The Panoramic View in Mercantile Thought: Or, a Merchant’s Map of Cymbeline

Abstract

The language of economics is so prominent in Cymbeline that Caroline Spurgeon felt Shakespeare “almost drags it in at times, even in places where as a metaphor it is both far-fetched and awkward” (296). Nonetheless, surprisingly little scholarship has given attention to the problems of economic value raised by the play.2 The action of the play is set in motion by a dispute over value: Cymbeline believes that Posthumus is inferior in worth to Imogen, whom he has secretly married, and banishes him. In trying to determine the worth of each lover relative to the other, the characters in the play engage in debates similar to those that took place in seventeenth-century mercantile treatises.