Search

Summary

Chapter 1 examines British playwright Henry Milman’s 1815 play Fazio, within the context of a series of nineteenth-century banking crises in the United Kingdom and the United States. Reading the play’s love triangle as an allegory for changing relations among specie, banks, and paper money, it demonstrates how the play not only staged a crisis in (moral) value, but also enacted an imaginative solution to that crisis in its performance form. Taking Fanny Kemble’s performance as Bianca as its case in point, this chapter shows how Romantic actors used their signature “point” technique to help audiences accept a shift from material to abstract value. Tracking the rise and fall of the play’s popularity against the uneven development of modern banking on both sides of the Atlantic, this chapter reveals how, in a moment when gold and silver specie was being replaced by a paper currency backed by the modern nation-state, the dynamic exchange between actor and audience facilitated even as it figured an exchange of a fiction for the real.

Search Results

Refine search

Refine search

Actions for selected content:

1 results

Chapter 1 - Money

Summary

Search Results

Refine search

Refine search

Actions for selected content:

Save Search

1 results

Chapter 1 - Money

Summary