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Poetics of Power: Money as Sign and Substance in Romeo and juliet

Poetics of Power: Money as Sign and Substance in Romeo and juliet Greg Bentley "For the love of money is the TOot of all evil." (I Timothy 6:10) "A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things." (Ecclesiastes lO:19i With its roots so firmly planted in scriptural texts, it is not surprising that a paradoxical attitude toward money governed the minds and hearts of people throughout the Renaissance. While many denounced it as an absolute vice, others extolled its virtues, but most, like most of us today, undoubtedly held both notions at once and, depending upon the circumstances, wavered between the two. In the argot of current criticism, such paradoxes occur most frequently when a sign is detached from its referent in the material world. Separated from their objects in physical reality, signs become empty, devoid of substantive value. At the same time, however, such free floating signs often become powerful "operatives" that shape reality, 2 and, depending upon the motives and the linguistic sophistication of the people who consciously or unconsciously manipulate language, the realities such conditions create range from the comic to the tragic. In Shakespeare's works the paradoxical relationship between signs and the material world produces on the one hand the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Explorations in Renaissance Culture Brill

Poetics of Power: Money as Sign and Substance in Romeo and juliet

Bentley, Greg
Explorations in Renaissance Culture , Volume 17 (1): 145 – Dec 2, 1991
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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© Copyright 1991 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0098-2474
eISSN
2352-6963
DOI
10.1163/23526963-90000132
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Greg Bentley "For the love of money is the TOot of all evil." (I Timothy 6:10) "A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things." (Ecclesiastes lO:19i With its roots so firmly planted in scriptural texts, it is not surprising that a paradoxical attitude toward money governed the minds and hearts of people throughout the Renaissance. While many denounced it as an absolute vice, others extolled its virtues, but most, like most of us today, undoubtedly held both notions at once and, depending upon the circumstances, wavered between the two. In the argot of current criticism, such paradoxes occur most frequently when a sign is detached from its referent in the material world. Separated from their objects in physical reality, signs become empty, devoid of substantive value. At the same time, however, such free floating signs often become powerful "operatives" that shape reality, 2 and, depending upon the motives and the linguistic sophistication of the people who consciously or unconsciously manipulate language, the realities such conditions create range from the comic to the tragic. In Shakespeare's works the paradoxical relationship between signs and the material world produces on the one hand the

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Explorations in Renaissance Culture – Brill

Published: Dec 2, 1991

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