Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative: "What's aught but as 'tis valued?" (review)

Both Shakespeare and Milton were the sons of moneylenders. Indeed, both poets practiced moneylending themselves. They were able to manipulate the new, little-understood force of autonomous financial value, and they became skilled at exploiting the power of money to reproduce. In short, they were usurers born and bred, and no doubt their facility in cultivating financial value was related to their verbal dexterity. They are the most famous poets of the capitalist era because they understood capitalism. More pertinently, they understood capitalism's implications for semiotics as a whole. Their work is capitalist in form, even when it is anticapitalist in content, for they use language as they used money: as a self-generating, self-referential system of endlessly fascinating, endlessly malleable significance. We must bear in mind, however, that the society in which they lived regarded capitalism in general, and usury in particular, as the work of Satan. Reading their observations on economic affairs, we will discern a frustrating but fruitful source of contradiction in their work.

The ethical status of exchange value is the subject of copious debate in Shakespeare's plays, as it presumably was in his life. Milton was certainly troubled by the ethics of usury, although he never stopped practicing it. That these poets engaged in avant-garde, and morally disreputable, financial practices does not necessarily mean that they approved of them. It was impossible to avoid some involvement with usury in early modern London. The economy was monetarizing rapidly, yet physical cash was in short supply. Small-scale transactions tended to be mediated through credit, not coins. Virtually everyone was compelled to practice usury, in spite of the ancient ethical strictures that remained in force against it. Polonius's warning to Laertes, "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" (Hamlet, 1.3.75),¹ was highly topical but impossible to obey. But this contradiction would not have presented a problem to a mind trained in Protestant Christianity. In the Pauline reading of the Decalogue, we are forbidden to do what we must do and condemned for doing what is natural to us. It should not surprise us to find practicing usurers repelled by usury in theory, any more that it would to find a compulsive gambler opposed to gambling in principle.

Peter F. Grav's first book establishes the influence of such intriguing economic ambivalences on Shakespeare's thought. As today's financial system grows more abstract and as money's true nature as a performative sign is revealed, literary critics are concentrating on the intersection of the semiotic and the economic. Grav carefully locates Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative within the new economic criticism, which distinguishes itself from the old, Marxist economic criticism by focusing on the system of exchange rather than production, reflecting the orientation of the Western economies since the Second World War. An exchange-based economy drives home the fact that money is a sign, rather than a substantive thing. An economy based on self-generating signs has copious implications for literary theory. In the 1980s, the work of Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux laid much of the theoretical groundwork for the new economic criticism, and a younger generation of critics is now putting their insights into practice, using them to analyze the key texts of the literary canon. This book is a worthy contribution to that effort.

Some of the new economic critics differ from their Marxist forebears in another important regard: they lack an ethical critique of capitalism. In Marxism, that critique is based on the labor theory of value and thus on class conflict. The ethical problem with capitalism is that the proletariat is systematically dispossessed of its rightful property by the bourgeoisie. But such class oppositions mellowed over the second half of the twentieth century, for an exchange-based economy is less clearly divided by class than societies organized around production. It would have been...