Capitalists in all Heywood plays analyzed here, but especially in the second part of IYK, have apparently been, as we have seen, idealized: Bess Bridges as the girl in a tavern transformed into a wealthy international merchant, then married into the nobility; Sir Thomas Gresham as successful Elizabethan international businessman, the idealized citizen, philantropist and capitalist merchant prince.
But it is probably the figure of Sir Thomas Gresham that introduces a clearest interrogation on capitalism as the alleged unconflictive defining feature of Early Modern identity.
The character of Sir Thomas Gresham embodies well these contradictions: when compelled to pay a tribute to the most prominent representative of the new capitalist episteme, Heywood can only produce a conflictive character, halfway between feudal society and new economic relations, simultaneously exemplifying and rejecting capitalism, embodying residual and emergent elements of the new economy.
China's Shanxi Province killed an estimated 830,000 people; 1571: The Royal Exchange founded by financier
Sir Thomas Gresham was opened by Elizabeth 1; 1832: Birth of French impressionist Edouard Manet; 1849: English-born Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from a New York medical school to become the first female doctor; 1898: Birth of Soviet film director Sergei Esenstein; 1931: Death of Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova; 1989: Death of Spanish painter Salvador Dali.