Globalizing Fortune on The Early Modern Stage

Abstract Offering in-depth discussions of plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, this study considers how England’s economic expansion through global commerce and nascent colonial exploration produced new understandings of the role of fortune in the world, both as a philosophy of chance and luck and a means by which to accumulate wealth. While largely derided as a sinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, fortune made a comeback on the Renaissance stage as a force associated with virtuous opportunities, valiant risks, and ennobling adventures. Fortune’s Empire shows how a pagan goddess who blindly spins the wheel of our lives becomes an avatar for new understandings of risk and investment that underwrite capitalist systems of value in a period of globalization. The book also demonstrates how fortune helped to foster a philosophy of action in a Protestant culture where divine providence remained largely incomprehensible and inaccessible to human consciousness. Like the history of English seaborne expansion, the history of English theater was also a history of fortune. For theater itself depended on novel commercial structures that were vulnerable to speculation and risk, and the success of its live performances required careful management of accident, contingency, and unpredictable audience responses. Drawing attention to an archive of plays dramatizing maritime travel, trade, and adventure, Fortune’s Empire shows how the popular stage shaped evolving understandings of fortune by cultivating new viewing practices and mechanisms of theatrical wonder, as well as proper ethical responses to new forms of economic investment.