From and money to and a , hatred and fear of others, our world sometimes seems to be on .
How can our society not only avert disaster, but move toward a better path forward, driven not only by money-making (the accumulation of wealth, power and status), but also by meaning-making (the search for deeper purpose for ourselves in community with others and with the natural world)?
As scholars who have respectively studied Shakespeare and health and economics — along with a team of thinkers in economics, health policy, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and a number of theatre and literary artists and humanities scholars — we’re building a project called .
Shakespeare and the arts can help researchers see the way toward new ways of thinking through , especially since the world in Shakespeare’s time, like our world now, was .
Making meaning with audiences
Why Shakespeare? In some ways, Shakespeare was the Jeff Bezos of his time.
Unlike the billionaire entrepreneur Bezos, , Shakespeare didn’t sell everything under the sun. However, like Bezos, who , Shakespeare existing stories and authored plays as a leader of the creation of a new money-making industry.
Shakespeare’s new industry was different from TV streaming in important ways. Theatre, which fosters , never operates on a one-way supplier-to-buyer axis.
Shakespeare’s theatre made money — — but his theatre always also made meaning in collaboration with its audiences, , and about and of .
Shakespeare as social entrepreneur
whose work strengthened the convergence of money-making and meaning-making. Shakespeare showed all kinds of people how they might play creatively with the systems that ruled their world.
Shakespeare didn’t dismantle the systems, but what the characters in the plays say and do opens up fissures in those systems that invite characters like Rosalind in As You Like It or Imogen in Cymbeline to wriggle through, toward the possible restoration of freedom that allows them to do things differently.
The was the foundation of the political system in Shakespeare’s time.
In Richard II, (King Richard’s uncle) because while the king orchestrated the murder, he is above the law.
Shakespeare’s play, which dramatizes the history of the deposition and assassination of King Richard, . But it dramatizes how the characters are able to do what they need to do for the good of the state by finding their way through the cracks in the political system.
Recognition of mortality
Theatrical art like Shakespeare’s also leads us away from the fatuous life goal of the endless accumulation of wealth.
In King Lear, Shakespeare shows us how money-making can become divorced utterly from meaning-making and how money and meaning have to be brought back into convergence. At the start, Lear is wedded to wealth, power and prestige.
Even his daughters are required to declare publicly their worshipful love and loyalty to him. By virtue of his uncrowning, the suffering that follows for him, and his recognition of his own mortality, . He also learns how his meaningfulness as a man can come back to him only once he embraces the .
Not that Shakespeare is the only one offering insights into how to address the multiple crises that the world is facing. have brought forward new ideas or how to restore human values to a sense of value calculated exclusively in monetary terms.
But something more is needed now to move us toward a healthier and more just future, and the makers of art are the ones who can provide it.
Money poisonous when ill-used
Consider one moment from Shakespeare’s play, Timon of Athens. The once fabulously wealthy Timon has squandered money on scores of men whom he thought were friends. Here the character Flavius distributes the money he has saved from his employment as Timon’s steward to the other household servants, all of them now unemployed.
He insists that they take their share, and he reflects on the poisonous power of money when :
Good fellows all,
The latest of my wealth I’ll share amongst you.
Let each take some;
Nay, put out all your hands—not one word more:
(The servants embrace, and part several ways)
O, the fierce wretchedness that glory brings us!
Who would not wish to be from wealth exempt,
Since riches point to misery and contempt?
Who would be so mock’d with glory? or to live
But in a dream of friendship?
In Timon, Shakespeare shows us that money must not be stripped of a search for a meaningful life in community with others. Money without meaning conjures a mere dream of friendship, a fantasy world that must finally give way to a reality of misery and contempt.
If that is what we want, bring on the dollars — so much money, — and away with art!
By bringing about finance, health, climate and AI, our research collaboration aims to help change the prevailing rationale of western modernity that positions .
Paul Yachnin receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada.
Laurette Dube does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
