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Chapter 1 - Money

Transacting Value on the Romantic Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2021

Julia A. Walker
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Performance and Modernity
Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage
, pp. 19 - 59
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Money
  • Julia A. Walker, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: Performance and Modernity
  • Online publication: 09 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108966870.002
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  • Money
  • Julia A. Walker, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: Performance and Modernity
  • Online publication: 09 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108966870.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Money
  • Julia A. Walker, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book: Performance and Modernity
  • Online publication: 09 December 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108966870.002
Available formats
×