Capitalism's Poet Laureate.

• Author: Cantor, Paul A.

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.

There are signs that the academy is finally reassessing the cultural role of capitalism and overcoming its traditional contempt for money making. Literary critic Lisa Jardine has written a revisionist history of the Renaissance, Worldly Goods (1996), in which she argues that the great cultural achievements of the period were sparked by its new entrepreneurial spirit. More generally, economist Tyler Cowen argues in his book In Praise of Commercial Culture (1998) that capitalism has been the most productive cultural force in history, a claim he documents in case studies as diverse as Florentine painting, German chamber music, and the English novel. (See "Cultivating Culture," October 1998.) Now critic and poet Frederick Turner has joined the debate with his original and provocative book Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics, making analytically and seriously the point that Shakespeare in Love made intuitively and comically. Turner puts forth the audacious claim that Shakespeare was in effect the poet la ureate of capitalism.

Turner, a REASON contributing editor and a professor of arts and humanities at University of...