Economy of Love as Manifested in William Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Merchant of Venice

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.