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Podcast: New Books in Performing Arts
Episode: Laura Kolb, "Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Description: In Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2021), Laura Kolb examines how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented credit-driven artifice and interpretation on the early modern stage. It also analyses a range of practical textsâincluding commercial arithmetics, letter-writing manuals, legal formularies, and tables of interestâwhich offered strategies for generating credit and managing debt. Looking at plays and practical texts together, Fictions of Credit argues that both types of writing constitute âequipment for livingâ: practical texts by offering concrete strategies for navigating England's culture of credit, and plays by exploring the limits of credit's dangers and possib...