In recent years, scholars of early modern Britain have deftly analyzed the nexus of literature, economics, and science. Ceri Sullivan's The Rhetoric of Credit (Madison, NJ, 2002) demonstrates that the humor of city comedies originates in their characters’ obsession with credit. Blair Hoxby's Mammon's Music (New Haven, CT, 2002) sees John Milton's engagement with economic theory as a powerful influence on the poet's theology, political theory, and writings. Harmony and the Balance (Ann Arbor, MI, 2000), written by Andrea Finkelstein, looks at the intersection of science and economics, arguing that William Harvey's discovery of circulation inspired William Petty's ideas about the velocity of money and that Robert Boyle's assertion that “air had spring” helped Nicholas Barbon conceptualize elastic demand. Jonathan Gil Harris brings all three disciplines together in Sick Economies (Philadelphia, 2003) in which he demonstrates how playwrights and economic theorists used diseases like syphilis and canker to explore economic theories. Richard Kroll's Restoration Drama and “The Circle of Commerce” also explores this nexus, seeking to demonstrate the interplay among economic theory, tragicomedy, politics, and medicine. But Kroll does not restrict himself to this area of inquiry. This book also explores ancient rhetorical practices, the symbolism of architectural orders, the growth of theatrical criticism, the development of the proscenium stage, and the effect of casting decisions. Kroll's work is chock-full of stimulating ideas and interesting theories, but the breadth of his investigation distracts the reader from his main points.

Kroll's main point is that playwrights of the Restoration era embraced the Fletcherian genre of tragicomedy because it facilitated the ability of theater to act as a heuristic device. That is to say, tragicomedies, by incorporating dual parallel plots, enabled playwrights to “test and retest various postulates” (6). For Kroll, the postulates tested by restoration drama often pertained to economic theory and political practices. He further argues that dramatists explored such postulates to subtly critique the king.

In order to establish that double plots were particularly apt for political and economic discourse, Kroll goes far afield. He explores an allusion to Cicero in John Dryden's Of Dramatic Poesy to demonstrate that Dryden, like Cicero, maintained, “any statement we make is only ever a question of relative probability and must at all times compete dialectically with alternative or contradictory points of views” (81). Double plots, of course, allow a probing of such contradictory points of view. Kroll takes this idea of contradictory points of view further when he explores architectural theory. Building on the fact that Inigo Jones was inspired by reading authors like Sebastiano Serlio and on the marginalia in Jones's own copies of these works, Kroll argues that there is a hidden political message in many of Jones's structures. Jones had a penchant for mixing architectural orders. For instance, in the tower of the orders at the Schools Quadrangle at Oxford, Jones incorporated all of the orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite), with the most rustic at the bottom and the most sophisticated at the top. Kroll claims that this use of multiple orders had a polemical purpose, to remind his patrons of the mixed nature of the English constitution.

Just like Jones used architecture to subtly warn sovereigns of the dangers of absolutism, so too, Kroll contends, did playwrights use double plots to make political and economic statements. Dryden's All for Love, for instance, advises Charles II by holding up one positive role model, Octavius, who favors a blue water policy, and one negative role model, Mark Antony, whose uxoriousness renders him ineffectual. Similarly, Aphra Behn's The Rover uses the dual plots of the Spanish and English characters to warn the king to avoid sexual excess and to induce him to promote trade.

This brief summary does not do justice to the complex arguments that Kroll makes, and this book is a testimony to his erudition, but since Kroll spends most of the book developing his ideas about architecture, staging, and rhetoric, it leaves him little space to fully analyze the six tragicomedies at the heart of his argument. With a scant ten pages or so for each play, many of his arguments seem underdeveloped. Kroll never substantiates his claims about playwrights using drama to explore economic theory. Certainly the plays he cites are filled with economic imagery and metaphors, but they seem to be using economics to enhance the imagery of their plays, not using drama to explore economic theory. Furthermore, Kroll sometimes misinterprets economic theory. He claims, for instance, that in The Plain Dealer Manly's opposition of intrinsic worth to counterfeit honor is a false alternative since the debate over coinage was between intrinsic (the worth of the precious metal) and extrinsic (what a coin could buy) value. Yet, proponents of intrinsic value would, of course, see extrinsic value as counterfeit, as based on nothing but the false opinion of others, just like “counterfeit honor.”

Kroll's main argument that tragicomedy sought to advise the king also lacks sufficient substantiation. Certainly royalist propaganda was not monolithic, and it is plausible that Dryden, Behn, and William Congreve all sought to advise the king. But the political messages of these plays seem overly subtle. (Such oversubtleness also applies to Kroll's contention that Jones mixed orders in his buildings in order to emphasize that England was a mixed monarchy. Considering the multivalent nature of architectural orders, even if Jones had such a goal, would any viewer have perceived it?) Kroll's depiction of restoration politics also suffers from the fact that he relies mostly on works published fifty or more years ago and never cites any of the many works on restoration politics published in the last twenty years.

That said, the book has many insightful comments. One of the most interesting appears on the very last page. Congreve's Way of the World abandoned the Fletcherian model and adhered to the French unities. Kroll argues that such an abandonment of dual plots reflected John Locke's famous argument that coins should be estimated at their intrinsic value. After the Revolution of 1688, both economists and dramatists fled from the uncertainty of exchange rates and dual plots and embraced unities of plot and time and “a fixt … estimation between bills and running cash” (293).