), or his own promise in Henry V to “gentle” (4.3.63) all who fight at Agincourt, the prince's emphasis at Shrewsbury works in the opposite direction, making all merchants and retailers.⁵⁵

PROMISES

If Hal's movement from prodigal to chivalric merchant in 1 Henry IV celebrates the benefits of turning economic practices to political use, the betrayals and bad faith of 2 Henry IV warn of the dangers, especially when credit is extended solely on the basis of a gentleman's, or a prince's, word. Reputation conferred by social status proves unreliable at the start of the play when the rebels mistakenly credit Lord Bardolph's “certain news” of Hotspur's victory at Shrewsbury because it comes from “A gentleman well bred and of good name” (2 Henry IV, 1.1.12, 26). The actual report of Percy's death comes minutes later, from a servant who, despite Bardolph's claim that “he is furnish'd with no certainties / More than he haply may retail from me” (ll. 31-32), has better credit in this instance than his social superior. The earl of Northumberland's absence from Shrewsbury, attributed to illness in 1 Henry IV, is now exposed for what it is. “[Y]ou broke your word” (2 Henry IV, 2.3.10), Hotspur's widow bluntly tells him. And Falstaff, now graced with the gilded lie of his “good service” at Shrewsbury (1.2.61-62), attempts to borrow against his borrowed name. The most disturbing display of failed credit, of course, comes with Prince John's triumph at Gaultree Forest, a victory that, in contrast to Shrewsbury, replaces heroic action with a “horrible violation of faith,” as Samuel Johnson characterized it.⁵⁶ The supposed agreement between the Crown and the rebelling lords, which Prince John backs “by the honor of [his] blood” (4.2.55) and the rebels mistakenly accept on the basis of his “princely word” (l. 66), epitomizes the dangers of trusting “the word of the noble” (4.3.54). It thus goes far to undermine the optimistic conjunction of chivalry and contract, of princes and merchants, at the conclusion of the earlier play. In 2 Henry IV only Master Dommelton, the “smoothy-pate[d]” London tradesman, appears to possess enough business acumen not to take gentlemen at their word: he refuses Falstaff's request for twenty-two yards of satin on credit because he dislikes the knight's “security” (1.2.38, 33).

In its almost obsessive concern with promises, with oral rather than written contracts, 2 Henry IV might seem to appeal more to medieval than early modern credit practices, to an idealized past in which a man's word was his bond and an ethical standard that, by some accounts, was more exploited than honored in the expanding market economy of Shakespeare's day. But while the use of bonds increased with the expansion of credit in the sixteenth century, most loans, even those made within a commercial center such as London, continued to be secured by verbal agreements founded on trust in the promise of future payment.⁵⁷ Promises also had strong contemporary resonance in the late 1590s as debate about the status of oral contracts involving debt culminated with the hearing of Slade's Case, a case that rested precariously on the evidence of an implied promise. Argued on the basis of “breach of contract,” rather than simple debt, Slade's Case forms the basis of modern contract law, clarifying a century's worth of litigation involving the status of promises in debt recovery.⁵⁸ As a result of its historical position, Slade's Case is also useful in adjudicating credit relations in the Henry IV plays, offering a model for economic and political obligation that defines creditworthiness not on the basis of social status but on one's reputation for honoring promises. Importantly, this is a model that places contractual arrangements at the center of obligation.

Slade's Case was argued under the general category of assumpsit, which in the sixteenth century became the principle form of action in the common law courts for enforcing contracts “not under seal.”⁵⁹Assumpsit rested on the understanding that the defendant promised to undertake—or “assume”—the performance of a particular action or payment. The legal action of assumpsit thus offered a broad means of redress in cases involving breach of contract and was applied during the sixteenth century to promises involving the performance of acts or services, the conveyance of lands, and, increasingly, the payment of debt. Whether a case was actionable under the category of debt or assumpsit depended on how the obligation was defined. The action in debt cases, for example, rested on the notion of quid pro quo, and defendants were charged with failing to live up to their end of the bargain. Legal redress in these cases meant simply that one paid what one owed, either money or property. The action in assumpsit, by contrast, rested not on the exchange of goods or property but on the process by which the exchange was negotiated, specifically, on the promise itself and on the motivating circumstances, known as “consideration,” in which the promise was made. As Solicitor-General Egerton put it in 1586, the action of assumpsit rested on three things—“consideration, promise and breach of promise.”⁶⁰ One effect of the rise in assumpsit during the sixteenth century, then, was to shift the emphasis in credit relations from property to promise, from the materiality of the exchange—the quid pro quo—to the mechanism that underwrites that exchange—the agreement together with the consideration.⁶¹

As a watershed case upholding the action of assumpsit in matters of debt, Slade's Case was important in changing the early modern understanding of debt and its recovery.⁶² It was also important in defining the responsibilities of contracting parties. First heard in the Exeter assize court in 1596, Slade's Case made its way into the Exchequer Chamber in 1597 and over the course of the next five years was argued in both the Exchequer Chamber and the King's Bench. Initially a dispute over a grain transaction between John Slade and Humphrey Morley, the case turned on the question of whether an oral agreement, in this case the agreement to purchase grain, also included the promise to pay for it, even if that promise was not explicitly stated. In the words of legal scholar J. H. Baker, the question was: “Did a contract contain in itself an undertaking to perform the duty which it generated, even though the contracting parties did not use the express words ‘I promise’ or ‘I undertake’?”⁶³ The court's final decision was that a bargain, even in the absence of an explicitly stated promise, constituted a legally binding contract for performance or payment and, as such, was allowable under the action of assumpsit. As Edward Coke wrote in his decision, “every contract executory imports in itself an assumpsit, for when one agrees to pay money, or to deliver any thing, thereby he assumes or promises to pay.”⁶⁴

Coke's decision in the Slade case rests on two related assumptions: that an individual enters into an agreement knowingly and that his failure to carry through on the agreement constitutes deceit. As Francis Bacon and others argued on behalf of the defendant, assumpsit required deceit, and failure to pay did not necessarily constitute the intention to deceive. Coke's response put the matter bluntly: “It is clear that when a man contracts with another to pay money or to do anything, and does not perform it, this is a deceit.”⁶⁵ For Coke intentions may be probative, but they do have a material basis in the actions or nonactions of the consenting parties as defined by the rule of consideration. As Coke reputedly wrote in a report on the case in 1598, in language that appropriates the quid pro quo of debt into assumpsit, “if some benefit leave the plaintiff, be it to the defendant or to a stranger, this suffices; for it shall be intended at the request of the defendant.”⁶⁶ This is a conclusion that goes against the earlier decision in the Exeter assize by Justice Walmsley that failure to fulfill an obligation did not necessarily involve deceit. It is “‘plain dealing,’” Walmsley wrote, for a man not to pay if he has no money.⁶⁷ Coke's argument, by contrast, assumes that individuals knowingly enter into bargains, or contracts, and that their responsibility to honor their word lies, in principle at least, outside either social or economic status. Thus a ruling that is potentially coercive in assuming intention on the part of the defendant is at the same time potentially liberating in ascribing choice and responsibility to the individuals making the transaction.⁶⁸

Like early modern actions of assumpsit, economic relations in these plays, and in 2 Henry IV especially, also turn on the promise of payment, or performance, implicit within an agreement or undertaking. And with the notable exception of Prince John—who precisely construes his “word” to the rebels and gets away with it—the plays anticipate the outcome of Slade's Case by enforcing the promises implicit within understandings between parties that range from lowly servants to the crown prince and to the “author” himself. At one end is the case of Shallow's servant, William, whose wages are to be “stopped” because of the “sack he lost at [Hinckley] fair” (2 Henry IV, 5.1.24-25). The assumption in this case, we may conjecture, is that William had promised either to transport or sell the sack but instead lost it or drank it. Hostess Quickly's suit against Falstaff, which appears to be simply a case of debt—he owes her “A hundred mark” (2.1.32), she first claims—might also be actionable under the category of assumpsit, especially in the way matters of debt become intertwined with her claim that the knight had promised to marry her. When asked what “gross sum” Falstaff owes her, Quickly replies, “thyself and the money too” (ll. 84, 85-86), her unwitting joke accurately acknowledging the interplay between erotic and monetary debt that Falstaff continually exploits. Because there is no gift of a ring and no witness (Goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, comes into her testimony not as a witness, as we might expect, but “to borrow a mess of vinegar” [l. 95]), Quickly's charges probably would not have stood up in the ecclesiastical court, but they might have been allowed under an action of assumpsit.⁶⁹ Her lengthy testimony before the chief justice places the emphasis on Falstaff's promise of marriage, for which she supplies a form of consideration in an outrageously detailed account of the material circumstances in which the promise took place, circumstances that supposedly give authority and authenticity to her claim:

Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin chamber, at the round table by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the Prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? … And didst thou not, when … [Goodwife Keech] was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people, saying that ere long they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me, and bid me fetch thee thirty shillings? I put thee now to thy book-oath. Deny it if thou canst.

(2.1.86-93, 98-103)

Even though Falstaff attempts to discredit the Hostess, claiming she is a “poor [mad] soul,” “distracted” by poverty, the chief justice, like Coke, finds for the plaintiff, concluding that Falstaff has used her “both in purse and in person” (ll. 104, 107, 116) and instructing him to “Pay her the debt you owe her, and unpay the villainy you have done with her” (ll. 118-20). The unreformed Falstaff, of course, slips out of this accounting by once again parleying his erotic credit into coin. “Come … dost not know me?” (ll. 150-51), he asks the Hostess, assuming an intimacy that invites reciprocity.⁷⁰ This strategy works as well with Justice Shallow, who lends Falstaff a thousand pounds, on the assumption that this will further the justice's advancement at court when Hal becomes king. In this instance the promise again appears to be upheld when, at the play's close, after Henry V destroys Falstaff's credit by publicly refusing to acknowledge any debt to his former companion, Falstaff is taken off to the Fleet. For the first time, Falstaff admits a debt, confessing, “Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound” (5.5.73), though not without once again attempting to regain his credit, and retain the sum, by renewing his promise to Shallow: “Fear not your advancements, I will be the man yet that shall make you great. … Sir, I will be as good as my word” (ll. 78-80, 85).

In its concern for the processes of exchange rather than its materiality, the action of assumpsit is especially useful in charting the movement between economic and political credit in the play. As in 1 Henry IV, the Lancastrian royals again adopt economic practices for political gain. As a consequence, the play invites its audience to judge princes by the same ethical standard they apply to commoners. The most unsettling conjunction of politics and credit practices comes with Prince John's resolution of rebellion at Gaultree Forest, which exploits contractual language and its assumption of mutuality only to reassert royal power and send the rebels to “the block.” Even if one justifies John's behavior on the basis of national security—he is after all negotiating with rebels who have themselves broken faith with their monarch—his arrest of the leaders for treason nonetheless might be construed as a breach of promise by the standards of assumpsit. The rebels' grievances, put forth in a series of written articles, constitute the required consideration, or motivating circumstances, for John's promise of speedy redress, which he makes upon his “princely word” (4.2.66). To show their agreement to his offer of redress, John asks the rebels to engage in a series of mutual displays of trust and friendship:

                                                                                If this may please you,
Discharge your powers unto their several counties,
As we will ours, and here between the armies
Let's drink together friendly and embrace,
That all their eyes may bear those tokens home
Of our restored love and amity.

(ll. 60-65)

After the rebels have made good on their side of the bargain and dismissed their army, John then arrests the leaders for high treason. “Will you thus break your faith?” (l. 112), the archbishop asks. John's reply is that he promised only “redress of these same grievances” (l. 113), nothing more. According to the ethic of credit operative in late-sixteenth-century England, what makes John's victory troublesome is not that it gives the rebels their “due” (l. 116). He has, after all, made good on his explicit promise of redress. The problem lies instead with the secondary promise implicit in the terms of the stated promise. Like Falstaff in his promises to Hostess Quickly, John here exploits gestures of intimacy to imply a promise of trust and reciprocity, which the rebels mistakenly construe as a contractual meeting of minds. The assumption, of course, is that forgiveness rather than death will follow. That Prince John succeeds with his exploitation of contractual expectation, while others in the play do not, underscores—but does not necessarily condone—differences between princes and commoners, or between any parties of unequal status, in a credit economy in which all are theoretically subject to the terms of their agreements.

Prince Hal also uses credit and contract to political advantage in this play, and though he, unlike his brother, honors his debts, his strategies continue to generate an ambivalent politics that heightens as much as minimizes differences in rank, especially as he comes closer to the crown. As in 1 Henry IV, the emphasis on contract again allows Hal to translate passive inheritance into active consent and, in the process, to remove the taint of his father's own violent succession by paying “the debt [he] never promised.” When the prince, believing his father dead, takes the crown from his pillow, his speech overlays the “lineal honor” (2 Henry IV, 4.5.46) of inheritance from father to son with the strict logic of a commercial transaction:

                                                                                          Thy due from me
Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood,
Which nature, love, and filial tenderness
Shall, O dear father, pay thee plenteously.
My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me.

(ll. 37-43)

One effect of Hal's turn to contract at this moment is to civilize the parricidal violence of the Lancastrian succession by transforming it into an exchange in which a son “pays” for his father's crown with the tears of “filial tenderness” rather than with blood. The prince's balanced sentences, moreover, signal his readiness to rule by insisting on an equality between father and son, monarch and prince, that if the king were alive—which he is—would be parricidal and treasonous.⁷¹ At the same time, however, Hal's terms set up a tension between late-sixteenth-century credit practices and fifteenth-century dynastic succession. Even as the prince actively takes the crown from his father's deathbed and invokes the mutuality of contract, he simultaneously avoids responsibility for his actions by representing himself as the object and not the subject of this exchange—the crown “Derives itself to me”—the recipient in a process that appears to take place independently of his intentions or will. Similarly, as he here rehearses his acceptance of the crown by asserting his personal agency in a way that honors the promises implied by the contract of kinship, he simultaneously distances himself from that responsibility by making “nature, love, and filial tenderness” his agents, or factors, in paying his father “his due.” Reinforcing this tension between mutuality and distance, and between equality and hierarchy, are the newly crowned king's last words in the play, which make good on his initial promise in 1 Henry IV, ordering the chief justice “to see perform'd the tenure of [his] word” (2 Henry IV, 5.5.71) by banishing Falstaff. Refusing to acknowledge an intimacy with the old man, Henry V's “I know thee not” (l. 47) cancels all debt and obligation. If to know is to owe in Falstaff's account book—“a million, thy love is worth a million; thou owest me thy love,” the knight insists to Hal in 1 Henry IV (3.3.136-37)—Henry V, in contrast to his father, begins his reign owing nothing to his former companions.

With the installation of the “true inheritor” (2 Henry IV, 4.5.168), the Henry IV plays close by insisting on lineal succession rather than commercial practices. “[W]hat in me was purchas'd / Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort; / So thou the garland wear'st successively” (ll. 199-201), Henry IV pronounces to his son with his dying breath. And with the return to dynastic stability comes the remystification of monarchical power. Authority no longer resides in the mutual consent arising from “diuers motions of the mind,” to borrow from West's definition, but within the singular motion of the sacred ruler himself. As if to reiterate this movement from diversity to singularity, Eastcheap's community of economic exchange is discredited, punished, and expelled from the realm. The entrepreneurial women are suddenly criminalized, as Hostess Quickly, in a startling inversion of her initial entrance as plaintiff in a lawsuit, is now, together with Doll Tearsheet, dragged offstage by officers to be incarcerated for allegedly having beaten a man to death. Falstaff and his company are likewise escorted to prison, denied access not only to the monarch's “person,” as the banishment requires, but to the social and economic community as well. Rather than mediating difference within the heterogeneous community, it seems, the return to sacred rule insists on a homogenous society in which difference is all but invisible.⁷² Again, the political implications of Lancastrian power are mixed. Henry V is, after all, fulfilling the promises he made in 1 Henry IV, but, as more than two centuries of criticism document, the price is high and the politics sinister. Indeed, it could be argued that the notion of credit, based in consent and mutuality, is merely a fiction, in politics as well as economics, connected in this play to a comic plot that has, finally, no basis in reality. But, in light of the play's Epilogue, the scene of singular sovereignty may be the fiction and not the diverse community bound by credit and exchange.

For while the conclusion to 2 Henry IV marks the return of Lancastrian legitimacy by dismantling the credit economy, the Epilogue reinstitutes it, stepping out of the dramatic and historical frame of the play to present yet another variation on credit relations. If, as Robert Weimann has argued, Shakespeare's epilogues help to “assimilate the represented ‘matter’ to the actual cultural purpose of its performance,” the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV is no exception.⁷³ Returning to the business of credit and contract, it joins both playwright and audience with the economic world of the play, connecting contemporary London to Eastcheap in a way that reaffirms the efficacy of credit relations alongside the image of singular sovereignty celebrated at the play's close. In the liminal space of the Epilogue, the speaker, perhaps the “humble author” (l. 27) himself, delineates an elaborate economic network that links the play's performance as well as its “matter” to the commercial exchanges of everyday London. Deferentially curtsying to the audience and begging their pardons, the Epilogue begins by proposing a “venture” that turns on a contractual relation of credit between the author and his audience. Casting himself in the role of the debtor and his audience as his creditors, the speaker offers up his play as payment or recompense for an earlier “displeasing” play:

Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it and to promise you a better. I meant indeed to pay you with this, which if like an ill venture it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here I promis'd you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some, and I will pay you some, and (as most debtors do) promise you infinitely; and so I kneel down before you—but, indeed, to pray for the Queen.

(ll. 7-17)

In contrast to the restrictive “Articles of Agreement” Jonson's scrivener forces on the audience at the start of Bartholomew Fair, drawing up a contract that limits the spectator's censure to the price of his seat, Shakespeare's terms are far more flexible and equitable. Like the fluid relations of early modern credit, the contract in 2 Henry IV plays on a give-and-take between debtor and creditor from which everyone profits.

Shakespeare's terms set up an equivalence between payment and pleasure that underwrites theatrical performance. The audience, in paying admission to the theater, has contracted for a pleasing play, which the playwright has implicitly promised to deliver. When the playwright fails to make good on this contract, as he did in this case by delivering a “displeasing play,” he then incurs a second debt by promising “a better.” Like Bassanio, Shakespeare undertakes this new “venture” in order to recover losses from a previous “ill venture.” Understood within the economy of credit, the performance of 2 Henry IV, if it is good, fulfills the contract implicit in the earlier promise. Conversely, if it is bad, the “venture” will “break,” or bankrupt, the author and cause losses for his “gentle creditors.” The most likely outcome, however, is that the indebtedness will continue—and that is part of the joke here—with the audience forgiving a portion of the debt—to “Bate me some”—and the playwright promising yet more payment, which in this case means that he is bound to produce more plays just as the audience is bound to attend and, in a playful turn on credit relations, to pay. Within the space of the Epilogue, in stark contrast to the plight of many Henslowe dramatists, even sharp practices have happy outcomes by conjoining playwright and audience in a relationship of credit that supports the continuation of theatrical production itself. In the credit economy of the early modern theater debtor and creditor alike profit from the exchange between pleasure and performance, bound together in a relationship of mutual consent and mutual gain, which the Epilogue ensures will continue by closing his speech with a shameless advertisement for a sequel.⁷⁴

If the Epilogue thus capitalizes on the theater's function as a site of both holiday pleasure and commercial exchange, it gives shape to a community based more on the contingent relations of early modern credit and commerce than on the fixed hierarchies of patronage and privilege.⁷⁵ And within this community, as in the Eastcheap tavern, pleasure and commerce are not necessarily antithetical but instead come together, allowing for exchange and freedom within a hierarchical culture. The Epilogue puts these exchanges into play in part by making the audience party to the performance. With theatrical exchange, as with early modern contractual relations, authority resides with neither the players nor the audience alone but with the process that underwrites the exchange, a process that, as Weimann describes it, circulates the movement of authority within the theater among the text, the performance, and the audience. “[T]he theater's readiness ‘to please,’” Weimann writes, “is neither servile nor passive; the arts of performance achieve their final authority in the exchange of cultural signs with the audience, either through clapping hands or further talking after the play has ended.”⁷⁶ More commercial than communal, this talking serves as a kind of advertising for future performances, “an extradramatic circuit of pleasurable exchanges, further engagements with, and distributions of news about, the play's events and figurations.”⁷⁷ Like the economic networks of credit represented within the play, the community constituted by the playful give-and-take between audience and actor at the close of 2 Henry IV is grounded in commerce and not in the sacred space of sovereign rule, though there is mention of the queen.

With the Epilogue, as with the play itself, the economic discourse continues to generate a political resonance that offers an alternative to the fixed structures of sacred rule in the fluid processes mediating credit relations, processes that allow for the possibility of both equality and exploitation, trust and betrayal. Playing the debtor and promising “infinitely,” the Epilogue ends his appeal not with a call for applause but with an extravagant display of submission—kneeling down before his audience of “gentle creditors”—a gesture that he then playfully recasts as a prayer “for the Queen.” Just as the references to credit and contract suggest a profitable circle of obligation between the Epilogue and audience, the terms also hold the possibility that, for a moment at least, the speaker, his “creditors,” and even the “Queen,” are equivalent and exchangeable. The playwright may adopt a posture of deference, submitting his “body” as well as his play to the mercy of his “gentle creditors” and his queen, but in refiguring these relations in economic terms, he also gestures toward the freedoms offered by the commerce of the early modern stage.

Notes

1. Quotations from Shakespeare's plays follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. For recent discussions of carnival in the plays, see Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York and London: Methuen, 1985); Graham Holderness, Shakespeare's History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985); David Scott Kastan, “‘The King Hath Many Marching in His Coats,’ or, What Did You Do During the War, Daddy?” in Shakespeare Left and Right, Ivo Kamps, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 241-58; Charles Whitney, “Festivity and Topicality in the Coventry Scene of 1 Henry IV,” English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 410-48; and Kristen Poole, “Saints Alive! Falstaff, Martin Marprelate, and the Staging of Puritanism,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 46 (1995): 47-75.

3. H. R. Coursen, The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad (Washington, DC: UP of America, 1982), 3 and 4. For other studies of the plays' economics, see Sandra K. Fischer, “‘He means to pay’: Value and Metaphor in the Lancastrian Tetralogy,” SQ 40 (1989): 149-64; and Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1993), 107-28.

4. Though more concerned with politics than economics, most new-historicist discussions of the Henry IV plays tend to regard economic interests as inherently oppressive, most notably Stephen Greenblatt's influential essay “Invisible Bullets,” which, in its revised version in his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England ([Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988], 21-65), applies late-sixteenth-century “evangelical colonialism” (30) to Lancastrian domestic policy. By contrast, Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin, in Engendering a Nation: A feminist account of Shakespeare's English histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), assume a more complicated model of economic politics, one that sees the commercial activity of the tavern as having the potential to challenge fixed hierarchical structures, though in emphasizing the power of the state to criminalize and eventually quash “female entrepreneurship” (160-85, esp. 179), their conclusions bear more resemblance to Greenblatt's insistence on coercive state power than to my own interest in the democratizing potential of economic relations in early modern London.

5. In identifying material credit with commoners rather than kings, Shakespeare departs from Holinshed's Chronicles, which abounds with references to Henry IV's money problems, detailing the parliamentary debates about subsidies and taxes needed to maintain the king's wars. See Raphael Holinshed, Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), ed. Henry Ellis, 6 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1807-8), 3:27-31.

6. Exceptions to the tendency to subordinate Eastcheap to Westminster, commoners to aristocrats, and comedy to history include studies of carnival festivity in the plays as well as Howard and Rackin's discussion of female economic independence.

7. Engle, 127. Fischer likewise keeps attention on the Crown, grounding her analysis less in everyday economic practices than in Holinshed's use of “econo-contractual” metaphors to describe Henry IV's reign (155). As a result, she interprets Shakespeare's use of contract not in terms of “mutual consent” but rather as it relates specifically to Lancastrian political strategy.

8. Engle, 107.

9. P. S. Atiyah, An Introduction to the Law of Contract (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). For early modern interpretations of credit, I am indebted to Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

10. William West, Symbolaeographia (London, 1590), sig. ¶¶.1 (quoted here from the 1975 Theatrum Orbis Terrarum facsimile of the Bodleian copy).

11. According to Jean-Christophe Agnew, this emphasis on conclusions rather than processes in bargaining characterizes “virtually all economic thinking,” with the effect of subsuming social and cultural conditions and motives into an ahistorical model of market relations (Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986], 3).

12. For an excellent discussion of the affective or emotional aspects of early modern credit practices, see Theodore B. Leinwand, Theatre, finance and society in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 13-80.

13. John Wheeler, A Treatise of Commerce (Middelburge, 1601), sigs. B1^r-B2^v.

14. Thomas Tusser, Fiue hundreth pointes of good husbandrie (London, 1586), 21.

15. Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury, ed. R. H. Tawney (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925), 202.

16. Wilson, 232. See also Richard Johnson, who reminds his readers in Look on Me, London (London, 1613) that during the reign of Henry III, the “good cittizens of London, in one night, slew five hundred Jewes, for that a Jew tooke of a Christian a penny in the shilling usury, and ever after got them banished the citty” (quoted here from Illustrations of Early English Popular Literature, ed. J. Payne Collier, 2 vols. [New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966], 2:22-23).

17. Wilson, 180. Like Wilson, the preachers at Paul's Cross typically railed against the dangers of economic individualism and looked back to an earlier, supposedly better time. For further discussion of this topic, see Miller MacLure, The Paul's Cross Sermons 1534-1642 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1958); and Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders: Usury and Law in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

18. Muldrew emphasizes the increasing importance of personal wealth in establishing credit during this period; according to one late-sixteenth-century writer: “commonly no man is accompted worthy of much honor, or of great trust and credit, unlesse he be rich” (quoted in Muldrew, 153). See also Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 152-53.

19. Thomas Lodge, An Alarum against Vsurers (1584) in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, 4 vols. (Glasgow: Robert Anderson, 1883), 1:13. See also Wilson, who warns of the dangers to the commonwealth when a landed gentleman is “eaten up by an usurer” (356).

20. Roger Hacket, A Sermon Needfull for Theese Times (Oxford, 1591), sig. B3^r.

21. See Richard L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981), 609.

22. John Stow, A Survey of London (1603), ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:225.

23. Charles Gibbon, quoted here from Jones, 148.

24. Miles Mosse, The Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie (London, 1595), 28-30.

25. For a valuable overview of the usury debate and the compromise of the 1571 statute, see Tawney, ed., 157.

26. Edward Misselden, The Circle of Commerce (London, 1623), 17 (quoted here from the 1969 Da Capo Press facsimile edition).

27. William Scott, An Essay of Drapery or the Compleate Citizen (London, 1635), sig. B2^v. See also Joyce Oldham Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978).

28. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

29. See, for example, Craig Muldrew, “Interpreting the Market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England,” Social History 18 (1993): 163-83; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977); and Agnew, 1-16.

30. Muldrew, “Interpreting the Market,” 169. David Harris Sacks, in The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991), also emphasizes the extensiveness of credit networks within trading communities where economic ties were such that “One trader along the line breaking faith could cause a credit crisis for everyone else in the chain” (321).

31. Johannes Nider, On the Contracts of Merchants (1468), trans. Charles H. Reeves, ed. Ronald B. Shuman (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1966), 7 and 8.

32. Christopher St. Germain, Doctor and Student (1531), ed. T. F. T. Plucknett and J. L. Barton (London: The Selden Society, 1974), 228.

33. Thomas Elyot, The boke named the Governour, quoted here from Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 135.

34. A Godlie Treatice Concerning The lawfull use of ritches (London, 1578), sig. L2^r.

35. West, sig. ¶¶.1.

36. Wilson, 287.

37. See, for example, Lodge, An Alarum; and Johnson, Look On Me, London.

38. This remark is attributed to Philip Henslowe by the Lady Elizabeth's Men in a formal petition charging him with oppressive financial practices; quoted here from E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 1:367.

39. See C. W. Brooks, Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The ‘Lower Branch’ of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 57-71. A tally of cases before the Court of Common Pleas in Michaelmas Term 1606, for example, shows that “men below the rank of gentlemen were involved as plaintiffs in 71 per cent of all litigation, and that they were a good deal more likely to sue their social superiors than to be sued by them” (Brooks, 61).

40. Muldrew ascribes the increase in litigation both to the expansion of credit and to the “increasing complexity of obligations” but emphasizes as well the importance of the legal system in ensuring trust in the market and community (“Interpreting the Market,” 179).

41. See John Dunne, “Trust and Political Agency” in his Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays 1981-1989 (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990), 26-44. Dunne defines trust as “a device for coping with the freedom of other persons,” which, though subject to failure, is nonetheless “central to the understanding of political action” (33). Summarizing Locke's conception of legitimate political societies, he writes, “politics at its best is an intricate field of cooperative agency, linking a multiplicity of free agents, none of whom can know each other's future actions but all of whom must in some measure rely upon each other's future actions” (36). See also Annette Baier, “Trust and Antitrust,” Ethics 96 (1986): 231-60.

42. Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 133. See also Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in early modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 274-75.

43. Bristol, 3.

44. See Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: a social history 1200-1830 (London and New York: Longman, 1983).

45. Acts of the Privy Council of England, AD 1596-7, ed. John Roche Dasent, 32 vols. (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1902), 24:95.

46. For an especially insightful discussion of the Coventry scene that reads Falstaff as “both exploiter and spokesman for the exploited,” see Whitney, 425. See also Harry Berger Jr., “The Prince's Dog: Falstaff and the Perils of Speech-Prefixity,” SQ 49 (1998): 40-73.

47. For Falstaff, and perhaps for Shakespeare, bad faith becomes a marker of high social status. “Falstaff is the first major joke by the English against their class system; he is a picture of how badly you can behave, and still get away with it, if you are a gentleman—a mere common rogue would not have been nearly so funny,” William Empson remarks in his essay “Falstaff” in Essays on Shakespeare, David B. Pirie, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 29-78, esp. 46.

48. Fischer, 152.

49. Greenblatt, 52-53.

50. Coursen, 109.

51. Greenblatt, 44.

52. As Elliot Krieger remarks on Francis's dilemma: “Service according to an objective, regulative time schedule, as a force opposed to the subjective, whimsical demands for immediate gratification imposed by a master, works, in 1 Henry IV, as a liberating force” (A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979], 156).

53. Engle, 111.

54. Long associated with the dangers of unregulated commerce, engrossers garnered even more opprobrium in the late 1590s, when the government blamed the dearth of corn on the monopolistic practices of these “bad-disposed persons” who, like those responsible for the death of Robin Ostler, preferred “their own private gain above the public good” (Tudor Royal Proclamations, The Later Tudors [1588-1603], Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., 3 vols. [New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1969], 3:194).

55. See Kastan's discussion of Henry IV's “utopian solution to the problems of difference” (242).

56. Samuel Johnson, quoted here from The Second Part of Henry the Fourth: A New Variorum Edition, ed. Matthias A. Shaaber (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1940), 319.

57. See Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 95-119.

58. For general discussions of the law of contract, see J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 1971), 174-204; and Anson's Law of Contract, ed. A. G. Guest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

59. F. W. Maitland, The Forms of Action at Common Law: A Course of Lectures, ed. A. H. Chaytor and W. J. Whittaker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1936), 68. For definitions of actions of debt and assumpsit, see also Baker, 174-204; and Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 206-9.

60. Sir Thomas Egerton, quoted here from A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Common Law of Contract: The Rise of the Action of Assumpsit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 319.

61. Pointing to the importance of promises rather than property in assumpsit, Muldrew comments: “With the rise of assumpsit, the legal notion of moveable property was actually becoming less important in the early modern period than it had been in feudal times, as the stress in assumpsit was on trust in interpersonal relationships” (Economy of Obligation, 209). This is not to suggest, however, that assumpsit ignored the materiality of the exchange. The concept of “consideration” served to link the promise to an actual exchange—that is, the circumstances motivating the promise—and in this sense fulfilled a function similar to, though not identical with, quid pro quo. For further discussion of the complicated relationship between quid pro quo and consideration in the sixteenth century, see Simpson, 316-488; and J. H. Baker, “Origins of the ‘Doctrine’ of Consideration, 1535-1585” in his The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (London and Ronceverte: Hambledon Press, 1986), 369-91.

62. For discussions of Slade's Case, see Edward Coke, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, ed. George Wilson, 7 vols. (London: J. Rivington, 1777), 2:91-95; A. W. B. Simpson, “The Place of Slade's Case in the History of Contract,” The Law Quarterly Review [LRQ] 74 (1958): 381-96; H. K. Lücke, “Slade's Case and the Origin of the Common Counts, Parts 1-2,” LQR 81 (1965): 422-45 and 539-61; H. K. Lücke, “Slade's Case and the Origin of the Common Counts, Part 3,” LQR 82 (1966): 81-96; J. H. Baker, “New Light on Slade's Case, Part I,” Cambridge Law Journal [CLJ] 29 (1971): 51-67; J. H. Baker, “New Light on Slade's Case, Part II,” CLJ 29 (1971): 213-36; J. H. Baker and S. F. C. Milsom, Sources of English Legal History in Private Law to 1750 (London: Butterworth, 1986), 420-41; David Ibbetson, “Assumpsit and Debt in the Early Sixteenth Century: The Origins of the Indebitatus Count,” CLJ 41 (1982): 142-61; and David Ibbetson, “Sixteenth Century Contract Law: Slade's Case in Context,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 4 (1984): 295-317.

63. Baker, “New Light, Part II,” 226.

64. Coke, Reports, 2:94b.

65. Baker, “New Light, Part I,” 62n.

66. Baker, “New Light, Part I,” 55.

67. Baker, “New Light, Part II,” 220.

68. In allowing the action of assumpsit in matters of debt, Coke's ruling allowed plaintiffs to avoid the corrupt wager of law practice associated with actions of debt. By the 1590s compurgation, or wager of law, was being openly abused by the practice of hiring professional oath-helpers, or “‘knights of the post,’” as they were dubbed, in place of the friends and neighbors who had traditionally testified to a defendant's reputation or trustworthiness (Baker, “New Light, Part II,” 228). As Coke writes on Slade's Case: “for now experience proves that mens consciences grow so large that the respect of their private advantage rather induces men (and chiefly those who have declining estates) to perjury” (2:95b).

69. While disputes involving marriage contracts usually came under the jurisdiction of the Church courts, when deceit or bad faith was involved in promises of land, moveables, or money made in connection with a marriage, then the case was actionable under assumpsit. See The Reports of Sir John Spelman, ed. J. H. Baker, 2 vols. (London: Selden Society, 1978), 2:269 and 277; and Lücke, “Slade's Case, Part 1,” 435-37.

70. If Falstaff's deployment of erotic credit here and elsewhere in the Henriad recalls feudal relations of service, it also points to the ways in which eroticism is not necessarily antithetical to commercial exchange and contract. See, for example, Walter Benn Michaels, “The Phenomenology of Contract” in his The Gold Standard: The Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: U of California P, 1987), 115-36.

71. As Jonathan Crewe observes, the peaceful succession in this play rests on the likeness, or equivalence, between father and son: “what this situation allows is that wildness … can consensually be transferred from the scapegrace son to the father as original usurper, on one hand allowing it to be buried with the corpse and on the other permitting the instantly reformed son to become the legitimate heir” (“Reforming Prince Hal: The Sovereign Inheritor in 2 Henry IV,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 21 [1990]: 225-42, esp. 236).

72. See Laurie E. Osborne, “Crisis of Degree in Shakespeare's Henriad,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 25 (1985): 337-59.

73. Robert Weimann, “Thresholds to Memory and Commodity in Shakespeare's Endings,” Representations 53 (1996): 1-20, esp. 2.

74. For an excellent discussion of the contractual nature of early modern performance and its ties to assumpsit, see Luke Wilson, “Promissory Performances,” RenD [Renaissance Drama], n.s. 25 (1994): 59-87.

75. For a discussion of the shift from patronage to commerce, see Kathleen E. McLuskie, “The Poets' Royal Exchange: Patronage and Commerce in Early Modern Drama,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 53-62.

76. Weimann, 17.

77. Weimann, 4.

I am especially grateful to Kate Brown, Jill Frank, Gail Kern Paster, and the anonymous readers for Shakespeare Quarterly for their helpful suggestions and comments on this essay.