From greed for resources and money to technology run amok and a politics of domination, hatred and fear of others, our world sometimes seems to be on a course of assured destruction.
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 Reimagining Shakespeare, Remaking Modern World Systems.
Shakespeare and the arts can help researchers see the way toward new ways of thinking through our period of massive disruption, especially since the world in Shakespeare’s time, like our world now, was riven by social, political, ecological and epidemic crises.
Read more: After the plague, Shakespeare imagined a world saved from poison, slander and the evil eye
Making meaning with audiences
Why Shakespeare? In some ways, Shakespeare was the Jeff Bezos of his time.
Unlike the billionaire entrepreneur Bezos, who founded Amazon and is now its executive chair, Shakespeare didn’t sell everything under the sun. However, like Bezos, who innovated new ways of packaging stories for people via books and movies, for example, Shakespeare repackaged 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 real-time, embodied and collective experiences, never operates on a one-way supplier-to-buyer axis.
Shakespeare’s theatre made money — he became a wealthy man — but his theatre always also made meaning in collaboration with its audiences, educating playgoers and stimulating conversations about about state politics, money and power and about the care of other people and of the natural world.
Shakespeare as social entrepreneur
Shakespeare was a 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 divine right of kings was the foundation of the political system in Shakespeare’s time.
In Richard II, John of Gaunt says to the Duchess of Gloucester that there is nothing he can do to avenge the murder of her husband (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, does not dismantle the system of monarchy as it stood in Shakespeare’s time — the divine right of kings remains in place. 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 learns to see other people as people, including his truly loving daughter Cordelia. He also learns how his meaningfulness as a man can come back to him only once he embraces the equitable distribution of resources among all the people of Britain.
Not that Shakespeare is the only one offering insights into how to address the multiple crises that the world is facing. Many others have brought forward new ideas about how to “green” the world of finance 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 it is not used to support meaningful community:
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, we won’t know where to spend it all — and away with art!
By bringing Shakespeare into conversations about finance, health, climate and AI, our research collaboration aims to help change the prevailing rationale of western modernity that positions money-making as the core driver of individual and collective progress.
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 organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
