“The Common Market of All the World”: English Theater, the Global System, and the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, England’s religion was Roman Catholic, its feudal economy was marginal to global trade flow, and its professional theater was itinerant and largely dependent on household or courtly patronage. At the end of the century, England was predominantly Protestant and its economy was becoming a capitalist economy with stronger ties to global trade; London was rapidly becoming a world city, and its theater, too, had become “global” and commercial. In 1599, at the newly opened Globe Theatre in London, when the actor playing Jaques declared, “All the world’s a stage,” these words glanced at a new sense of English identity as a role that was to be performed on the stage of the world, and performed for profit. The theatrum mundi trope took on new meaning when England’s place in the world was understood differently, as a staging point for action in a global marketplace. In Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750, Jean-Christophe Agnew has shown how both market and theater pursued a parallel course of change, breaking free of local tradition to create new forms and functions that were oriented toward that far-flung process of exchange that sent English subjects and commodities back and forth, across the wide world.1