2 - Drama and the age

Summary

We were just in a financial position to afford Shakespeare when he presented himself.

J. M. Keynes, A Treatise on Money

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a combination of general historical factors coincided with special economic and demographic developments to mark the early modern era as the time social change began to become, for England generally and the city of London in particular, a phenomenological constant. Earlier, around the year 1500, according to Fernand Braudel, England could be aptly described as a “‘backward’ country, without a powerful navy, with a predominantly rural population and only two sources of wealth: huge wool production and a strong cloth industry.” During the course of the century, however, sustained forces began affecting England's economic foundations, ultimately transforming its society, as Margot Heinemann points out, from one “based on rank and status to one based more directly on wealth and property.” Figuring prominently among such influences were a continually high level of inflation; the extension and intensification of merchant adventurism and other speculative financial activity (including the increase in “projects” and “projectors”); the material implications of international trade expansion; the rapid growth of London's population and the subsequent complications of urban pressure; and, perhaps most important, the progressive, structural institutionalization of the market economy.

The cumulative effect of these socioeconomic changes forever altered the structure of English society.