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

"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.

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.

Library Journal

Mixing criticism, economics, and self-help, Turner (English, Univ. of Texas, Dallas) proposes that an examination of Shakespeare's plays will provide us with a wiser and more complex view of the economic bonds that form the basis of human relationships. He sees Shakespeare as a forefather of a line of thinkers who espoused ideas we may not presently be comfortable with (e.g., that the establishment of just government is fundamentally a matter of property rights and only secondarily one of political or even human rights) but that have been reinforced by recent world events. Whereas many recent 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. While some assumptions and a lack of scholarly detail may prove frustrating, readers will certainly find food for thought in this otherwise gracefully presented text. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries.--Karen E. Sadowski, Norwood, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

"In this book, Frederick Turner argues that we need a new, humane, evolutionary economics - a capitalism with a human face - that fully expresses the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic relationships among persons and things. As Turner demonstrates, that new economy was envisaged centuries ago in poetic terms by William Shakespeare." "If we should revise our old, heartless notions of economics, Turner asks, must we find a new language for it? The answer, as Shakespeare shows, is no. Buried within our apparently cold language of finance and business are living meanings. Such words as "bond," "trust," "good," "save," "value," "means," "redeem," "dear," "interest," "honor," "company," "worth," "thrift," "use," "will," "partner," "deed," "fair," "owe," "ought," "treasure," "risk," "royalty," and "venture" contain a pattern of moral obligations and social emotions. Personal bonds and hard-headed business transactions need not occupy separate worlds; we forget at our peril that a nation is also a commonwealth." "Using close readings of the Sonnets, The Winter's Tale, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra, Turner provides a lexicon of common words and a variety of familial and cultural situations in an economic context."--Jacket Making constant recourse to well-known material from Shakespeare's plays, this text demonstrates that terms of money and value permeate our minds and lives even in our most mundane moments