> I'm agreeing. Ted says Shakespeare understood money very well.
> That's no doubt true. But Shakespeare is as good now as he was 400
> years ago not because he tells us a lot about his own time but
> because he is "bottomless",as a book I've been reading recently
> describes it. You can keep going back to the well and finding new
> things that are more than just information about money and
> humankind, although that is there of course.
>
> I read one of Marx's kids saying she could recite from Shakespeare
> when she was six because her father placed such an emphasis on its
> importance. I don't think Marx read him only to find his thoughts on
> money or the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
I quoted Marx saying that.
Shakespeare on "money" - on "avarice" - is "universal"; as is, so Marx claims, Balzac.
Such "universality" is his genius.
Marx "appropriates" Greek drama in the same way:
"Philosophy, as long as a drop of blood shall pulse in its world- subduing and absolutely free heart, will never grow tired of answering its adversaries with the cry of Epicurus:
'Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is truly impious.'[19]
"Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus:
'In simple words, I hate the pack of gods' [Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound]
is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other beside.
"But to those poor March hares who rejoice over the apparently worsened civil position of philosophy, it responds again, as Prometheus replied to the servant of the gods, Hermes:
Be sure of this, I would not change my state Of evil fortune for your servitude. Better to be the servant of this rock Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus. (Ibid.)
"Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/foreword.htm
As I've pointed out before, Keynes, who "appropriates" literature in the same way (as, e.g., in his quotation of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound in The Economic Consequences of the Peace), makes this the basis of a similar judgment of Ibsen.
In an unsigned introduction to the program for a series of four Ibsen plays staged at the Cambridge Arts Theatre to mark its opening in February 1936, having referred to Ibsen’s "reputation as the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century", he claims that, "as is usually the case with the greatest plays," these four "can be understood and enjoyed, and are indeed in a sense complete, from several distinct aspects and on planes of varying depth below the surface." (Collected Writings, vol. XXVIII, pp. 326-7)
At the deepest level
"they can be seen sub specie eternitatis, remote from contemporary moods and problems, as tragedies of character, exploring the depths and often the crannies of human motive with the imagination of a poet and the insight of a novelist. If the plays have sometimes been felt to be painful, it is because Ibsen can penetrate too deeply into regions which we prefer to keep concealed even from ourselves." (pp. 326-7)
In The General Theory, he quotes The Wild Duck as insightful about the roots of Hayek's money crankery.
Ted