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

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Oxford University Press, Sep 23, 1999 - Literary Criticism - 232 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.

From inside the book

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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Page 56 - The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.
Page 26 - And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion...
Page 65 - You have among you many a purchased slave, Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules, You use in abject and in slavish parts, Because you bought them...
Page 156 - Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were love-sick with them...
Page 125 - But all things that are reproved, are made manifest, by the light : for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.
Page 97 - Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander every where, Swifter than the moon's sphere ; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green.
Page 53 - That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat. Of habits devil, is angel yet in this, That to the use of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery. That aptly is put on.
Page 149 - Never ; he will not : Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety : other women cloy The appetites they feed : but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies : for vilest things Become themselves in her; that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish.
Page 77 - Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes The throned monarch better than his crown. His scepter shows the force of temporal power, The attribute to awe and majesty, Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; But mercy is above this scept'red sway; It is enthroned in the hearts of kings; It is an attribute to God himself, And earthly power doth then show likest God's When mercy seasons justice.
Page 21 - Which does mend nature, — change it rather; but The art itself is nature.

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