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Abstract Close to the time of Elizabeth’s expulsion of the Hanseatic merchants and the closing of the Steelyard (der Stahlhof) in the years 1597-98, two London plays engaged extensively with the business of trade, the merchant class, foreign merchants, and moneylending: early modern England’s first city comedy, William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, or A Woman Will Have Her Will (1598); and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (registered 22 July 1598). Whereas Haughton’s play uses foreignness, embodied in a foreign merchant, three half-English daughters, and three foreign suitors, as a means of promoting national consciousness and pride, Shakespeare indirectly uses the foreign not to unify but to reveal the divisions within England’s own economic values and culture.

Shakespeare's history plays in general, and Henry V in particular, grant a good deal of attention to Parliament. The injunction by the opening Chorus of Henry V, “Into a thousand parts divide one man,” echoes Speaker of the House Edward Coke's anecdote about the origins of a bicameral Parliament, in the course of which he recounted a knight's purported remark that “his Majestie and the lordes there every one being great persons represented but themselves, but his commons though they were inferiour men yet every one of them represented a thowsand men.”Henry V, like Shakespeare's earlier histories, explores the relationship between theatrical and parliamentary forms of representation. Recognizing the ways in which the plays both draw upon and challenge Elizabethan ideas about parliamentary representation casts new light on the relations between nobles and commoners in Shakespeare's histories.

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