Representing theft and other crimes against property in Renaissance dramas on Henry V and in Fielding's ""Amelia""
Description
Several Elizabethan plays on Henry V share with Fielding a marked tendency toward ambiguity and contradiction in representing crimes against property. The Henry plays, including the early anonymous Famous Victories of Henry V, the Henslow play, Sir John Oldcastle: Part I, by Munday, Drayton, et al., and Shakespeare's I & II Henry IV and Henry V alternately eulogize and proscribe theft. They consistently exploit Hal's popular characterization as a thief, while other thieves, or theft in general at times, is disallowed Fielding condemns theft in his prose tract, An Enquiry into the Late Increase of Robbers, and calls for renewed enforcement of laws protecting property. In Amelia, however, Fielding indulges Booth, a debtor, at the expense of property laws Both sets of texts valorize or excuse crimes against property; they also condemn illicit or illegal forms of exchange. My study traces these problematics, and also explores various textual mechanisms that work to efface contradictions in the texts' construction of property and their representation of exchange Certain elements in the dramas, for instance, work to contain illicit forms of exchange. In Oldcastle, certain thefts create what I call 'gift-effects.' Theft is valorized when it brings about the circulation of property as gift. Gift-effects neutralize, sanitize, or redeem illicit forms of exchange; thus, they soften, or even efface, the contradictions produced by a text that valorizes the illicit or illegal. In Amelia, a certain ethics--or a certain nostalgia associated with the gift and with patronage exchange--works to legitimize Fielding's resistance to the criminalization of debt, despite his austere legal reformism in the case of theft. Fielding may be seen both to defend and repudiate the newly emergent market culture that increasingly criminalizes debt