Globalizing Fortune on The Early Modern Stage

Globalizing Fortune explores how early capitalist developments, such as English trade and colonial exploration, influenced perceptions of chance, luck, and fortune. It demonstrates how the popular theater played a significant role in shaping ethical practices and understanding fortune as a globalizing commercial and ethical phenomenon. The theater's influence on popular perceptions of fortune was due to its involvement in London commerce, reliance on paying customers, and vulnerability to live performance risks and contingencies.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 25 August 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Early capitalist developments, such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration, had a significant impact on understandings of chance, luck, and fortune. This expansion brought new opportunities and risks, which challenged traditional Protestant beliefs about the all-controlling hand of divine providence. The recognition of fortune's powerful force in the world led to a new philosophy of fortune that focused on discerning and optimizing unexpected opportunities.

The popular theater played a crucial role in dramatizing these new prospects and dangers, fostering a set of ethical practices for engaging with fortune's unpredictable turns. While fortune had been largely derided as a sinful, earthly distraction in the Boethian tradition of the Middle Ages, it made a comeback on the English Renaissance stage as a force associated with valiant risks, ennobling adventures, and purposeful action. The early modern stage also revealed how a new philosophy of fortune led to economic exploitation and racialized exclusions.

Globalizing Fortune, a book by Professor David Scott, explores these questions in depth by examining the history of the English commercial theater. The theater, like English seaborne expansion, was a history of fortune, shaped by the opportunities and risks of global commerce. The book discusses plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Heywood, Dekker, and others, demonstrating how the theater shaped popular understandings of fortune's role in a culture undergoing economic transformation.

The public theater, with its unique position in London commerce, reliance on paying customers, and vulnerability to the risks and contingencies of live performance, addressed this transformation from a distinct perspective. It played a crucial role in shaping popular perceptions of fortune, as well as in challenging and subverting traditional beliefs about divine providence and human agency.

In conclusion, early capitalist developments, such as the global expansion of English trade and colonial exploration, had a profound impact on understandings of chance, luck, and fortune. The popular theater played a crucial role in shaping these perceptions, fostering a new philosophy of fortune that focused on optimizing unexpected opportunities. While the theater had its challenges and controversies, it remained a powerful force for shaping cultural and social attitudes toward fortune and its role in the world.

Weight: 540g
Dimension: 242 x 163 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780198867920