How did early modern English drama conceptualize the risks and opportunities of global commerce and the shifting nature of fortune? Jane Hwang Degenhardt, an associate professor of English, examines how playwrights utilized the concept of 'fortune' to navigate the anxieties surrounding the expansion of trade, colonial ventures, and the instability of wealth in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By analyzing a variety of plays, she argues that the stage served as a critical site for debating the moral and economic implications of a rapidly globalizing world.

Scholars in the field of early modern studies recognize this work as a significant contribution to the understanding of how economic anxieties were mediated through dramatic form. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose and the depth of the historical research provided by the author.