The 2014 volume of Shakespeare Jahrbuch will be a special issue devoted to “Money and Power”.

Karl Marx thought that “Shakespeare excellently depicted the real nature of money”. Indeed, money plays a central role in Shakespeare’s works: monetary transactions and the exchange of goods, bonds and loans, greed and expenditure, wealth and debt are themes of his plays and poems and provide the sources for their imagery. The language of money permeates the language of love; purses and coins circulate and merchants and moneylenders shape the plot: “To be or not to be” is determined by assets and economic transactions. The shepherd Corin in As You Like It is well aware that “he that wants money, means and content is without three good friends”, and yet wealth is not always a blessing in Shakespeare. His plays react to the economic upheavals in early modern times and they interrogate the inherent moral, religious and political implications. Early modern poetry and drama are simultaneously bound up in economic networks and the underlying power relations of patronage and the corporate structure of London’s theatres.

Analyzing the relationship between “money and power” in Shakespeare is particularly pertinent at a time when debt crises, the influence of financial markets and the divide between rich and poor dominate world politics.

The editorial board of Shakespeare Jahrbuch invites essays on the following topics:

• Money and power in Shakespeare’s plays
• Representations of poverty and wealth
• The circulation of money and goods on the early modern stage
• Shakespeare and the debate on usury
• Money and love – monetary and affective economies
• Shakespeare’s negotiation of early modern economic discourses
• Shakespeare’s theatre as big business
• Shakespeare in Political Economy
• Shakespeare and the debt crisis

Shakespeare Jahrbuch, the Yearbook of the German Shakespeare Society, is a peer-reviewed journal. It offers contributions in German and English, scholarly articles, an extensive section of book reviews, and reports on Shakespeare productions in the German-speaking world. It also documents the activities of the Shakespeare Society.

Papers to be published in the Shakespeare Jahrbuch should be formatted according to our style sheet.

Please send your manuscripts (of about 6,000 words) to the editor of Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Prof. Dr. Sabine Schülting (email: sabine.schuelting@fu-berlin.de), by 31 March 2013.