| Sumario: | In the comedy Mother Bombie (c. 1589), John Lyly presents a highly verbal conception of human wit as a key element of emergent capitalism, presents it as inconsistent with the inheritance framework underlying Elizabethan society, and yet tries to imagine society adapting to the rising importance of this human capital without completely sacrificing its longstanding model of socioeconomic stratification. Mother Bombie addresses the stress that non-heritable human capital (i.e. wit, for Lyly) was increasingly placing on a socioeconomic structure reliant on primogeniture, and then attempts to alleviate this stress. The play makes this latter move by reframing mental (dis)ability as the determining factor for class, rather than the reverse. By reconceptualizing wit as human capital rather than hereditary symbolic capital, Lyly shores up defined social categories by preserving wit as a classed attribute with which the societal ingroup can define itself against the witless outgroup of an "idiot" underclass. Instead of making the inarticulate foolish characters at the center of the action or their dysfluency completely disappear by the end of the play, Lyly has the play end with them becoming highly legible as dysfluent fools.
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