There was among men and women in the latter part of the sixteenth century a dawning, sometimes consuming, awareness that both rural and urban life, agriculture, industry and trade depended on credit. In England, where there was a chronic shortage of coin, “the use of credit was almost ubiquitous.” From laborers to the Duke of Norfolk, from widows to Queen Elizabeth, English people were lending and borrowing. They were engaging in the sorts of verbal, personal, usually reciprocal and non-institutional monetary transactions upon which depended the livelihood of communities of tradesmen and gentlemen, farmers and citizens alike. But they were also beginning to participate in, and to take notice of, more “rational, impersonal and pragmatic money-lending practices” that took the form of penal bonds and written contracts, and were characterized by profit and self-interest. We may gauge the social and psychological force of this awareness if we keep in mind the interplay of two related meanings of “credit”: trustworthiness (one's worth in the realm of belief) and solvency (one's worth in the realm of finance). The sometime congruence, sometime friction, registered in these distinct senses of credit is readily felt in dramatic texts sensitive to linguistic slippage. I take as my examples Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and (with Thomas Middleton) Timon of Athens, and Thomas Heywood's 2 If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody.