| Abstrakt: |
This article examines the connection between inheritance and confidence schemes or other forms of financial speculation (such as gambling) in early modern English drama. Considering plays including Thomas Middleton's Michaelmas Term (1604-6), John Cooke's Greene's Tu Quoque (1611), and Ben Jonson's Volpone (1605-6), I explore the cultural work done by dramatic narratives in which inheritance becomes a site of risk or speculation. I argue that the inheritance scam in early modern drama fulfills a cultural fantasy that extends well beyond the monetary, at times modeling or testing out new forms of socioeconomic behavior or injecting the possibility of fluidity into otherwise restrictive systems of wealth transfer and social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
