Translating Economic Discourse and Imagery in George Gascoigne’s Supposes (1566). A Multifocal Perspective

Drama and economy were seamlessly interwoven in Elizabethan England. Debt, insolvency, usury were engines of English Renaissance plays, which in turn served “as a proxy form of the new and but partly fathomable relations of a nascent market society” (Agnew, 1986, p. 11). This seminal relationship has been brought into sharper focus by New Economic Criticism, whose scholarship has offered major theoretical support to the joint study of literature, culture, and economics. Though undeniably productive, this school’s “instinctive turn to the local material culture of early modern England as a privileged explanatory framework” has nevertheless “entailed a diminishing awareness of European culture more broadly and of the translation of poetic forms and genres” (Hutson, 2020, p. 27) that contributed to shaping Elizabethan culture, thus overshadowing the transnational circulation of ideas, codes, and models in which economic practices and discourses participated. Moving from these theoretical premises and responding to the emerging call for a wider cross-cultural approach to the study of Elizabethan drama and economy, this essay engages in a multifocal analysis of George Gascoigne’s Supposes – a “treasonably faithful” (Beecher, 1999, p. 66) translation of Ariosto’s Suppositi first performed in 1566, during the Christmas revels of Gray’s Inn. This play offers a remarkable standpoint, I will argue, from which to examine the dramatic cross-pollination between Italian and English discourses and practices of economy, revealing the dialogic and at times conflictual construction of new economic paradigms embedded in early modern European drama. Focusing on a meaning-laden excerpt from Act 2.4, I will demonstrate how Gascoigne naturalised Suppositi by foregrounding the socioeconomic issues entrenched in Elizabethan public discourse – the depersonalization of Western markets, the untrustworthiness of informal contracts, the liceity of usury – while also providing fitting domestic alternatives for the culture-bound imagery embedded in his sources.