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.