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

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 1999 - 223 pages
"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.
 

Contents

Understanding Money
3
How Human Economics Grows Out of Natural Increase
15
The Love Bond and the Meaning of the Zero
33
How Bonds Connect People and Property Souls and Bodies
51
Why Justice Must Be Lubricated with Mercy
75
How Does One Stamp a Value on a Coin and Make It Stick?
93
Debt Time and the Parable of the Talents
117
Why Creation Enters into Bonds
139
The Economics of Resurrection
175
Shakespeare and the Economic Future
193
Further Reading
213
Index
217
Copyright

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About the author (1999)

Frederick Turner is at University of Texas at Dallas.

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