[lbo-talk] th’ expectation of plenty

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Tue Aug 2 04:42:54 PDT 2011


I was watching Macbeth and this line, "Here's a farmer that hanged himself on th' expectation of plenty" prompted me to google "shakespeare capitalism"

And here's an interesting result. How many writings in the past 20 years have included a variation of this money shot?

'The collapse of communism has discredited Marxist theory"

<http://reason.com/archives/2000/03/01/capitalisms-poet-laureate>http://reason.com/archives/2000/03/01/capitalisms-poet-laureate

Reason Magazine

Paul A. Cantor from the March 2000 issue

Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money, by Frederick Turner, New York: Oxford University Press, 223 pages, $35.00

Marxist scholars have been arguing for years that Shakespeare was a creature of the Elizabethan marketplace, but Hollywood and movie audiences everywhere finally got the message in 1998 with the success of Shakespeare in Love. That immensely popular film suggested that the imaginative energy of Shakespeare's plays somehow fed off the new economic energy of the bustling Elizabethan commercial theaters. Except for box office concerns, the movie might just as well have been titled Shakespeare in Debt, since it portrays a harried author driven by financial necessities to create a masterpiece like Romeo and Juliet.

The critics who first made the connection between Shakespeare and capitalism were looking to take Shakespeare down a peg or two, but the unintended result has been to elevate capitalism. The Marxists sought to debunk the myth of Shakespeare as an individual genius by showing that he was part of a market system, collaborating with producers, directors, actors, and others in what amounted to a communal effort. But in stressing the commercial origins of Shakespeare's art, these critics undermined the longstanding Marxist prejudice that capitalism is the enemy of culture.

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