Early Modern Bonds of Trust: From Shakespeare to Milton (Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama)

The concepts of trust and risk provide important insights into the social and cultural life of early modern England but remain relatively unexplored in early modern literary studies.This collection addresses that gap by exploring a wide range of literary genres and texts including comic drama, lyric verse, emblem books, ledgers, wills, polemical prose and religious epic.Contributors explore issues of personal trust through the faith and lies that characterize Shakespeare’s sonnets, Donne’s sermons and Milton’s Paradise Lost.Following the idea of trust and risk into community brings us to a discussion of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the spiritual trust of faith communities and the network of relationships that are traceable though surviving records of women’s wills.Following this progression outwards from the personal to the communal, the final essays in the collection consider the role of institutional trust, specifically the early modern obsession with credit in its various guises.The