Amanda Bailey's recent book, Of Bondage: Debt, Property and Personhood in Early Modern England, examines the economic practice of debt bondage and how it is manifested in six seventeenth-century plays. To do so, Bailey draws upon a wide range of historical circumstances to paint a picture of an English society increasingly enmeshed in credit relations. Arguing that economic literary criticism's emphasis on usury has sidelined the investigation of an equally important credit vehicle, her focus is the debt bond, a signed promise to repay in full, whose very name invokes the physical act of bondage. Underpinned by the premise that, rather than strengthening communal ties, a growing culture of credit was adversely affecting the social contract, Bailey's book explores the issue of what constituted self-ownership in a world in which the bodies of debtors became, in effect, property at the moment of default. The six plays under discussion are hardly a cohesive lot generically, but they do all present debtors as central characters and interrogate “the dynamics of debt bondage” (18) on a number of fronts. As Bailey argues, “[B]ecause debt was a bodily event at the center of complex political and philosophical issues raised by contract law, the theater was uniquely positioned to stage the emerging story of the possessive individual” (3).

The book's opening chapter on Shakespeare and Middleton's notoriously difficult Timon of Athens views the play as a “botched revenge tragedy” (21), centering on the term “payback.” Bailey argues that Timon fundamentally misunderstands the disastrous credit relations he enters into by believing that value stems from him, whereas the bonds which come due in the second act situate value in his person. An oft-neglected aspect of Timon, the scenes of Alcibiades confronting the senate, are explored to good effect from the stance that the condemned soldier's value in his own person makes the plea for his life a matter of equitable reckoning that reflects on the main plot. Interestingly, the problem of the play's “two Timons” is viewed as originating in how character stability is problematized by living in an economy in which the intentionality of both creditors and debtors is ultimately rendered moot. This engaging chapter is, however, somewhat weighed down by a tenuous parallel drawn between Timon and Phillip Henslowe's mercurial character that never quite gels.

The Merchant of Venice provides ample material for Bailey's investigation of a legal world in which money and flesh are rendered as equivalent forms of property. Her focus on the debt bond, which assured restitution, rather than usury, which didn't, provides fresh insights into the play. Of particular interest is Bailey's work on the emphasis Merchant places on forfeiture and the ethics of regarding the debtor's body as a nonfungible asset. As she contends, that body “becomes the proving ground of the bond's ability to invoke theological precepts of the origin of possession, which observe the sanctity of human life, while at the same time support the state's investment in penalizing the insolvent” (56). Bailey's deft analysis of the play's courtroom scenes, which contextualizes the arguments in early modern thinking on credit relations, makes this chapter a very worthwhile addition to Merchant criticism.

Of Bondage's chapter on Middleton's Michaelmas Term considers the role of intention and consent in debt relations by situating the play against a backdrop of early modern court cases that sought to bring coherence to the common law of contract. Bailey uses the misfortunes and ultimate victory of Michaelmas's hapless debtor, Easy, to illustrate how the textual aspect of debt bonds, in particular the debtor's signature being a sign of agency, complicated the execution of contracts. The idea of the debt bond is expanded to encompass the contracts of indenture that underpinned colonial England's servant trade in Bailey's reading of Fletcher and Massinger's little-studied play, Custom of the Country. That play's depiction of men and women in a state of chattel bondage is paralleled with the commodification of indentured servants in England's Virginia colony. Despite some digressive side trips into issues such as the role of port cities and early modern theatrical players' state of bondage, this chapter does offer the intriguing premise that a societal harmony achieved by temperance and a civility based on mutual agreement is born in part by taking an ethical approach to both the creditor-debtor relationship and that of masters and servants. In effect, social and credit relations are convincingly argued to have an equivalency.

Bailey's final chapter, which examines Middleton's A Trick to Catch an Old One and Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts, gives the issue of self-possession an intriguing spin because both plays are argued as depicting debtor's prisons as sites of regeneration where “the debtor maintains his dignity . . . not by reclaiming his person but by transcending the material conditions that threaten to debase him” (118). However, given Of Bondage's explicit focus on the debt bond, this chapter's discussion of the two plays' principal antagonists is problematized to an extent by Middleton's Dampit and Massinger's Overreach being usurers (Dampit is even identified as such in A Trick's dramatis personae). Reconciling the line drawn in the introduction between the two types of indebtedness and how these plays' depiction of usury (which, as Bailey points out, is the usual focus in critical explorations of early modern debt) fits in with the book's overarching argument could have more clearly defined and supported Bailey's central theses.

Overall, Of Bondage's extensive historical and literary analysis sheds new light on a fascinating economic construct of the early modern era, namely, “the law's ability to transform the human body into a new species of money” (146) via the debt bond. The exploration of that construct, in turn, provides fresh perspectives on self-identity, self-ownership, and the question of how value is defined. In the end, Bailey admirably achieves her stated goal of expanding the parameters of new economic criticism.