Debt’s Poetry, Credit’s Fictions

Abstract

This chapter examines Timon of Athens alongside handbooks that teach readers how to interpret the fictionalized credit world that surrounds them—a world full of false surfaces, which invite misconstrual. It focuses on the portrayal of a particular hard-to-read figure: the “rich beggar,” an outwardly wealthy person whose debts invisibly outstrip his assets. While handbook authors simply warn readers against lending to such persons, Shakespeare and Middleton go further, probing the conditions that produce this paradoxical figure. Their co-authored Timon of Athens suggests that rich beggary results less from poor estate management than from the interplay of language, conduct, and interpretation. The play suggests that the fiction-making power of debt and credit extends from the individual “rich beggar” to the fabric of society. Credit here appears as an agent of universal falsification: a demiurgic power that upends hierarchies and rewrites identities.

Self-Judging Security Exception Clause as a Kind of Carte Blanche in Investment Treaties: Nature, Effect and Proper Standard of Review

“…Besides, as scholars of international law have stated, good faith has a wider realm than a subjective meaning, thus we should not limit the concept of good faith to this narrow aspect. 148 As we will explain below, the objective aspect of good faith might be more important when considering an applicable test to uphold the necessity element. Also, as we are exploring a legal test to concretize the good faith standard, taking such a subjective approach clearly cannot help achieve this purpose.…”