Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England

Abstract

The world of The Faerie Queene is no mere microcosm; it is a heterocosm of great complexity."When scholars today attempt to describe the "notions" at play in the minds of Sidney, Spenser, and their peers," Quitslund writes, "the components of popular or middle-class culture, as codified in books such as Shakespeare's England and The Elizabethan World Picture, no longer seem so monolithic as they did in the 1940s and 1950s" (p.121).Indeed.Still, Quitslund's excellent book reminds us that ideas have histories-as real, perhaps, as anything we can touch.