Course description

In reading Medieval Italian literature, I have been puzzled by the hostility of writers toward businessmen, given that a robust business climate was necessary for the flourishing of art, architecture, and literature in 14th- and 15th-century Europe. Through works of drama, poetry, prose, and film, this course examines shifting views on business and capitalism in readings that also include works by Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Arthur Miller.

Books and plays

by Giovanni Boccaccio

Set during the Black Death in 1348, The Decameron is a collection of 100 tales, told over the course of 10 days by seven young women and three young men sheltering outside the plague-ravaged city of Florence. Plague is the metaphor for fallen mankind, and during their fortnight away the young band—the “brigata”—model an ideal society: Days are dedicated to singing, dancing, and telling stories, which are, by turns, bawdy, comical, violent, and sentimental. With the merchant class in ascendance in Florence, men of business figure frequently in the stories, depicted as impetuous, gullible, greedy social climbers. On day seven, Filomena describes the foibles of a “very rich merchant called Arriguccio Berlinghieri, who, like many of his counterparts of the present day, foolishly decided to marry into the aristocracy.” His mother-in-law derides his ilk as “country yokels.” “No sooner do they get a few pence in their pockets,” she says, than they “devise a coat of arms for themselves, and go about saying, ‘I belong to such-and-such a family’ and ‘my people did so-and-so.'” The Decameron accrues meaning gradually, and, recognizing that merchants were the future lords of the city, Boccaccio dedicates the final day’s tales—of discerning bourgeois gentleman Ser Torello, for example—to the princely virtue of largesse and to stories about generosity of spirit and purse. A fledgling, fictional precursor of the Medici, Ser Torello finds his hospitality toward three strangers repaid in dazzling fashion. Consider this a lesson, the author seems to suggest.

by Honoré de Balzac

This novella, one of the earliest in Balzac’s multi-volume Human Comedy, is the tragic tale of Augustine, the beautiful and naive daughter of a wealthy Parisian cloth merchant. “Brought up to a commercial life, accustomed to hear nothing but dreary arguments and calculations about trade,” Augustine is plucked from her bourgeois world by Théodore de Sommervieux, an aristocratic artist who is fascinated by her simple grace. Théodore paints a portrait of her that wins him vast public acclaim and Augustine’s hand in marriage. But the artist soon tires of a wife who is virtuous and unsophisticated, and Augustine, incapable of matching his fashionable indifference to such values, wastes away and dies. The ease with which a person becomes a commodity, like a piece of cloth, is at the troubling heart of this story, and, ironically, it is Augustine’s father, the cloth merchant, not the artist, who speaks the truth of this: “I am not going to be hoodwinked by the thirty thousand francs to be made by spoiling good canvas.” An aspiring yet failed businessman (publishing, printing), Balzac was well aware of the links between toil, economy, and earned wealth. To the charming artist born to riches, money is round “that it might roll” easily out of pocket. To the affluent merchant, money is flat, that he might “pile it up.” The merchant seems to have the author’s respect more than his affection.

by George Bernard Shaw

This popular play—produced on Broadway in 1915, 1928, 1956, and 1980—explores the neutral character of profit, how it can be used to good and evil ends alike. The hypocrisy of aristocrats, who will not sully themselves with talk of money, and workers who imagine themselves virtuous for being poor, is measured against the power of money as embodied by Andrew Undershaft, a self-made man and unapologetic weapons manufacturer. Lack of money, not the lack of religion, is the root of evil, according to Undershaft: “Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability, and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man’s neck but money,” he says. So, for his employees, he builds Perivale St. Andrews, a town with all the amenities for a happy, healthy, and fulfilled life, and he offers to fund the local Salvation Army, in which his daughter Barbara holds the rank of major. She decries the “the bribe of bread. . . . Let God’s work be done for its own sake.” Her father responds: “You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.”

by Garet Garrett

A paean to unbridled capitalism that is often compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957), this novel opens with an account of the historic march on Washington by Coxey’s Army of the unemployed. Jacob Coxey, a struggling Ohio quarry owner, called for government-sponsored jobs as the Panic of 1893 extended into another year. Garrett’s response to Coxey’s appeal is the tale of a fictional businessman who is more powerful (and more productive) than the government: the loner, iconoclast, and visionary Henry Galt. For Galt, the Panic represents an opportunity to build up the Great Midwestern Railroad, which John J. Valentine, a businessman born to wealth and more interested in personal profit than in capital formation, has allowed to go into receivership. Galt wrests control of the company, crushes opposition on the board, and—buying land, equipment, and failing rail lines—in time amasses a great interwoven fortune. What his critics in the business establishment, New York society, and the press consider profiteering, Galt describes as benefiting the economy: “It is my idea,” he tells a Senate investigating committee, “that the financial institutions of the country [ought] to build up great reserves of capital to be loaned out in hard times. . . . But they won’t do it by themselves, somebody has to see to it—somebody who knows not only how not to spend money when everybody is wild to buy, but how to spend it courageously when there is a surplus of things nobody else wants.” As he lies on his deathbed, Galt studies plans for his personal Manifest Destiny—a vast railway “articulating the North and South American continents.”

by Caryl Churchill

Written in response to the 1986 “Big Bang” deregulation of financial markets in London, with characters who include a Peruvian businesswoman, an importer from Ghana, and the president of Missouri Gumballs, Serious Money is a frenetic rendering, often in rhyming couplets, of private and corporate greed. Intertwined are two plots: In one, Scilla Todd, a financial futures and options trader in London, sets out to discover the cause of the death of her twin brother Jake, but upon learning he was making vast sums from insider trading, she moves to insinuate herself into business with Marylou Bains, the American arbitrager to whom Jake was selling information. Bains is Henry Galt turned cynical and Andrew Undershaft turned self-serving: “By buying and selling large amounts of stock we ensure the market’s liquidity— / I work twenty-four hour days and take pills for stomach acidity— / So companies can be taken over easy, / Which means discharging superfluous workers, discontinuing unprofitable lines, the kind of stuff that makes your lazy inefficient management queasy.” In a subplot, the corporate raider Billy Corman is priming the market for a hostile takeover of the biscuit company Albion, as government ministers and an international assortment of shysters nose around the deal, looking for their cut. Both plots are unfinished, much like the story of deregulation that the playwright captures. The play was revived off-Broadway in 2012.

by Mohsin Hamid

Presented as a self-help manual, with chapters such as “Get an Education,” “Dance with Debt,” and “Learn from a Master,” this buoyant novel traces the life of a nameless individual—”you”—ostensibly intent on one thing: getting rich. Born in a village, he moves to a city, also anonymous, its streets a “a ribbon of convenience stores, auto garages, scrap-metal dealers, unregistered educational institutes, fly-by-night dental clinics, and mobile-phone top-up and repair points.” By luck, wits, and a willingness to be as corrupt as the next person, the man becomes wealthy, yet he remains attuned to the strivers all around him: “You ride home alone, in the rear of your limousine. . . . You see a man on a motorcycle bearing also his wife and children turn off his engine as he waits for the signal to change.” Resilient, aspiring, rough around the edges, the poor man is ever present in the businessman, and we discover with him that there is more than one way to be rich. “Slough off your wealth, like an animal molting in the autumn,” the narrator instructs. “Having less means having less to anesthetize you to your life.”

Associate professor of Italian Laurie Shepard is the author of Courting Power: Persuasion and Politics in the Early 13th Century (1999).