They that have power to hurt, and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others, but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself, it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
     For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
     Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.

Analysis

Sonnet 94 chides those who are beautiful but are controlled by and used for their beauty; it makes them common.

Bill muses on whom will rightly inherit heaven’s blessings and keep nature’s treasures from being wasted– it is those whose beauty gives them the power to hurt others, but do no hurt; those whose looks arouse but won’t have sex; those who tempt others but are themselves cold and difficult to tempt. People with self-control truly own their beauty; the rest merely exist for others’ use. The summer flower seems sweet to us in summer, though the flower itself may feel that it’s only living and dying. But if that flower is infected by a parasite, the weeds will be better. That which is sweet can turn sour by acting wrongly. Lilies that rot smell worse than weeds.

Will’s Wordplay

“husband” here is more a reference to maintaining land than marriage. To husband is to perform agricultural work and fits

The Latin optima corrupta pessima translates as ‘the best things, when corrupted, become the worst’. Plus another proverb which runs ‘What is sweet in the mouth is oft sour in the maw’. The latter is obviously closer to the sweet/sour contrast which Billy enjoys.

Wall Street, Manhattan

Hear the opening bell? Wall Street is in the financial district of New York City,[1] which is named after and centered on the eight-block or 0.7 miles long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial sector (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or signifying New York-based financial interests. It is the home of the New York Stock Exchange, the world’s largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies. Several other major exchanges have or had headquarters in the Wall Street area, including NASDAQ, the New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Board of Trade, and the former American Stock Exchange.

Early Years

There are varying accounts about how the Dutch-named “de Waal Straat” [2] got its name. A generally accepted version is that the name of the street was derived from an earthen wall on the northern boundary of the New Amsterdam settlement, perhaps to protect against English colonial encroachment or incursions by native Americans. A conflicting explanation is that Wall Street was named after Walloons—possibly a Dutch abbreviation for Walloon being Waal [3] Among the first settlers that embarked on the ship “Nieu Nederlandt” in 1624 were 30 Walloon families.

In the 1640s, basic picket and plank fences denoted plots and residences in the colony. Later, on behalf of the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant, using both African slaves and white colonists, collaborated with the city government in the construction of a more substantial fortification, a strengthened 12-foot wall.[4] In 1685 surveyors laid out Wall Street along the lines of the original stockade. The wall started at Pearl Street, which was the shoreline at that time, crossing the Indian path Broadway and ending at the other shoreline (today’s Trinity Place), where it took a turn south and ran along the shore until it ended at the old fort. In these early days, local merchants and traders would gather at disparate spots to buy and sell shares and bonds, and over time divided themselves into two classes—auctioneers and dealers. [5] Wall Street was also the marketplace where owners could hire out their slaves by the day or week. (The rampart was removed in 1699) On December 13, 1711, the New York City Common Council made Wall Street the city’s first official slave market for the sale and rental of enslaved Africans and Indians.

In the late 18th century, there was a buttonwood tree at the foot of Wall Street under which traders and speculators would gather to trade securities.The benefit was being in close proximity to each other. [6] In 1792, traders formalized their association with the Buttonwood Agreement which was the origin of the New York Stock Exchange. The idea of the agreement was to make the market more “structured” and “without the manipulative auctions”, with a commission structure. [5] Persons signing the agreement agreed to charge each other a standard commission rate; persons not signing could still participate but would be charged a higher commission for dealing.

In 1789, Wall Street was the scene of the United States’ first presidential inauguration when George Washington took the oath of office on the balcony of Federal Hall on April 30, 1789. This was also the location of the passing of the Bill Of Rights. In the cemetery of Trinity Church, Alexander Hamilton, who was the first Treasury secretary and “architect of the early United States financial system,” is buried.

19th Century

In the first few decades, both residences and businesses occupied the area, but increasingly business predominated. “There are old stories of people’s houses being surrounded by the clamor of business and trade and the owners complaining that they can’t get anything done,” according to a historian named Burrows.[7] The opening of the Erie Canal in the early 19th century meant a huge boom in business for New York City, since it was the only major eastern seaport which had direct access by inland waterways to ports on the Great Lakes. Wall Street became the “money capital of America”.

In the 1840s and 1850s, most residents moved north to midtown because of the increased business use at the lower tip of the island. The Civil War had the effect of causing the northern economy to boom, bringing greater prosperity to cities like New York which “came into its own as the nation’s banking center” connecting “Old World capital and New World ambition”, according to one account. [8] J. P. Morgan created giant trusts; John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil moved to New York. Between 1860 and 1920, the economy changed from “agricultural to industrial to financial” and New York maintained its leadership position despite these changes, according to historian Thomas Kessner.

In 1884, Charles H. Dow began tracking stocks, initially begHe added up prices, and divided by the number of stocks to get his Dow Jones average. Dow’s numbers were a “convenient benchmark” for analyzing the market and became an accepted way to look at the entire stock market. In 1889, the original stock report, Customers’ Afternoon Letter, became The Wall Street Journal. [9] After October 7, 1896, it began publishing Dow’s expanded list of stocks. A century later, there were 30 stocks in the average.

20th Century

The address of 23 Wall Street where the headquarters of J. P. Morgan & Company, known as The Corner, was “the precise center, geographical as well as metaphorical, of financial America and even of the financial world.’ [8]

Wall Street has had changing relationships with government authorities. In 1913, for example, when authorities proposed a $4 tax on stock transfers, stock clerks protested. At other times, city and state officials have taken steps through tax incentives to encourage financial firms to continue to do business in the city.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the corporate culture of New York was a primary center for the construction of skyscrapers, and was rivaled only by Chicago on the American continent. As a result of the construction, looking at New York City from the east, one can see two distinct clumps of tall buildings—the financial district on the left, and the taller midtown district on the right.

On September 16, 1920, close to the corner of Wall and Broad Street, the busiest corner of the financial district and across the offices of the Morgan Bank, a powerful bomb exploded. It killed 38 and seriously injured 143 people. [10] The perpetrators were never identified or apprehended. The explosion did, however, help fuel the Red Scare that was underway at the time. The area was subjected to numerous threats; one bomb threat in 1921 led to detectives sealing off the area to “prevent a repetition of the Wall Street bomb explosion.”[11]

Regulation

In October 1929 celebrated Yale economist Irving Fisher reassured worried investors that their “money was safe” on Wall Street. [12] A few days later, stock values plummeted. The stock market crash of 1929 ushered in the Great Depression in which a quarter of working people were unemployed, with soup kitchens, mass foreclosures of farms, and falling prices.During the New Deal years as well as the 1940s, there was much less focus on Wall Street and finance. The government clamped down on the practice of buying equities based only on credit, but these policies began to ease. From 1946-1947, stocks could not be purchased “on margin”, meaning that an investor had to pay 100% of a stock’s cost without taking on any loans. But this margin requirement was reduced four times before 1960, each time stimulating a mini-rally and boosting volume, and when the Federal Reserve reduced the margin requirements from 90% to 70%. [13] These changes made it somewhat easier for investors to buy stocks on credit.

Construction of the World Trade Center began in 1966 but had trouble attracting tenants when completed. Nonetheless, some substantial firms purchased space there. Its impressive height helped make it a visual landmark for drivers and pedestrians. In some respects, the nexus of the financial district moved from the street of Wall Street to the Trade Center complex. Real estate growth during the latter part of the 1990s was significant, with deals and new projects happening in the financial district and elsewhere in Manhattan; one firm invested more than $24 billion in various projects, many in the Wall Street area. In 1998, the NYSE and the city struck a $900 million deal which kept the NYSE from moving across the river to Jersey City; the deal was described as the “largest in city history to prevent a corporation from leaving town”.[14] A competitor to the NYSE, NASDAQ, moved its headquarters from Washington to New York.

References

1. Profile of Manhattan Community Board 1,
2. The street on the map of Nieuw-Amsterdam
3. “Walloons and Wallets”. the loc.gov. 2009-03
4. Timeline: A selected Wall Street chronology PBS Online.
5. Charles R. Geisst (1997). “Wall Street: a history : from its beginnings to the fall of Enron”. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511512-0.
6. Noelle Knox and Martha T. Moor (October 24, 2001). “‘Wall Street’ migrates to Midtown”. USA Today.
7. Aaron Donovan (September 9, 2001). “If You’re Thinking of Living In/The Financial District; In Wall Street’s Canyons, Cliff Dwellers”. The New York Times: Real Estate.
8. Daniel Gross (October 14, 2007). “The Capital of Capital No More?”. The New York Times: Magazine.
9. DOW JONES HISTORY – THE LATE 1800s 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
10. Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; pp. 160-161.
11. “DETECTIVES GUARD WALL ST. AGAINST NEW BOMB OUTRAGE; Entire Financial District Patrolled Following AnonymousWarning to a Broker”. The New York Times. December 19, 1921.
12. Larry Elliott (reviewer) Steve Fraser (author) (book:) Wall Street: A cultural History (by Fraser) (May 21, 2005). “Going for brokers: Steve Fraser charts the highs and the lows of the world’s financial capital in Wall Stree”. The Guardian.
13.”STOCK MARKET MARGINS: The Federal Reserve v. Wall Street”. Time Magazine. August 8, 1960.
14. Charles V. Bagli (December 23, 1998). “City and State Agree to $900 Million Deal to Keep New York Stock Exchange”. The New York Times.

ACTOR – Lily Dorment

Lily Dorment is a London-born, Brookyn-based actor and voiceover artist.
www.lilydorment.com

DIRECTOR – Sina Heiss

Sina Heiss is a theater director and performer from Austria. Her theatre work is highly physical, rhythmical, visually striking and challenges the minds of the viewers. She develops her work with an multidisciplinary, international team of artists and she likes to experiment, improvise and to cross boundaries (of any kind). Sina has worked with artists like Ivo van Hove (Toneelgroep Amsterdam), Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar (Big Dance Theatre, NYC), 600 Highwayman (NYC) and Theatre en Flammes (Lausanne, CH).
She has produced full length theatre pieces, performances and short films in Austria and the USA and toured her original work as a director and performer through Europe. In 2014, she founded the artistic collective Lonesome George with Gabrielle Sinclair and Martyna Grydlik.
Sina holds a Master degree in theatre directing from Columbia University, New York. She has studied with teachers like Anne Bogart, Robert Woodruff, Tina Landau, Brian Kulick, Norman Taylor and Keith Johnstone.