Shakespeare and the Great Recession

John Kay of the Financial Times makes the case that, in his plays about kings and princes, Shakespeare was also describing our financial world. To wit,

At the medieval courts Shakespeare described, the exercise of power was not a means to an end, it was itself the end. Kings and barons sought principally to extend their territory. If they occasionally claimed that the purpose was to bring the benefits of their wise rule to a wider public, the assertion was little more than a smokescreen for personal ambition. The rulers aimed to be exalted as rulers of wider domains and to levy taxes on ever more peasants. The political and economic environment has been transformed. But human nature has not, and the factors that drive powerful men today are little different from those that drove them five centuries ago.

The fine robes of Shakespeare’s princely characters were paid for by the work of the peasantry, the men and women who tilled the fields and garnered the crops. Their labours yielded revenues to support lifestyles entirely disconnected from their own experience, people who knew nothing of agriculture and cared less, and whose activities were sometimes disruptive to day-to-day economic activity but mostly irrelevant. Once there were sowers and reapers, now there are bank clients and factory workers; once there were palaces and carriages, now there are McMansions and private jets. Much has changed, yet much remains the same.