Economy of Love as Manifested in William Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Merchant of Venice
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56062/gtrs.2023.2.04.338Keywords:
Economy, love, gender, William Shakespeare, Elizabethan and Jacobean age.Abstract
This paper tries to make a study of William Shakespeare’s above plays with reference to his contemporary period’s views on money and love. Economy is inadvertently linked with love as we find during the time of Shakespeare. Two of the most important plays of Shakespeare – King Lear (1606) and The Merchant of Venice (1596-1598) shows how love is tested by economic considerations and how relationships get complicated when the two collide with each other. Market economics of the public sphere questions the love of the private sphere. Here love is equated to lust. This acquisitiveness is characteristic of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age with commerce and trade flourishing and the age itself being termed as the Golden Age. Gender roles are redefined in such a mercantile situation and the place of women in such society become endangered.
References
End Notes:
Gupta,Jayati ed. Reading Poems: An Annotated Anthology. Calcutta, Macmillan India Limited,2002,p.43,LL-12
Ibid.
Jonson,Ben. “Come my Celia” Source: Web
Kermode,Frank ed. King Lear:A Casebook
Gill,Roma ed. The Merchant of Venice. India, Oxford University Press,1995. All the quotations of the above book are taken from this book.
Muir,Kenneth ed. King Lear. London, Methuen,1977. All the quotations of the above play are taken from this book.
Muir,Kenneth ed. King Lear. London, Methuen,1977,p.xxix-xxx
Hamilton,Edith ed. Mythology. USA, Penguin Books,1969
Jones,Katherine Duncan ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Delhi, East West Press,1998
Works Cited:
Gill,Roma ed. The Merchant of Venice. India, Oxford University Press,1995.
Gupta,Jayati ed. Reading Poems: An Annotated Anthology. Calcutta, Macmillan India Limited,2002,p.43,LL-12
Hamilton,Edith ed. Mythology. USA,Penguin Books,1969
Jones,Katherine Duncan ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Delhi,East West Press,1998
Jonson,Ben. “Come my Celia” Source: Web
Kermode,Frank ed. King Lear:A Casebook
Muir,Kenneth ed. King Lear. London, Methuen,1977
References:
Kenneth J.E. Graham. ‘“Without the Form of Justice”: Plainness and the Performance of Love in “King Lear”’Shakespeare’s Quaterley 42.4(Winter,1991):438-461.Web.23March2009.< http://www.jstor.org/stable/2870463>
Paul N.Siegel. “Adversity and the Miracle of Love in King Lear” Shakespeare Quaterley6.3(Summer,1955):325-336.Web.23March2009 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2866618
Walter F.Eggers,Jr. “Love and Likeness in The Merchant of Venice” Shakespeare Quaterley28.3(Summer,1977):327-333.Web.23March2009 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2869082
Isabella Wheater. “Aristotelian Wealth and the Sea of Love: Shakespeare’s Synthesis of Greek Philosophy and Roman Poetry in The Merchant of Venice” The Review of English Studies 44.173(Feb,1993):16-36.Web.23March2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/518440
Virginia Cox. “The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice” Renaissance Quaterly 48.3(Autumn,1995):513-581.Web.23March 2009http://www.jstor.org/stable/2862873
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
