This dissertation considers the intersections between emerging capitalism, global trade, and shifting negotiations of value as they are represented in early modern English theater during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. International exploration, contact with other cultures, and new forms of trade fundamentally transformed the English economy as well as English understandings of the self. This dissertation utilizes economic criticism and a focus on queer theory in order to examine early modern theater’s place in constructions of early modern value. Each chapter of this dissertation analyzes how certain plays explore newly emerging capitalist conceptualizations of value through language and relationships combining, intertwining, and complicating economic and erotic value in order to question the changing nature of the self, the economy, and the English state. Chapter One analyzes representations of male homosocial chains of credit and reputation that complicate, and at times supersede, those of the English heteronormative family structure in literature and in law. The plays offer representations of queer economic value and desire that are in fact vital to the English economy, though they also contend with historical anxieties regarding male eroticism, sodomy, and coinage. Chapter Two explores a complimentary financial institution, that of marriage, but the plays examine international marriages between English subjects and strangers. As England navigated its new capitalist practices at home, it increased its reach abroad, which in turn brought more opportunities to examine the relationships between economic power and gendered, racialized, and queer desire. Finally, Chapter Three interrogates plays that follow the circulation of gold specie and the rise in counterfeit gold, which reveal and influence English anxieties regarding the promise and peril of mercantile wealth within new representation-based global economies. This dissertation focuses on characters who employ both economic and erotic language to describe themselves and their worlds in order to search for opportunities to subvert the mandates of commodity fetishism, accumulation, and exploitation that the capitalist world demands.

This dissertation explores “racial capitalism” as it relates to late-medieval and early modern English literature and literary culture, especially drama, in order to reframe the stories we tell about human difference as we seek to reconstruct our contested pasts. This dissertation uses methodologies employed in critical race theory (CRT) and critical white studies (CWS) to re-examine the long history of Western race thinking and racialization alongside the development of emergent capitalism. It examines “whiteness” in English drama as a racial category not solely defined by skin color. The purchase this dissertation gets from focusing on “race” is in an illumination of systemic racism—in the premodern past and today. The first chapter illuminates systemic racism by examining England’s history as the earliest “nation” to expel its Jewish population (in 1290). This chapter analyzes Anglo-Jewish history, which has been marginalized in the field of English history, to study England’s role in the forefront of antisemitic thought and practice. By close reading a fifteenth-century drama, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, this dissertation shows the relationship between antisemitic thought and mercantilism. The second and third chapters illuminate the development of capitalism and systemic racism by examining the invention of “whiteness” and “Christian identity” on and off stage. Throughout these chapters, the English theater is an important site in the development of racial capitalism—Elizabethan theatrical companies like the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe were one of the earliest forms of the joint-stock company—and an important site of cultural production. This dissertation examines how racial constructs work together to produce and reproduce processes of exclusion, systems of signification, and social hierarchies to argue that the invention of the “white race” is rooted in racial and class-based threats to the established social order.