The Language of the Emerging Financial Market and Early Eighteenth-Century English Plays

Abstract

Between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth the birth and development of a flourishing financial market provided the English stage with a variety of new characters, situations and subjects. Most of the plays were written and/or performed in 1720, when the bursting of the South Sea Bubble bit many, but a number of other works had already been composed. In spite of their different aims–some purely satirical, others more curious or documentary–they all shared the interest in the fascinating new language of the market and, in some measure, contributed to its formation and development.