“Dead for a Ducat”: Tragedy and Marginal Risk

Abstract

In Shakespeare’s London, it was increasingly apparent that the circulation of abstract capital and its transformative powers could create stark disparities of wealth and poverty. Meanwhile, the theater of tragedy emerged as a place where people could go to pay to watch other people in pain. The theater was a little globe, and one way to understand its relation to the broader world and economy is that the theater enacted something like what would later become the stock market, where a group of people (the audience) invest in tradable shares (staged affect), and then hope to gain (aesthetically/psychologically/morally) in part because others (the audience) make a similar investment, and thereby raise the value of the product (the play). Recent work has highlighted the rich and multifaceted links that can be drawn between economic theory and theatrical gains.¹ In the broader economic market, the gain of the winners seems unequivocally good if and only if the necessary by-product of abstract capitalism, extreme poverty, is concealed. Shakespeare’s tragic theater offers us a return on our investment: we pay an entrance fee, we receive artistic and perhaps even Aristotelian² edification. In my terms, financial tragedy is a theatrical performance of tragic loss that functions as a commercial event, in which a particular exchange of real and symbolic goods is made.