"My well-won thrift which he calls interest". Merchants and Usurers on the Elizabethan Stage

In the wake of recent insights into the discursive practices of ‘debt’ and ‘credit’ (Kolb-Oppotz-Trotman 2020; Kolb 2021) in early modern English culture, the essay examines the multifaceted socio-cultural context against which the hybrid, and partly overlapping identities of merchants and usurers took shape in Elizabethan England, and the conflictual ideological models that underpin their characterization on the early modern stage. Considering Robert Wilson’s The Three Ladies of London (1581) and William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money (1598), along with Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596-97), the essay explores how issues related to ‘Jewishness’ and to the increasingly disturbing presence of ‘foreigners’, ‘strangers’ and ‘aliens’, that seemed to threaten English national identity, became inextricably related to the Elizabethan discourses on an emerging mercantile society between the 1580s and the 1590s.