Market and theater. What different meanings these two words evoke. One word summons up ancient images of stalls, scales, and ledger books, of raucous hucksters and sober, black-coated clerks. The other conjures up a magical world of sets, costumes, and greasepaint, of gallant heroes, scheming villains, and clowns in motley. Markets we are accustomed to think of as meeting every sort of material need. Theaters we associate with more symbolic, less tangible human longings. Commerce involves risk and therefore prizes the clear and specific assignment of liability. Comedies, by contrast, glory in their avowed inconsequentiality as they do in the immunities that innocuousness invites. Theatricality is to the serious person of business what commerciality is to the serious person of the theater: a threat to the foundation of trust on which each enterprise stands. From this perspective, the two figures appear to inhabit entirely different, if not wholly contradictory, realms. Reality and fiction. Materialism and symbolism. Necessity and freedom. Work and play. What are these terms but variants of the pairing of market and theater? And how else to think of them except as worlds apart?

One of my purposes in this book is to answer that question. Yet the answer I offer is an admittedly equivocal one in that it both denies and affirms this image of separate worlds. On the one hand, I want to show that the themes of commerciality and theatricality have actually sustained a long, intimate, and complex relationship in Anglo-American thought; on the other hand, I believe that people brought and, in a sense, thought these two themes together precisely because they experienced their markets and their stage as distinct and different universes.