ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book examines how a range of literary forms responded to economic, political, and religious changes between 1580 and 1630. The particular economic languages and arguments of a range of genres situated literature more clearly within a society in flux, registering the significance of economic praxis to literary history. Jonsons court masques draw on the power of poetry to transform the world by representing it in new ways. Working with Inigo Jones, he reshaped the genre to express the magnificence of monarchy while also maintaining a certain ideological flexibility. The tumult of Civil War and the establishment of a Protectorate in England helped produce new awareness of the significance of trade for political power, a belief that underpinned an emergent English empire. Denham identifies commerce rather than georgic labor which the poem elsewhere invokes as the source of national prosperity.
