Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money

by Frederick Turner

Overview

"I love you according to my bond," says Cordelia to her father in King Lear. As the play turns out, Cordelia proves to be an exemplary and loving daughter. A bond is both a legal or financial obligation, and a connection of mutual love. How are these things connected? In As You Like It, Shakespeare describes marriage as a "blessed bond of board and bed": the emotional, religious, and sexual sides of marriage cannot be detached from its status as a legal and economic contract.

These examples are the pith of Frederick Turner's fascinating new book. Based on the proven maxim that "money makes the world go round," this engaging study draws from Shakespeare's texts to present a lexicon of common words, as well as a variety of familiar familial and cultural situations, in an economic context. Making constant recourse to well-known material from Shakespeare's plays, Turner demonstrates that the terms of money and value permeate our minds and lives even in our most mundane moments. His book offers a new, humane, evolutionary economics that fully expresses the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic relationships among persons, and between humans and nature. Playful and incisive, Turner's book offers a way to engage the wisdom of Shakespeare in everyday life in a trenchant prose that is accessible to lovers of Shakespeare at all levels.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195128611
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	08/28/1999
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Understanding Money
2. "Great Creating Nature": How Human Economics Grows out of Natural Increase
3. "Nothing Will Come of Nothing": The Love Bond and the Meaning of Zero
4. "My Purse, My Purse": How Bonds Connect People and Property, Souls and Bodies
5. "The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained": Why Justice Must be Lubricated with Mercy
6. "Never Call a True Piece of Gold a Counterfeit": How Does One Stamp a Value on a Coin and Make it Stick?
7. "Thou Owest God a Death": Debt, Time, and the Parable of the Talents
8. "Bounty...That Grew the More for Reaping": Why Creation Enters into Bonds
9. "Dear Life Redeems You": The Economics of Resurrection
10. "O Brave New World": Shakespeare and the Economic Failure
Bibliography (Suggestions for Further Reading)

Editorial Reviews

"Whereas many critics have attempted to fracture the myth of the all-knowing, all-wise Shakespeare, Turner argues compellingly that his work is remarkably insightful regarding 300 years of history and can be used to examine current socioeconomic issues....Readers will find food for thought in [this] gracefully presented text."—Library Journal

"[Shows] us Shakespeare [the] Jacobean 'media tycoon.' [Turner] sees [the plays] as a serial advertisement for capitalism....[An] odd, intriguing book."—he New York Observer

From the Publisher