Tao Jiusheng: Market Value Anxiety in Early Capitalist England—Money, Commodities, and National Security in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida
Renaissance England witnessed an unprecedented expansion of commodity trade, with commodification and marketization serving as defining features of the economic development of the period. Not only did the Enclosure Movement [1] gradually sever the connection between people and the land—forcing labor into the market to become a commodity—but women, who had occupied a subordinate status in society long before this era, saw their process of commodification accelerated by the market economy. Market logic triggered new modes of thinking; people gradually began to use money as a framework to conceptualize matter, actions, ideas, and human beings themselves. Early modern society frequently compared the individual to a coin stamped by God; as the intermediary between commodities and persons, money possessed a highly rhetorical metaphorical value. In Shakespeare’s play Troilus and Cressida (1609), an international marketplace is formed between Troy and Greece, wherein female characters are commodified. This serves as an analogy for the way currency became a commodity on the foreign exchange markets during the play’s composition, fluctuating according to market value. Like money, the value of the commodified person vacillated between intrinsic and extrinsic value. Based on the tradition of moral philosophy regarding value theory, intrinsic value theory holds that the value of an object is determined by the internal properties of the value-bearer, whereas extrinsic value theory argues that value is determined by the external relational characteristics of the value-bearer. In the realm of the market economy, the valuation of commodities (and money) gradually decoupled from intrinsic value, becoming increasingly dependent on the market and exhibiting a shift toward extrinsic value. When people realized that market rules were penetrating the evaluation of human worth, market forces undermined the evaluative benchmarks centered on intrinsic value; this violation of traditional standards of value carried the potential to induce social crisis.
Troilus and Cressida relates the story of the Trojan War, triggered by the Trojan prince Paris’s abduction of the Greek woman Helen. In the play, the Trojan royal house engages in a heated debate over whether to continue fighting to keep Helen. Much like precious gold or silver, the valuation of Helen by others is unstable. Hector believes that "every tithe soul 'mongst many thousand dishes / Is as dear as Helen," and that Helen’s value "holds his estimate and dignity / As well wherein 'tis precious of itself / As in the prizer" (II.ii.19-21, 53-56). Troilus, however, insists: "What’s aught but as 'tis valued?" (II.ii.52). Hector is ultimately persuaded by Troilus, choosing to continue the war based on Helen’s market value, which leads to the eventual fall of Troy. Starting from the Trojans' debate over Helen’s value, David Hawkes elucidates how relative value would conquer absolute value and the extrinsic would conquer the essential, signaling the rise of economic value in the modern sense. From the perspective of economic pathology, Jonathan Gil Harris analyzes the causes of Helen’s value fluctuations, arguing that Shakespeare defends the theory of internal causes of value while harboring suspicion toward the theory of external causes, and points out the harm that value fluctuation dealt to the Trojan body politic. While the aforementioned scholarship researches the problem of value in the play, it fails to sufficiently discuss—within the historical context of the development of England’s emerging capitalist market economy—the connection between the debate over the internal and external value of Helen and Cressida as commodities (money) and the issue of national security. In the play, Helen is like a commodified precious currency; the debate her value provokes among the Trojans echoes the early modern disputes over monetary value. Based on Helen’s own value as an ordinary woman, Hector judges whether to return her to Greece; yet others, based on Helen’s scarcity and uniqueness, believe her value to be beyond measure. This indicates that her value derives from herself, from the relationship between supply and demand, or from the subjective judgment of the Trojan and Greek royalty. Similarly, Cressida wavers between intrinsic and extrinsic value. However, the Trojans allow Helen’s value to revert to market choice; by exaggerating her value, they plunge the two nations into a war of immense attrition. This demonstrates Shakespeare’s profound anxiety regarding the early capitalist market and the extrinsic value of money.
I. Value Theories of Money and Commodities in Early Capitalism
Agrarian transformations during the Renaissance forced labor into the market to become a commodity. Population growth in 16th-century England increased the demand for agricultural products, causing prices to rise; consequently, English landlords and tenants focused on agricultural "improvement," particularly through lower-cost, higher-yield economic activities such as the Enclosure Movement. Agricultural "improvement" did not mean "making better" in the general sense, but rather referred to increasing the productivity of the land to obtain monetary profit. The population growth of the Tudor dynasty [2] was linked to the social and economic phenomena of the period; increasing population numbers exerted pressure on land and resources while also stimulating market demand, leading to the development of domestic trade. 16th-century England was viewed by the historian Fernand Braudel as a "backward country" with only two sources of wealth: wool production and the cloth industry. However, during the transition into the 17th century, the power of the commercial economy began to affect England’s economic base. The expansion of the export trade in English woolens stimulated the aristocracy and great landowners of the time to forcibly enclose open fields. To demarcate farmland as pasture for the increasingly profitable livestock industry, they fenced off the land, transforming common land—originally open to all—into private property, and forcing those who relied on common land usage rights to depart. Rapid population growth and commercial development catalyzed changes in agrarian society. Influenced by these factors, many who previously relied on the land for survival migrated en masse to cities to engage in paid labor; they were forced to sell their labor power as a commodity to make a living. By Shakespeare’s time, wage laborers deprived of traditional sources of survival were becoming increasingly common, with over half of English households depending on wage labor to at least some extent. The commodification of labor power (the person) became one of the major changes in the transition from England’s feudal economy to a capitalist economy.
The development of the early modern commodity economy accelerated the process of the commodification of women. According to the legal rules of the late Middle Ages, the obligation of women to submit to their husbands in marriage prevented them from acting as independent persons. Even unmarried women and widows had their legal rights restricted due to the potential for marriage. In many parts of Europe, all goods or property a married woman brought into a marriage, as well as any wages she earned during the marriage, were regarded as the property of her husband. Legally, she was subject to all her husband’s arrangements and even belonged entirely to his legal identity. The 15th-century female writer Christine de Pizan [3] explored the reasons why women were in a secondary position in society at the time. She acknowledged that women were disadvantaged in many respects and attributed this to their lack of education and their excessive economic dependence on men. The subordinate and dependent relationship of women to men exhibited semi-commodified characteristics; under the baptism of the market economy in the 16th and 17th centuries, women were thoroughly commodified. Unmarried women became valuable commodities on the marriage market, and married women were regarded even more so as part of male property. Early modern people believed that chastity constituted the entirety of a woman’s value; if a woman lost her chastity, she would have nothing. Chastity was defined by its exchange value—"clearly not a commodity, yet treated as one." The commodification of chastity, of women themselves, and of the human person involves not only market economic issues such as money and exchange, but is also an expression of personal value. In an early modern society invaded by market forces, this was a socio-political issue of significant importance.
Analogies between persons and money, and women and money, were not uncommon in the early modern period. Prior to Shakespeare’s era, the passage in the Gospel of Matthew concerning the tribute money mentioned the metaphor of the person as a coin; humanity was seen as carrying the image of God, coins stamped by the Divine. Augustine, in a sermon, also pointed out to his congregants: "Since you are the coins of God, possessing reason and life, you know whose seal you bear and according to whose image you were made." Since the Middle Ages, fantasies and anxieties regarding money were similar to impressions of women; both manifested qualities of instability, susceptibility to influence, and liquidity. The medieval construction of women and femininity was influenced by classical theories of generation: just as Aristotle proposed in De Generatione Animalium that the female always provides the material in reproduction while the male shapes that material, people believed that women were characterized by formlessness and chaos, passively receiving impressions, while men were characterized by stability and order, actively stamping their mark upon feminine matter. Misogynistic thought of the period held that female sexual loyalty would not last; the liquidity and instability of women rendered them physically and morally inferior. This liquidity shared similarities with the circulatory characteristic of money, which "can fall into anyone’s pocket." In the medieval cultural imagination, coins even frequently appeared as female figures—either as unfaithful and capricious women, or as generous and seductive ones—all related to the desire for and fear of monetary finance and eroticism. At the level of the early modern economy, money functioned both as a special commodity and as an intermediary between ordinary commodities and persons, possessing a highly rhetorical metaphorical value. Consequently, early modern people were accustomed to citing money to think about human beings.
Monetary value vacillated between intrinsic and extrinsic value. Based on the tradition of moral philosophy regarding value theory, intrinsic value can be understood as value possessed solely by virtue of the internal characteristics of the value-bearer, while extrinsic value refers to value possessed by virtue of at least some of the bearer’s external relational attributes. Intrinsic value theory holds that the value of a thing stems from the thing itself, whereas extrinsic value theory emphasizes that the value of a thing is obtained from "another source (including government intervention)." When value theory extended into the realm of the market economy in pursuit of pecuniary interest, people’s reactions and thinking were constrained by early modern economic theories. Early modern currency was minted from precious metals and simultaneously bore the portrait of the monarch and the state seal. Successive European monarchs had manipulated the physical attributes of currency, using debasement [4] to compensate for currency shortages. The mutability of the physical attributes of money blurred the essence of its value, leading to competing theories of intrinsic and extrinsic value. The Mercantilist Gerard de Malynes reached a compromise between the traditional intrinsic value model remaining from the Middle Ages and the reality of the nominal and unstable nature of monetary value. While insisting that the intrinsic precious metal value of money was the foundation for achieving exchange, he emphasized the protective significance of monarchical authority over the internal material value of the currency. Modern critics such as Stephen Deng, in categorizing monetary value theories, argue that the intrinsic value theory of early modern money refers to a coin's value being determined by its precious metal content, with the stamp on the coin serving only as the issuing institution's guarantee of that content. Conversely, incorporating 16th-century French "nominalist" theory, extrinsic value theory holds that the stamp itself confers value upon the coin. In the Shakespearean play Macbeth, the combination of precious metal, royal portrait, and state seal grants gold coins a healing efficacy (use value) in the theological dimension and "facilitates state power by helping to produce a mystical ideology of kingship." However, money is used by Macbeth to "buy" mercenaries; in a market economy, the exchange value of money undermines national security. During the reign of Queen Mary, when acts of debasement became known to the public, she had to force the populace to continue using the currency as indicated by the state seal in ordinary transactions. This event illustrates that during this period, both internal and external theories of monetary value were applicable, but extrinsic value had to be maintained through compulsory legal means. Therefore, the play demonstrates the transformation of money from use value to exchange value, revealing from another dimension the debates over monetary value and anxieties over national security during England’s transition to capitalism.
Money, as a specialized commodity, saw its external benchmarks for judgment undergo a transition toward market value. The history of currency debasement since the Middle Ages made people realize that the precious metal content of coinage was easily manipulated. As the actual value of money in circulation fluctuated, its intrinsic value gradually became independent of its nominal external value. People were forced to accept that money was a specialized commodity; consequently, like any other commodity, money’s external value took on artificial and market-driven characteristics. In the early modern period, the most prominent manifestation of money as a commodity occurred in the foreign exchange market. In the process of international exchange, money was the very commodity possessing market value. The merchant Malynes expressed anxiety that foreign bankers, at the behest of foreign monarchs, controlled exchange rates and depressed the value of English currency [5]. Thomas Mun, however, challenged Malynes’s view, attributing exchange rate movements (fluctuations in currency value) to market supply and demand. He argued that the abundance or scarcity of money led to the overvaluation or undervaluation of English currency [6], asserting that the true value of money stood outside the authority of the monarch. On the other hand, since the medieval scholar Jean Buridan established the commodity theory of money—arguing that money originated from market commodities and that its value must be measured by human need—this view persisted. In the late 17th century, the economist Dudley North reaffirmed the commodity attributes of precious metal currency, pointing out that gold and silver were merely commodities selected by the market to be money due to their specific qualities, and their value, like all other commodities in the market, was determined by supply and demand. By the late Renaissance, placing money (as a commodity) within the market for value judgment seems to have long been a matter of consensus.
In early modern society, commodities—represented by money—fell increasingly under the sway of the market, where price fluctuations could trigger social crises. As early as the 14th century, the economist Nicole Oresme attacked the debasement policies of European kings who ignored the intrinsic value of money. He believed monarchs had an obligation to maintain the weight and coinage standards of money, arguing that debasement for market-economic purposes undermined the public’s respect for government authority, bred scandal and discord among the populace, and increased the risk of civil disobedience. Under such conditions, money gradually loses its quality as a measure of value, affecting both domestic and foreign trade; the state cannot correctly assess its monetary revenue, and domestic credit transactions become neither safe nor stable. During the Renaissance, the perception of monetary value shifted from being guaranteed by royal authority to being viewed as a commodity that responded to domestic and international market forces and was constrained by market mechanisms. With the development of the market economy, even monarchs, who were theoretically accountable only to God, gradually fell prey to more powerful market and commercial forces. In Measure for Measure, Shakespeare expressed moral criticism and questioning of currency debasement (including counterfeiting, clipping, and illegal alteration). The critic Stephen Deng understands the monetary imagery in Measure for Measure through the lens of Aristotelian reproductive metaphors for money and Biblical doctrine, revealing the destructive impact of currency debasement on a king's honor and national stability. When a government cannot guarantee the stability of monetary value and money is left entirely to the mercy of the market, society easily becomes what the French humanist Jean Bodin feared: "If money, which must govern the price of everything, is changeable and uncertain, no man can truly know what he hath: contracts shall be uncertain, charges, taxes, wages... fines and penalties limited by laws and customs... in brief, the whole estate of finances and of many public and private affairs shall be in suspense."
The assessment of commodity value was an important means of examining market dynamics during the Renaissance. As early as the 13th century, scholars analyzed the sources of commodity value, taking into account the capacity to satisfy human needs, alignment with the preferences of the user, and scarcity. During the Renaissance, with the development of overseas trade and the market economy, the internal and external values of precious metal currency became distinct. Money became a specialized commodity, manipulated in the market like ordinary goods, and the benchmark for value judgment gradually gave way from traditional, static intrinsic value to dynamic market value. The experimental and exploratory nature of the era's drama allowed it to serve as a proxy for emerging capitalist market relations. Shakespeare’s plays, by reproducing contradictory information, themes, and ideological positions, were products of early modern market forces. The Troy in Troilus and Cressida is regarded as a stand-in and precursor for the real London; the "market world with nothing to support it" presented in the play seems to be a true portrayal of London under the development of the early modern market economy. Created during the late Elizabethan era—a time when an emphasis on the intrinsic essence of commodities coexisted with their manipulation by market forces—the female characters Helen and Cressida perform a function similar to money as a public measure and undergo commodification within a patriarchal market. Like money and ordinary commodities, their value originates from themselves, from supply and demand, or from the subjective judgments of the two royal houses. However, the inflation of their market value plunges both nations into a massive crisis, reflecting the playwright's anxiety over the external value instability of early modern English society.
II. The Dispute over the Source of Value for Helen and Other Characters
Homer’s epic Iliad and Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrative poem Troilus and Criseyde served as the primary source texts for the creation of the play Troilus and Cressida. However, Shakespeare integrated more modes of commodity exchange from market economic discourse to highlight the "penetration of the market into love and war." While the romance plot is drawn from Chaucer, Shakespeare offers a starkly different narrative of love and sex that is anti-romantic: whereas Chaucer emphasizes Criseyde’s virtue and treats her romance with Troilus as a noble sentiment, Shakespeare adapts it to highlight Cressida’s appearance and equates "the experience of love with mating." Furthermore, the war plot originates from Homer’s Iliad but is rendered anti-epic and anti-heroic. Buying, selling, and exchange become the sources of sex in the play. The Greek soldier Thersites describes the events of Troy in market terms, devaluing the war: "All the argument is a cuckold and a whore; a good quarrel to draw emulations, factions, and bleed to death upon" (II. iii. 71-72). Contemptuously referring to the Trojan War of ancient Greek myth as the story of "a cuckold and a whore" (Menelaus and Helen) breaks the traditional aristocratic value codes emphasized in the text. This devaluation of love and women indicates, to some extent, the playwright’s intention to reveal the process of Helen and Cressida’s marketization and commodification. Thus, in a social environment transitioning toward capitalism, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida re-centers the war of honor among heroes, demythologizes the original material, and moves "from aristocratic authority toward market exchange" to demonstrate deep reflection on national politics and economics.
In the play, the intrinsic value of characters comes from the aristocratic value tradition based on virtue and social hierarchy. In The Philosophy of Money, the modern sociologist Georg Simmel emphasizes that things possess intrinsic value: "Things and people are not only regarded by us as valuable, but remain valuable even if no one appreciates them. The most striking example is the value we assign to another's personality, such as morality, dignity, or strength." Intrinsic value associated with virtue is an inherent attribute of a thing or person. When Renaissance-era English people rediscovered classical economic thought, they typically used "worth" to denote intrinsic, natural, and objective value—generally referring to use-value with moral connotations—and "value" to denote relative, conventional, and subjective value—generally referring to exchange value. The word "worth" originates from the Anglo-Saxon period to describe an individual's inner virtue or noble quality; it only took on the meaning of price after the stabilization of physical money. In Troilus and Cressida, the Trojan Hector, when debating Helen's value, judges her from the perspective of intrinsic value, arguing that "she is not worth / what she doth cost the keeping" (II. ii. 51) unless she possesses "particular will" or inherent preciousness (II. ii. 55-56). Just as early modern bullionists viewed the intrinsic precious metal content as the criterion for judging monetary value, Hector emphasizes the intrinsic value derived from Helen’s personal virtue and uses it as the decisive factor for whether to continue the war. Contemporary critic David Hawkes emphasizes that "worth" was used only to represent the qualities of the aristocratic class, and Shakespeare’s aristocrats defined themselves through intrinsic value that stayed far removed from quantitative evaluation. Ulysses suggests that one should "act like a merchant" (I. iii. 358), quantifying Achilles’s value from a commercial perspective and designing a plan to bruise Achilles’s pride. In contrast, the hero Achilles still insists on self-evaluation from the perspective of traditional intrinsic value: "I see they [the Greeks] have / some check should strike me, / but they do not know what" (III. iii. 90-92).
The female characters Helen and Cressida, much like money, exhibit characteristics of liquidity and instability. Early modern money was often depicted as an active, potentially damaging factor in society, possessing a liquidity and instability similar to the "feminine" qualities perceived during that period. Both women and money were imagined as objects passively passed between men. In Troilus and Cressida, Helen is moved from the Greeks to the Trojans: "in revenge of our stale queen / he brought a Grecian queen" (II. ii. 77-78). Similarly, "to exchange for the unfree’d Antenor, / deliver her [Cressida] to him" (IV. i. 40-41), and so Cressida is forced into the midst of the Greeks. 17th-century commercial pamphlets also frequently invoked female chastity to describe the financial ideal of money’s internal and external values being in alignment. For instance, in Saint George for England, Allegorically Described, the mercantilist Malynes depicts an Edenic kingdom troubled by the dragon of "international usury," where the king’s virgin daughter—symbolizing the nation's wealth—is threatened by this dragon. Malynes intended for the dragon to represent and warn against the multiple dangers of international usury, while the virgin daughter in crisis served as a metaphor for a national economy harmed by international usury (including the manipulation of exchange rates by foreign powers). By manipulating monetary value, international usury destroyed the social hierarchy and the sovereignty of the English kingdom; therefore, the stability and harmony of economic society were inextricably linked to the purity of the national currency. From this perspective, when Troilus witnesses Cressida's intimacy with a Greek and laments, "This is, and is not, Cressid" (V. ii. 146), the statement takes on a new monetary metaphorical meaning: Cressida, having lost her chastity through intimacy, is analogous to Malynes's virgin daughter who cannot resist the dragon’s attack. The gradual detachment of chastity from Helen’s body symbolizes how the external nominal value of full-weight currency eventually failed to withstand the development of national commerce and trade, becoming increasingly separated from its intrinsic material value. Thus, Helen and Cressida in this play are just like money, possessing liquidity and instability.
Similar to money, Helen serves as both a measure of value and an object of valuation within the play, as her extrinsic value gradually comes to the fore. During Shakespeare's time, mercantilists such as Malynes and Misselden reaffirmed the moral function of money, viewing it as a rule and a measure, and arguing that the estimation of things' value must rely on money. [9] As the Shakespearean critic Jonathan Gil Harris points out, Helen is the yardstick of value for the male characters in the play, measuring their achievements in war and love. [10] Having been abducted from the Greek royalty by the Trojan royal house, Helen was "stamped by two men and two nations," [11] and the war fought to keep her even became, in Troilus's eyes, an act of "quarreling for a... honor" (II. ii. 47). As Helen circulates between the Greek and Trojan royalties, the judgment of her value is tethered to kings and the state. Because Helen receives recognition of her value from the royal government, she possesses high value—much like early modern gold and silver coins were granted an authoritative guarantee of value by being stamped with the state seal or the monarch’s portrait. Thus, Helen's extrinsic value mirrors and manifests the extrinsic value of money. Hector argues, "she is not worth what she doth cost / The holding," and that "there’s not a meaner spirit / In the world's wide army queans it than she does" (II. ii. 51-52; 19-20), [12] equating Helen's value to that of any common soldier. He asserts that value originates from within a thing, yet he uses Helen's value as a reference point to define the value of every common soldier's life, demonstrating to a certain extent Helen's function as a measure of value. Conversely, the Trojans' expenditure of manpower and wealth to battle the Greeks for Helen highlights the plasticity of her value; from the perspective of extrinsic value, this constitutes an affirmation of her immense worth. Harris views Helen as a public standard of value, much like money in Malynes’s writings, which undergoes reassessment in the process of external exchange. [13] As a standard for measuring price, Helen's value is bestowed by the public and establishes a new relationship of representation with wealth. In the play, Helen is like the money described by the contemporary merchant Nicholas Barbon: "the Instrument that Men as Money use to Rule and Estimate the Value of all things else; and in which Men Consider more the Stamp and Currency of the Money, than the Quantity of Fine Silver or Gold." [14]
The characters in the play undergo commodification, and their value takes on the characteristics of marketization. The degree of commodification in early modern English society was fully articulated in the merchant John Wheeler's A Treatise of Commerce (1601): "all the world choppeth and changeth, runneth and rideth after commodities... not only those things which nature bringeth forth... but also even the works of mens hands... the labor of their bodies, the speech of their mouths, and even the very bodies and souls of men... are also set to sale." [15] Shakespeare’s Coriolanus depicts the conflict between the traditional moral economy and the emerging market economy; not only personal nobility and deeds but even scars are treated "as commodities to be bartered for 'voices' or other tokens of public right and credit." [16] Critic Douglas Bruster, studying the material culture of 16th and 17th-century English society, found that women of this period were frequently depicted as commodities degraded within a patriarchal market, while marriage was viewed as a middle-class transaction. [17] In Troilus and Cressida, when Troilus defends Helen’s value, he compares seizing Helen from the Greeks to obtaining silks from a merchant, insisting: "We turn not back the silks upon the merchant / When we have soiled them" (II. ii. 69-70). Helen is viewed by Troilus as silk circulating in the international market, which is precisely the result of the commodification of women during the development of the market economy. Furthermore, Troilus’s refusal to return Helen based on the principles of market exchange reflects that her value as a commodity has taken on marketized characteristics; her movement between the geographical spheres of Troy and Greece is thus imbued with heavy commercial overtones. Scholar Catherine Gillen, starting from the commodification of female chastity, argues that chastity represents a woman's personal value, just as honor and courage represent male virtues. The susceptibility of chastity to commodification within a patriarchal gender system presents the possibility that men and male virtues may also be commodified. [18] In the play, when Ulysses is faced with Hector's challenge, he opposes sending Achilles to fight, arguing that the Greeks "should... as merchants do, / Well let us show our foulest wares, / And think perchance they'll sell" (I. iii. 358-360). Both the god of war Achilles and the "recommended" Ajax become commodities of varying value in the soldiers' market. Once individuals have undergone commodification, even a god of war finds his personal value defined through commercial language.
Just as Helen's uniqueness causes the Trojans to recognize her ultra-high value, the scarcity of a commodity is a major source for judging its worth. The 13th-century Franciscan theologian Pierre Jean Olivi argued that scarcity is one of the reasons one commodity is valued higher than another: "on account of scarcity or the difficulty of procurement, things become more important to us; as they become scarce, our need to possess and use them grows while the possibility of doing so decreases," and therefore "the same grain is of greater value in a time of scarcity, famine, or poverty than in a time of general harvest." [19] Based on the view of scarcity, Olivi attempted to explain the "paradox of value." [20] Although utility affects the value of a commodity, and the intrinsic qualities of high-value commodities can better satisfy needs, scarcity plays a more important role. "The four elements—water, fire, earth, and air—though more necessary and useful for our life, are of lower value because they are more abundant [in their storage on Earth] than gold or balsam." [21] Olivi’s perspective gave rise to the theoretical tradition that commodity value is jointly determined by scarcity, utility, and difficulty of procurement, becoming one of the cornerstones of early modern Western economics. [22] Troilus and Cressida presents a value judgment based on Helen's "scarcity." Unlike Hector, who uses intrinsic virtue as the basis for measuring Helen's value, Troilus recognizes Helen's unique and beautiful personal qualities and rebukes those like Hector who diminish her value, believing they should continue to praise her as a "theme of honour and renown... a spur to valiant and magnanimous deeds" (II. ii. 199-200) and a treasure "richer than sea and land" (II. ii. 92-93). As Olivi’s "paradox of value" reveals, Helen is like a commodity, regarded as a priceless "treasure" due to her uniqueness and scarcity, thereby possessing ultra-high value. Furthermore, to the Trojans, Helen "is a pearl / Whose price hath launched a thousand ships / And turned crowned kings to merchants" (II. ii. 81-83). This further illustrates Helen's value; she is regarded by the Trojans as a rare gem, like a pearl, and is a sought-after commodity in the market. More importantly, however, she is a symbol of national honor, prompting the Trojans to persist in the fight. Thus, Troilus's recognition of Helen's high value reflects a market logic where scarcity determines value.
The value of Helen and Cressida also stems from the subjective emotional judgments of the characters. The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus was the first to propose the idea of subjective value, arguing that moral value or ethical principles are absolute, while economic value is necessarily subjective: "The same thing may be good for all people, but the degree of pleasure varies from person to person." [23] Olivi reaffirmed the factor of need, which had been valued since Aristotle, believing that individual subjective needs and differences in taste cause gaps in commodity valuation; personal subjective judgment and the scarcity of a commodity work together in the assessment of its value. [24] During the Renaissance, the rapid development of the English market economy saw the reputation of individuals or objects gradually enter the realm of money, exhibiting a disturbing fictionality. In this new social dynamic, the value of a person or a coin might be created solely by a collective belief in that value; it seemed that the value attributes of humans or money could be altered through a compelling subjective imagination alone. [25] By the late 17th century, the merchant Nicholas Barbon still viewed utility as a necessary component of value, once again emphasizing the important role of subjective evaluation of a commodity's utility in assessing its value. [26] This both continued the long-standing thought of subjective value and laid the foundation for the later scientific and systematic theory of subjective value. [27] During the historical period of Shakespeare’s writing, the subjectivity of the source of commodity value was always prominent. As Helen sings, "Love, love, nothing but love, still love, still more!" and "Love, love, will make us all die" (III. i. 110-112), love, as a subjective preference, is a vital standard for value judgment for the characters. Under the influence of love, Paris believes that "the world’s large spaces cannot parallel" her beauty (II. ii. 162). Similarly, through the lens of love, while escorting Cressida from Troy to Greece, Troilus rebukes the Greek general Diomedes for his insolence, believing that Cressida "is as far high-soaring o’er thy praises / As thou unworthy to be called her servant" (IV. iv. 124-125). Yet in the Greek camp, in the eyes of the Greek Ulysses, Cressida "wants manner" and is one of those "sluttish spoils of opportunity / And daughters of the game" (IV. v. 61-62), and Helen is also cheapened and disparaged in Diomedes’s speech. The value of the two main female characters is assessed by others in the market; their value as individuals is unstable, serving as the result of evaluations made under the influence of subjective emotions.
Helen’s value oscillates between intrinsic and extrinsic value, exhibiting a turn toward market value. In Troilus and Cressida, the primary female characters undergo commodification in a patriarchal market, sharing a degree of similarity with money which becomes a commodity in the foreign exchange market. The development of the early modern market economy caused money outside the theater to face value conflicts, oscillating between its intrinsic precious metal value and its market-manipulated value. Economists in the 16th and 17th centuries recognized the opposition between true, material intrinsic value and false, subjective extrinsic value; discussions concerning the market economy often centered on the value of money. [28] Even the thoughts on monetary value of the same individual were not fixed. The economist William Petty initially believed that the true value of money should be equivalent to its intrinsic value, rather than a variable value determined by the fantasies, opinions, and errors of specific people. [29] By the late 17th century, Petty had already accepted the commodity characteristics of money, believing that like other commodities, its value fluctuates with market supply and demand, acknowledging that its financial value is a product of purely artificial imagination. [30] Within the play, Helen's value also fluctuates between an intrinsic value where "she is worth what she doth cost" and an extrinsic (subjective) value related to "honor and renown." As the critic William Engel notes, the play manifests a faithful embrace of market forces, where all characters are part of an unstable market. [31] The characters in the play are reduced to the market, where commodification and market language are indispensable; intrinsic value seems no longer important, and people gradually accept an "ethics based on market-driven subjective evaluation rather than fixed principles." [32] The Trojans ultimately make value judgments based on the market economy, choosing to believe in Helen’s high market value and persisting in the war against the Greeks. Yet this confirms Cassandra’s prophecy of national doom; Troy is destroyed, and extrinsic (market) value becomes a source of suspicion.
III. Anxiety over the Extrinsic Value of Commodities (Characters) in the Age of Shakespeare
Merchants represented market forces, and through the attitudes of Shakespeare’s contemporaries toward them, one can perceive their anxieties regarding the impact of market forces on the social order. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English people identified with a universe governed by a hierarchical order in which everything followed its sequence and performed its specific function. Every subject of the state, whether of high or low status, occupied a divinely ordained position within a strictly stratified society and enjoyed traditional rights and obligations corresponding to that status. [16] William Harrison, an Elizabethan clergyman, described the state of English society by categorizing social groups based on hierarchy. While detailing each stratum, he recognized the importance of wealth in establishing and maintaining social status; unlike the rigid Middle Ages, he frankly acknowledged and accepted the existence of social mobility. [17] During this period, although merchants participating in the market economy ranked below the nobility, they could rapidly acquire wealth through trade and utilize commercial transactions to obtain honorable titles of nobility. "The social hierarchy maintained an unstable equilibrium between a rigid, unchanging caste system and a state of absolute social mobility." [18] Merchants sometimes entered the political sphere; successful ones could even enter the offices of municipal magistrates or mayors, enjoying a degree of administrative power. [19] Whether it was the nobility engaging in merchant-like behavior or merchants participating in political discussions, the method of making value judgments through a market lens became increasingly common within the new social order. However, the priest Thomas Starkey argued that individuals should not live for their own pleasure and interest while disregarding the welfare of the state; the theologian Richard Hooker also warned against individuals prioritized by private interest interfering in state or religious policy, emphasizing that the individual, as part of the body politic, should focus on their own field of experience. [20] They believed that early modern merchants, relying on overseas trade for survival, were prone to disregarding the national public interest in pursuit of personal gain or due to a lack of other capacities, reflecting concerns over the social reality of the traditional order being undermined.
In the play, market rules permeate interpersonal value judgments, and market value gradually replaces the value of intrinsic virtue, causing the traditional social order to fluctuate. In the Greek camp, Ulysses explains to Agamemnon the reasons for the failure to capture Troy, remarking on the nature of order: The specialty of rule hath been neglected; / ... Look, how many Grecian tents do stand / Hollow upon this plain, so many factions. ... Degrees being vizarded, / The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. ... Degree being vizarded, / The ladder to all high designs, is shaken! (I.iii.78–80, 83–84, 101–103)
The crisis of order is given dramatic treatment in the play, and the disorder is inextricably linked to the widespread application of market rules. The Greeks assigned the hero Achilles an extremely high market status due to his scarcity and preciousness. In the war market: "The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns / The sinew and the forehand of our host, / Having his ear full of his airy fame, / Grows dainty of his worth" (I.iii.142–145). Placing Achilles in a position of excessive market value shaken the order of the Greek camp to a certain extent; "many are infect" by his example (I.iii.185), and this disorder affected the progress of the war against Troy. Heroic figures, traditionally recognized as noble or possessing virtuous conduct in a moral sense, now find themselves caught in a contradictory morality conflicting with the concept of honor under market conditions; the concepts of nobility and honor are based entirely on economic value in the market. [21] When Hector issues a challenge to the Greeks, Ulysses, considering the overall interest of the Greeks, chooses to actively employ market rules to counter the market forces causing the crisis of order. Submitting to the market, he inflates Ajax’s market value and nominates him to fight first, arguing: "it is as lawful / For us, as for a merchant, to show / Our foulest wares, and think perchance they’ll sell; / If not, the lustre of the better shall exceed" (I.iii.358–361). In the face of Ulysses' merchant-like behavior, the Greek hero Achilles questions his own honor and personal value, reflecting how—when market forces penetrate interpersonal value judgments—traditional understandings of intrinsic value are gradually dismantled and aristocratic supremacism is further shaken, [22] manifesting the playwright’s anxiety regarding the effect of market value on social order.
In commodity transactions, people’s subjective value judgments of goods exhibit a certain negotiability. In the early modern period, almost all buying and selling was conducted through negotiation to agree on price, payment methods, and dates. [23] Buyers and sellers proposing higher or lower prices for goods not only demonstrated a pursuit of personal interest but were also described by early moderns as a process of "bargaining" that infinitely approached a "just price." [24] In the mid-17th century, Samuel Pepys, the Administrator of the Navy, noted that except for nobles and persons of renown, people even bargained for meat in a tavern. [25] Malynes, in Lex Mercatoria, explored the act of commodity bargaining, arguing that under conditions of good order and truth, buyers and sellers assess the value of goods based on mutual will, demonstrating a degree of equality and justice. [26] Subjective judgments of commodity value are built on a foundation of "common estimation," where both parties to a transaction negotiate to determine the just price of the commodity, ensuring a fair exchange. The play also depicts commodity bargaining in different markets. Cressida’s father, Calchas, abandons everything he has in Troy and sells his talents as a commodity to the Greeks; the Greeks, as buyers, once attempted to exchange important prisoners of war with the Trojans to bring Cressida to Greece as a reward for Calchas. "I have at times derived some benefit from you" (III.iii.20 [sic]), showing that the seller Calchas and the Greek buyers reached a consensus on the common estimation of Calchas’s commodity value. Cressida being sent to Greece becomes the "just price" for the deal reached between Calchas and the Greeks. In the prisoner-of-war market between the two cities, the Greeks had tried to exchange ordinary prisoners for Cressida, but were rejected by the Trojans. Following Calchas’s reminder, the Greeks recognized the importance of the new prisoner Antenor to Troy: "for him / The Trojans say they'll give a prince of blood, / A son of Priam" (III.iii.26–28). Therefore, they use Antenor to exchange for Cressida. The Greeks and Trojans reach an agreement on determining the value of Cressida and Antenor, completing a seemingly harmonious exchange.
Subjective value judgments under the influence of the market also expose a degree of deceptiveness. Under the dominance of market forces, Ulysses in the play "acts like a merchant," using commercial language to mislead the value judgments of Ajax and Achilles; people are also easily lured and defrauded by other merchants. The Trojan Paris asks the Greek Diomedes, "Who, in your thoughts, merits fair Helen best, / Myself or Menelaus?" (IV.i.55). Diomedes, seemingly in order to lead the Trojans to abandon Helen, consistently disparages her value, claiming her "soilature" (IV.i.58) and comparing her to "the lees and dregs of a flat tamed piece" (IV.i.64). Paris immediately sees through Diomedes’s commercial calculation: "You do as chapmen do, / Dispraise the thing that you desire to buy" (IV.i.77–78). The devaluation of Helen's female value is closely related to the roots of patriarchal culture and androcentrism that dominated the early modern period. However, from a market perspective, in the confrontation between Troy and the Greeks, it appears that material wealth is condensed within the commodity of Helen; both sides make value judgments regarding Helen for personal or national economic interests, and the superficial negotiability conceals an inherent deceptiveness. Commercial fraud was rampant in medieval England; parliamentary rolls, local court records, chronicles, Lenten confession manuals, and various types of literature all recorded a series of commercial frauds. [27] By the Renaissance, although legislation to curb commercial fraud was widely practiced in England and the general legitimacy of seeking wealth through moderate commerce had fostered a new positive attitude toward business, theologians still believed that the pursuit of profit and commercial activity were dangerous to both morality and religion. [28] Even in the Stuart dynasty, James I would complain about the "deceitful crafts" of merchants: "the Merchants... rich in the loss of all the rest of the people, they buy from us our worst commodities, and sell them at the highest price... their wicked custom remains consistent as if it had become the law they observe." [29] Shakespeare seems to use the mouth of the Greek Thersites to hit the nail on the head regarding the core of the play: "Lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion: a burning devil take them!" (V.ii.194 [sic]; author refers to II.iii.70–72).
Commodity value determined by market conditions gradually replaced the "just price." In the play, "to revenge the Greeks' taking of our aunt" (II.ii.77), the Trojans require Helen, whose beauty "the world's large spaces cannot parallel." According to "nature's law" and "the law of nations" (II.ii.176 [sic]; II.ii.184–185), "to return the wife to the husband" is "a law in each well-ordered nation" (II.ii.175, 184). The Greeks similarly require the return of Helen. Helen undergoes commodification; her unique and scarce condition in the market, combined with the high demand for her, establishes for Helen a high market value, leading directly to the two countries continuing a war for seven long years. When the Trojan royalty discusses whether Helen's value is worth their continued combat, Hector initially recognizes clearly that "she is not worth what she doth cost / The keeping" (II.ii.51–52), yet finally makes a sudden turn: "I propound to you / ... help to keep Helen, for ’tis a cause that hath / No mean dependence upon our joint and several dignities" (II.ii.191–193). The Trojans accept Helen’s market value and choose to continue fighting; in reality, they inflate Helen's value, plunging Troy into a war crisis of immense consumption. Aristotle believed that justice was a state of mind that enabled one to act correctly. He applied justice to exchange, laying the conceptual foundation for the "just price." [30] The concept of "just price" was crucial to early modern market equilibrium, as it limited individual interest to maintain the overall interest of society. However, under the pressure of the rapid increase in free market activities, individual profit motives became stronger, and commodity value was increasingly determined by market conditions such as subjective judgment and supply and demand; scholars also increasingly accepted the current market value of a commodity as its "just price." [31] In the play, the Trojans choose the market value of Helen—exaggerated by "merchants"—and insist on continuing the war. The result is of no benefit to the Trojan public interest and satisfies only the personal interest of Paris, undoubtedly reflecting early modern questioning and unease regarding the justice and rationality of commodity market value.
The play uses characters as metaphors for debased currency, revealing the anxiety of early moderns regarding the external value of commodities. In Act I, set within the Greek camp, Agamemnon looks back on seven years of the siege of Troy that failed to fulfill its design, mocking the princes by stating that "the fineness of metal is not found / In Fortune's love" (I. iii. 21-23). The playwright employs the language of monetary value—"fineness of metal"—to express human personal qualities, establishing a connection between human value and monetary value. In Act II, as the Greek Thersites contemplates words with which to insult others, he attempts to compare another Greek to a "silvered copper" (II. iii. 25). Debased or counterfeit currency seems to denote inferior character; thus, concerns over monetary value are inextricably linked to concerns over human value. By using the language of monetary value to describe the discrepancy between its intrinsic and extrinsic worth, the playwright expresses the uneven quality of human character. The debasement of currency during the Tudor period [32] forced the English people to accept commodity transactions based on the face value of the currency, causing its intrinsic precious metal value to slide gradually toward extrinsic value. The public was also compelled to accept debased "bad money," otherwise they would face a domestic shortage in the money supply, while simultaneously sowing hidden dangers that threatened the nation's reputation. When English merchants used debased currency to trade in international commodity markets, the mercantilist Thomas Smith, in A Discourse on the Commonwealth of this Realm of England (1549), mentioned a real situation that could not be ignored: "since our coin is base and has changed its appearance, foreigners have counterfeited our coin and found ways to transport vast amounts of counterfeit money here to dispose of it, exchanging it for our gold and silver and for our principal commodities... If left to develop freely, it might in a short time bring very serious disturbance to His Majesty and this realm." The inconsistency or large gap between the intrinsic and extrinsic value of money provided space for foreign merchants to manipulate value; English commercial interests suffered great damage, and the people's anxiety over external value became evident.
Fluctuations in international currency market prices threatened national security, and the elite felt a deep sense of unease regarding value in the exchange markets. Based on the analogy between female characters and currency in the play, the circulation and exchange of Helen and Cressida between the two cities of Troy and Greece bear a certain similarity to the foreign exchange in early modern international currency markets. The vacillation in the value judgments of Helen and Cressida affects the state of the war between Troy and Greece, seemingly echoing the social reality in which fluctuations in foreign exchange rates affected national security. In 1566, the Royal Exchange, designed by Sir Thomas Gresham, was officially completed. It served as a place for foreign merchants in London to exchange currency and news, a shopping center where luxury and imported goods could be purchased, and featured open-air stalls for selling domestic (cultural) commodities such as books and pamphlets. The Royal Exchange was a symbol of the new relationship between politics and culture in early modern London and a center for commodity agents; by regulating domestic and international commercial relations, it embodied the importance of trade to the political stability of the state. Queen Elizabeth I once commissioned Sir Thomas Gresham and other close advisors to consult on issues of coinage, trade, and imports/exports. For the purpose of maintaining national stability, Gresham suggested to the Queen in the Memorandum for the Understanding of the Exchange (1578) that when the value of English currency fluctuated on the exchange market, imports should be reduced to restore its value overseas. By the early 17th century, due to the debasement of English currency on the exchange market, the gold-to-silver ratio of the currency differed from that of other countries, making it impossible to exchange currency at an equal precious metal value. Furthermore, Malynes observed that greedy foreign merchants and bankers had manipulated the market value (exchange rate) of currency according to market conditions such as the abundance or scarcity of money and different times and places. Unbalanced exchange rates would incline merchants to buy foreign goods rather than domestic ones, thereby leading to a decline in domestic employment and damage to the balance of trade. Therefore, to protect national commercial interests, Malynes reiterated the importance of the Royal Exchange in conducting foreign exchange controls.
Conclusion
To be sure, the characters in the play fall into crisis due to the influence of multiple factors, including patriarchal culture, moral ethics, and the market economy. However, it is noteworthy that relying on market logic to perform interpersonal value judgments is one of the key factors inducing social turmoil in the play. Through this, the playwright seems to imply the necessity of governmental regulatory functions during the mercantilist period. Renaissance literature frequently involved the phenomenon of the principles of commodity exchange penetrating the sphere of social relations. In Troilus and Cressida, the primary female characters, due to their inherent fluidity and instability and their subsequent commodification, become associated with the dual-identity currency of the early modern period. Helen and Cressida are like commodified precious currency; the debates regarding their value echo early modern disputes over monetary (commodity) value, oscillating between their own intrinsic value and the subjective value judgments of the royalty, and exhibiting a shift toward market value based on scarcity or supply-and-demand relationships. However, the Trojans' disregard for Helen’s intrinsic value and their persistent adherence to external value judgments based on market conditions led to the fall of Troy, appearing to allude to a chaotic market order lacking state regulation in reality. The marketization and subjectivity of value judgment manifested in the play align with the society described by Hobbes in Leviathan: Hobbes argues that a person’s value is not absolute but is manifested as the price others pay to use their rights, depending on another’s needs and subjective judgment. To control this subjectivity, Hobbes emphasized that individuals should submit to the monarch, that patriarchal society should support state authority, and that the state should strengthen its control over other sources of value such as religion and education.
Raymond Williams pointed out that in modern society, the value of commodities (culture) is "governed by a variety of interests, including class interests." The cultural critic John Storey found that if a text satisfies the needs and desires of those with cultural power, it will persist "through the test of time," and even that "the text is never really the source of value, but only the site where value construction occurs," while cultural symbols in postmodern society have also clearly become the decisive factors of commodity value. Clearly, external value increasingly affects people's lives, culture, and art today; the shift toward external value for women, commodities, and currency shown in early modern drama seems to interpret this truth with foresight. While a Trojan royal government exists in Troilus and Cressida, it does not manifest the government's regulatory function over market value, which appears to be the breakthrough point for resolving the external value anxiety of the playwright and his contemporaries. In fact, when merchant-writers of this period spoke of the relationship between the monarch and market transactions, they believed on one hand that the unequal status between the monarch and subjects was a necessary condition for maintaining just value judgments in commerce, yet on the other hand, they revealed concerns that the monarch might be subject to greater commercial forces. By the mid-17th century, Thomas Mun clearly recognized that the monarch, like the subjects, was powerless to overcome the market forces that determined value.