With inflation in the air following a bipartisan orgy of money printing, investment flows are careening into perceived safe havens from a devalued currency, whether cyber currencies, precious metals, commodities, or others. Shakespeare saw even this, and chronicled the Elizabethan equivalent in Measure for Measure, a dark comedy ostensibly set in Vienna, but with local color clearly provided by then-present-day England.

The ban on banking that held throughout the Middle Ages was designed to enforce a static, feudal system that directed all human endeavor toward the glorification of God, and as little as possible toward material advance. Usury was legalized in Elizabethan England in 1575, as the emerging maritime power recognized that the ban on lending money at interest could no longer be sustained. The issue was still in the air in the late 1580s and 1590s, when Shakespeare was writing, and he addressed it in Measure for Measure in a speech offered by a charming lowlife character named Pompey.

Pompey: “I am as well acquainted here as I was in our house
of profession: one would think it were Mistress
Overdone’s own house, for here be many of her old
customers…”

To translate: Pompey, a bawd, or procurer of clients for a house of prostitution, finds himself in prison. Mistress Overdone was the Madame he worked for on the outside (we learn elsewhere that she had nine husbands and “’twas Overdone by the last.”) Pompey begins by marveling at how many of the prisoners were clients of Mistress Overdone. He then moves on to a Master Rash, and that’s where we get a glimpse of how the usury laws were circumvented before they were overturned.

Pompey: “…First, here’s young Master Rash; he’s in
for a commodity of brown paper and old ginger,
ninescore and seventeen pounds; of which he made
five marks, ready money: marry, then ginger was not
much in request, for the old women were all dead.”

Although the play is set in Vienna, Pompey is offering familiar English references to his Elizabethan audience in this speech, so we know that in this comic turn he is actually describing England. Master Rash borrowed money at interest from an unnamed lender. The true nature of the transaction was concealed by price abnormalities built into the contract. The lender posed as a wholesaler who advanced to Master Rash, the borrower, commodities (brown paper and old ginger) that sold at stable market prices.

The deal required Rash to pay the lender an above-market price for these goods. Rash was to sell the commodities, with the proceeds representing the true loan amount. He would invest that money in whatever his actual business was, and upon making a sufficient profit, would pay the above-market contractual price to his wholesaler/lender. The price margin above market value represented the (concealed) interest rate.

The joke was that the contracted repayment amount was not 10% or 20% above market, but was 197 pounds, when the market value of the paper and ginger was some five marks, likely around three pounds or less. Old women liked ginger, and Rash had trouble selling it to them because they were all dead. Mr. Rash, and most of the other prisoners Pompey goes on to describe, were in jail for their debts. and at the end they are crying out a customary plea for alms (“for the Lord’s sake”) to the street from their prison bars:

Pompey: “…and, I think, forty more; all great doers in
our trade, and are now ‘for the Lord’s sake.’”

We’ll see if the current degradation of our currency leads to similar human degradation in the debtors’ prison that we now all find ourselves in.

P.S. I wanted to let you all know that my recasting of Hamlet as the 2020 election is now up for sale as an e-book and paperback through this link.

‘Hamlet’s 2020 Vision; A recasting of Hamlet as the tragedy of the 2020 election,’ reimagines Hamlet as the 2020 election by substituting the main players on our national stage for the play’s original cast of characters. I think the result is a lot of fun, but it also provides surprising insights into our current predicament, and it gives readers a chance to enjoy Shakespeare’s great tragedy from an entirely new angle.