Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics

"e;I love you according to my bond,"e; 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 "e;blessed bond of board and bed"e;: 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 "e;money makes the world go round,"e; 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.