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

Shakespeare's Twenty-First-Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money. By Frederick Turner. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 223. $35.00 cloth.

In their brief and helpful "Book-Review Guidelines," the editors of Shakespeare Quarterlyask reviewers to remember their "comparatively varied readership--scholars and critics constitute the majority, of course, but there are also . . . men and women in such professions as law, medicine, and business." I mention this because, at the very start of Shakepeare's Twenty-First-Century Economics,Frederick Turner explains that "this book is not aimed primarily at professional Shakespeare scholars. . . . [but] is intended for intelligent people in all walks of life who feel the need for a deeper consideration of their lives as economic beings; for people morally perplexed in personal relationships involving money; for the broad public; . . . and for people in the new disciplines of business administration, management, and information science, whose job it is to think about how we will conduct our financial and personal affairs in the future" (vi). For this audience, Turner urges, indeed for anyone interested in questions having to do with value, Shakespeare is an indispensable vade mecum.

Turner would have it that William Shakespeare was "perhaps thekey figure . . . in creating that Renaissance system of meanings, values, and implicit rules that eventually gave rise to the modern world market and that still underpin it" (11). This is decidedly not meant to be one of those finger-pointing arguments that Shakespeare was either complicit in, or instrumental to, the dismaying hegemony of capitalism. To the contrary, Turner proceeds triumphantly from the assumption that "since the collapse of socialism it has become clear that we shall be living with the free market for the foreseeable future" (11). Shakespeare, the market's progenitor, foresaw "capitalism with a human face" (11) and understood that "the market is a garden" (13)--that "money is practical quantified objectified love" (10)--hence the Bard now may serve as our "Guide to the Market" (10). For our part, it is time we admitted that we "would certainly prefer being a victim of corporate downsizing to being a victim of tribal, national, religious, or ideological downsizing" (6) in Rwanda, Nigeria, Kashmir, Bosnia, or the Middle East. It still is not too late for us to "concede, as we mustthat no other form of human organization than a community of profit-seeking businesses can provide so many material benefits and protect us from so many dangers and threats" (7, emphasis added). Enough with those who, like Buddha or St. Francis, Van Gogh or Thoreau, prove their integrity by "starving in a garret"; it is time to heed "such wealthy artists as Virgil, Raphael, Verdi, Goethe--or Shakespeare" (7).

Frederick Turner's Shakespeare emerges as a champion pitted against those "who in the Marxist tradition persist in seeing the market as impersonal and merciless" (14) and against those who fail to see that "trading partners, participants in auctions, and financial wheeler-dealers . . . operate on a system of mutual personal trust, reciprocity, empathy, and respect" (9-10). The specter here includes such "fashionable thinkers" as "Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, Benjamin, and Derrida" and "such gatherings as the Modern Language Association" (39). It is not enough to imagine Shakespeare as a gifted young lad who came up to London and found a creative and lucrative niche for himself in the midst of an incipient capitalist economy. A "transcendent genius in his own right" (17), Turner's Shakespeare offers proof that "where poets blaze the trail, economists and business people can follow" (11). Where business people in turn take the lead, "democratic politics" will follow (14). This unabashedly presentist account of the Shakespearean canon is founded on a conviction that "reading Shakespeare we become aware that our problems are not new" (20), that "Shakespeare's reasoning endorses the control and readaptation of natural processes for human purposes...