Examination of the motif of the prodigal son as treated in early
modern drama, from Shakespeare to Beaumont and Fletcher. Why is it
bad to spend too much money? In early modern England, the concept
of prodigality governed all forms of financial excess and misuse,
from gambling away your family estate to buying too much food. To
be prodigal was not only to lack self-discipline but to be
immorally excessive. Prodigals were foolish, reckless, and sinful,
but their lives were also ones of excitement, lust, luxury, and
intrigue. Ambivalently positioned between conservative financial
ideals and increasingly popular economic indulgences, prodigals
embodied a nation's anxieties about the advent of early capitalism.
This book analyses the prodigal youth archetype in early modern
drama, examining plays byShakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, Randolph,
Chapman, Marston, Beaumont and Fletcher, Davenport, Gascoigne,
Heywood, as well as anonymous works and morality plays. The
theatres, which were so often criticised for financial excess,
became the perfect setting for the rebellious exploits of prodigal
youths, and their rises and falls were dramatised with increasing
glamorisation between 1500 and 1642. By discussing humanist
education practices, Aristotelian ethics, urban change, cuckoldry,
usury, and sex work, the author offers the first examination of
prodigality and the ways in which England at first condemned, then
tolerated, and then eventually came to celebrate excessive
spending. EZRA HORBURY is Lecturer in Renaissance/Early Modern
Literature at the University of York.
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