Shakespeare, Money, and Meaning-Making

Can reading King Lear help us rethink economic policy? Can Measure for Measure shape how we talk about justice, or Hamlet help us face grief? That’s the idea behind an ambitious project at Montreal’s McGill University called Reimagining Shakespeare, Remaking Modern World Systems.

Led by Laurette Dubé, professor emerita of management, and Paul Yachnin, professor of Shakespeare studies, the initiative brings together experts in economics, health policy, AI,  and robotics, with theater and literary artists and humanities scholars, to explore how Shakespeare’s plays can help us think more humanely—and creatively—about the systems we inhabit.

In this episode, Dubé and Yachnin discuss how Shakespeare’s theater created a space where money, power, and empathy intersected—and why those same plays may hold insights for addressing today’s most complex challenges, reminding us of how the humanities can help us build a better future.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published July 15, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: We’re living through a historical moment that’s defined by wicked problems like climate change and global instability.

To even begin to understand problems like these, sometimes it feels like you need double PhDs in economics and political science, with a bit of theoretical physics for good measure.

How can reading Shakespeare help us to navigate the world that we’re living in today? And what would happen if the people making big, far-reaching decisions sat down with a text like King Lear first?

An ambitious initiative based at McGill University in Montreal brings together bright lights in economics, AI, healthcare policy, and other fields with Shakespearean scholars, actors, and writers.

Called Reimagining Shakespeare, Remaking Modern World Systems, its goal is nothing less than to change the way the world works. Reimagining Shakespeare starts from the idea that Shakespeare himself was a so-called “social entrepreneur.”

That is to say, he and other playwrights of his day were not just making money, they were offering new ways of making meaning for their audiences. Their plays gave audiences the space to creatively imagine what kind of world they wanted to live in.

The Reimagining Shakespeare project is attempting to reunite money making and meaning making in our time, too. Laurette Dubé, a professor emerita of management at McGill, and Paul Yachnin, an English professor, are the leaders of this initiative.

Here are Laurette Dubé and Paul Yachnin in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Laurette, why don’t we start with you? How did this initiative start?

LAURETTE DUBÉ: It’s a long story.

BOGAEV: It always is.

DUBÉ: My lifestyle and work has been in examining the convergence between moneymaking and meaning-making, with the idea that the benefit that we have been having since the first industrial revolution could be increased if we were to look at more convergence between the economic and the human side of everything. So, there’s a lot to learn from Shakespeare, at the same time that we tweak a bit our modern world system. So, that’s the origin of this work.

BOGAEV: Paul, what did you think when Laurette reached out to you? I mean, was it immediately apparent that Shakespeare has a lot to say to us today about bridging political and class and economic divides?

PAUL YACHNIN: So, this is what you need to understand first about Laurette Dubé. She is a force of nature.

BOGAEV: I think I’m getting that already.

YACHNIN: She is an extraordinarily creative thinker across all kinds of disciplinary lines. Before she got in touch with me last spring—it’s a year ago now—I’d done a bunch of non-academic short pieces, publications, talking about how Shakespeare can help us deal with the problem of Alzheimer’s, the problem of the pandemic, the problem of money and the power of money. But all of it was kind of imagined work about how Shakespeare could help us think more clearly.

When Laurette reached out to me a year ago, she brought with her and her extraordinary broad understanding, a real desire to change things. That, for me, was an inspiration that we could work together not only to produce short pieces in various non-academic publications, but actually to work toward real change in the world. That is what we have been cooking for the past year and we’re not going to stop until we start to make a real difference.

BOGAEV: Wow. That is so bracing. I want to take a step back though for a moment, before we talk about changing the world, and ask you more about what Shakespeare has to offer. I mean, why Shakespeare? And maybe you can start with just the idea of Shakespeare as an entrepreneur himself.

YACHNIN: Sure. So, one of the things that’s going on in this period is the emergence of international capitalism and opportunities for entrepreneurial innovation and moneymaking.

Shakespeare is a kid from the country who comes down to London. Things are just beginning to roll in the new entertainment industry, and you know, one of the things I like to say is that Shakespeare was the Jeff Bezos of his time. Although there is significant differences between William Shakespeare and Jeff Bezos, both of them are entrepreneurs and were able to make money by bringing something new to the world.

But Shakespeare also brought a kind of new way of thinking for all kinds of ordinary people about the world that they were living in. And the world that they were living in is called early modernity for good reason. So much of what they were facing is what we’re facing now. There was tremendous hatred between Christianity and Islam. If anything, it’s worse now than it was then. And there were problems with pandemic. There was a climate emergency. There were terrible bad harvests. There were questions about sexual relations, gender in the field of the home. And problems, as we are facing now, with a move toward authoritarianism.

One of the things we see in Shakespeare over and over again is the parading of powerful people across the stage in front of three thousand ordinary people and the way in which those three thousand ordinary people are learning how to think critically about power. So, the theater is a place not only of great entertainment, but also of education and a kind of workshop for empathy.

BOGAEV: Oh, I like that phrase: “A workshop for empathy.”

I’m still digging into this idea of Shakespeare’s a social entrepreneur, in the sense that, as you’re saying, his theater made meaning with audiences in this collective way. And I’m thinking of an author who’s written about this, who we’ve had on the podcast, a very well-known Shakespearean, Emma Smith, who talks about “gappiness.” It’s a way that Shakespeare presents ideas and allows the audience a gap or a place to insert themselves to make up their own minds. Is this what you’re getting at?

YACHNIN: That’s part of what he’s doing in his drama. You know, Measure for Measure ends with an unending gap because the Duke proposes marriage to Isabella, and she doesn’t have a line. Shakespeare intentionally doesn’t say, “Yeah, I’ll marry you.” And so, it’s up to the actor on stage to kind of make a decision about where she—or in Shakespeare’s theater—he is, because it was a boy playing the character. But it’s also up to us in the playhouse to think about, “Is this right? Should she marry this man?”

And so what Emma Smith is talking about when she’s talking about gappiness is something we find throughout the plays. But it’s not only the gappiness, it’s the way in which Shakespeare brings very, very different ways of thinking and feeling about the same question. And he does this over and over again in play after play, so that in a play like Richard II, Richard is an abusive monarch, someone who takes advantage of others, and we see him fall. And as we see him fall, it’s very hard not to think that something terrible is going on. And we see him murdered at the end of the play. For an audience in Shakespeare’s time or an audience now, we can see not only how some people can abuse power, can create an authoritarian state, but also we see them, finally, as human beings. We see them face to face.

DUBÉ: Because art creates that space where all of the agents are willing to get a bit, not too much, outside of their comfort zone and this is really where imagination can flourish without scaring everyone to retract and remain in their silo. That’s an important new way of looking at these conversions between money and meaning-making between the arts, science, and so on.

BOGAEV: I think I’ve also read you making reference to how the Globe playhouse structure is an inspiration for how to address these big questions about money and commerce and meaning-making and culture because it brought together so many different kinds of people, collaborating in the playhouse as well. And it prompts me to ask you, Laurette, who else is involved in the initiative?

DUBÉ: Depending on the world system that we want to transform, the people we bring together are a combination of not just access, but the whole field of the humanities which can and should contribute much more than what has been done so far to addressing our complex problem. So, in Africa for instance, we have underground projects where communities, cities, are saying, “Can we invest differently? Make policy differently? But also, at the household or family level, can we actually change our personal and professional life as well?” So, I’m calling this a whole person in a whole society, as simple as that, for who is to be involved.

BOGAEV: As simple as that. I’m scrolling through some information online, and I see you’ve assembled quite a group of people from different disciplines. I’m looking at some of the names. There’s Frederic Samama, a French investment banker who helped pioneer low carbon indexes, and also Anne-Marie MacDonald, the Canadian novelist and playwright and actor. Paul, are all of these people going to get a crash course in Shakespeare?

YACHNIN: It’s not to force Frederic Samama to become a Shakespeare scholar but to bring him together with people like me, people like Jessica Hill, who is a young, brilliant, Shakespeare actor and playwright, so that we can get inside the space of the plays that Shakespeare wrote and move inside that space together toward new ways of thinking. And I think someone like Frederic Samama and the other people that Laurette is bringing into this conversation are willing to play. We’re going to cross boundaries that certainly I never thought of crossing. I’m going to have to learn a lot over the next several years about economic theory, about the history of healthcare, and to me, this is so important.

One of the things that Laurette insists on is we call this “Reimagining Shakespeare.” We don’t have to take everything that Shakespeare wrote as scripture. That’s not what we’re doing. We’re thinking with him. And sometimes we might say, “We don’t think he got this right. We don’t think that it should have come down to a pound of flesh. Maybe what Antonio could have done in The Merchant of Venice is offer to repay the loan that he didn’t have money to repay. By working with him to change the relation between the Jewish community and the Christian community in Venice, maybe Shakespeare could have done that better.” So, we are thinking with Shakespeare, but he’s not our god.

BOGAEV: So, you’re using Shakespeare as a kind of common language, it sounds like.

YACHNIN: Yes, I think that’s right, and getting inside the plays to follow the journeys that he’s making in the plays, but never as sacred pathways.

BOGAEV: Well, one journey that comes to mind right away—I mean, so many, obviously you just mentioned Merchant—but King Lear.

DUBÉ: Yes.

BOGAEV: Obviously riches to rags, but there’s so much in Lear about meaning and about how resources should be considered in a kingdom.

YACHNIN: Lear has to understand, and he comes to understand where the wealth of the monarchy comes from. This is something that Shakespeare is bringing forward many times in a number of plays.

But it’s so much about how to live a full life. It’s so much about listening to people, even when they seem to be talking nonsense. One of the things that we do in the 21st century, with the rise of psychiatric care and psychiatric drugs, is as soon as someone starts talking nonsense we stop listening to them. One of the things that happens in Lear, among other plays, that is so important for us now is to shut up and learn how to listen to others, even when they seem to be talking nonsense—as the Fool starts talking from the beginning or as Lear begins to talk as he moves through the play towards his death. So, I think that there’s so much that we want to bring into conversations with people who are doing work on healthcare now and especially perhaps end of life care and care of people who we deem to be mentally ill. And the play, as you said earlier, Barbara, we can think of it as a common language, a language that we can learn how to speak with that will change the way we’re thinking about the problems we’re facing now.

BOGAEV: How are you all going to work together? I mean, I can picture a Zoom where it’s like a class. But I imagine you’ll be more creative. What form will this take?

YACHNIN: That is the question. You know, Laurette organized this brilliant three-hour workshop in January at the Management Faculty at McGill and she brought in the most extraordinary people, including Frederic Samama, André Pratte, former editor of La Presse in Montreal, former senator in the Canadian government. Everybody brought ideas to the table. But it was very, very difficult for us to actually have a conversation in Shakespeare as the common language, and so, what Laurette and I are doing—and we’re talking to many others—is how do we do that?

Right now, we’re talking about doing a conference at McGill that will bring theater people, humanities scholars such as me, policy makers such as Laurette and her colleagues together. We will get inside Shakespeare’s plays. We’re not going to make anybody do anything that they don’t want to do, but we are going to start to play together very seriously

BOGAEV: Do you mean you’re going to put on a show?

YACHNIN: We are not going to put on a show, but we are going to do scenes, say from King Lear, and we’re going to ask someone like Frederic Samama to take on the role of King Lear. Don’t tell him that I said this—

BOGAEV: It’s just between us.

YACHNIN: —in particular, do scenes from the play so that we begin to get inside the play, not to treat the play as a sacred space, but a space for conversation.

DUBÉ: That’s the part that we are still negotiating. But what is relevant and important to address your question, Barbara, is that we need to revisit the link between the academic world and real world. We have real people or real agents of transformation that are actually making things happen. It’s not just going from one play to the other or one event to the other. We need to work with those who are building, have built, and will build those human-made systems.

BOGAEV: I’m so glad you brought up that agent of change. You’re speaking about Mark Daley, who’s part of this conversation. He’s the Chief AI officer at Western University in Toronto, and he spoke in a recent panel discussion that I listened to about looking to Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, really more of the plays, for guidance in thinking about the future of AI and the meaning-slash-money convergence. And maybe Paul, you can, you can tell us more about what he had to say?

YACHNIN: Absolutely. Human beings create systems to manage complex problems. We have a healthcare system in Canada. We have a financial system that is international, at risk now as we know it. One of the things that has happened with systems is that they become sovereign over us and what we want to do, by bringing Shakespeare into the mix, is to put the human back into the systems that humans have made. And Mark is thinking about this, especially, you know, around artificial intelligence. I’m not scared of it. I know that some people say that we should be very scared of it, but I think that it becomes a very important conversation partner.

DUBÉ: And, in fact, this is one of the core topics that Mark is interested in. What is it that makes us human and how far we can go? Mark would say we are closer than we think in having those artificial agents, How should we think of science, of governance, and what we do as mankind to adapt in a way that is effective, transparent, and so on? This is an important and major question that we can address by matching Shakespeare with someone like Mark.

BOGAEV: Yeah, that really gets to why it’s so important that you have this multidisciplinary group in this conversation. But also, you’re building something together and I think one of the conclusions I was picking up on was that what Shakespeare brought to the table in part was this, “Diagnosis of the human condition under stress in love and at war.” That’s a quote from Mark Daley. And that “His plays insist on our capacity for both folly and transcendence. That every new magic comes with a test of character.”

YACHNIN: One of the things that Shakespeare brings to us—but literature brings to us more generally—is the idea that we are, in fact, in narrative time, in story time. Systems exist in a real world that is moving for people who are living their lives, growing old, growing older, and then dying, and it’s so important for us to remember the narrative. The fact that we, each of us, has a way. And I think that Shakespeare, one of the things he’s bringing to the work we’re doing across disciplinary borders is not only to bring something like a human feeling back into the picture, but also to bring the idea of living lifetime, narrative time.

BOGAEV: Lifetime, narrative time. When you say that, I think, “Oh, it’s so hard to grasp that you’re living history.” We only understand history when we look back, but you’re creating, you’re in the midst of it. You can’t see it when you’re in the midst of it and this is part of the goal of the project, you’re saying?

DUBÉ: Exactly. Exactly.

BOGAEV: Wow.

DUBÉ: I was hosting in Europe last week a workshop on this. Not on Shakespeare, but on real world innovation. And I was calling this a “multi-everything” approach. Multi-temporal perspective, multi-jurisdiction, multi-science, and multi-multilevel over the life course of a human. Each of us, we start at “A” and we end at “Z.” So short a period in the bigger evolution of the world and of mankind.

So, that makes us believe that we can tweak our model of modern development and that’s really what keeps us working together and having fun together.

BOGAEV: I mean, that’s a huge goal. That’s transformative. But what are the goals when you break them down and how will you know you’re succeeding with your project?

YACHNIN: I think it’s a great question and it’s a crucial question. I think part of the answer, maybe the first piece of the answer that I’d bring to the table has to do with the university itself. Because especially in North America, the universities have isolated themselves from the larger world. It’s so important for us to see that the talent and intelligence and learning that we bring across the disciplines has to come back into the world. And I’m coming, of course, from the humanities. The humanities, in some ways, has profited the most from the success of the universities and also has suffered the most from that success because—

BOGAEV: —and are also under attack.

YACHNIN: Absolutely. One of the things I hope will emerge from this is that people in the humanities realize they will have to stand up and make our case. So, part of what I want to do with Laurette is show how the humanities actually has a real role to play in the world going forward.

BOGAEV: Won’t you have to have real deliverables to make that case?

YACHNIN: Absolutely, and we want to have deliverables, not in academic journals, but in the kinds of magazines that people read, the kind of places that people go to, like this podcast, to learn new ideas, to hear ideas coming from other people. And also, we want to go to various public presentations and bring those ideas forward. We’re talking to a number of academic presses, of course, about the possibility of doing a book that will bring a lot of these ideas and conversations to a broader readership. So, you’re absolutely right. We have to think very clearly and very hard about how we’re going to do what we are aiming to do.

BOGAEV: We’re talking about very public facing things and looking to Shakespeare for some meaning or guidance or pathways on them. But Paul, I understand you’ve looked to Shakespeare not only because it’s your job, but also for very personal reasons too.

YACHNIN: You know, it’s one of the things that you see in a play like Hamlet, among others, is how the private becomes public. Of course, Hamlet does this on a very large scale by talking to himself when he is alone in a space into which is crowded three thousand people.

So, I’ve written a number of pieces about my mother’s decline into Alzheimer’s, about my father’s slow death, and in every case, the point was to be able to speak about my private life in ways that would speak to others. So, when I published the piece on Alzheimer’s in a non-academic journal, I got an email from a woman who thanked me for it because her husband had just been diagnosed, and it helped her to begin to think her way into what lay ahead for her and for her husband.

BOGAEV: How did Shakespeare help you see your way through such a difficult time with your mother or through grief over your father?

YACHNIN: In both cases, he was a great conversation partner. When my father was dying, I felt absolutely helpless, and I wanted him not to die. Then after he died, I went back to Shakespeare. (I also had the help of a very good therapist and she asked me to think about where he was and what he was going through.) At that point, I was working with King Lear in this conversation and I realized—and this is very much a personal thing, but I think it’s something that speaks to the situation for many, many people—that you do not allow your parent, enable your parent to live a full life, you would not if you could keep them alive forever. It’s in fact death, and this is something Laurette has taught me, also, it’s the fullness, the wholeness of a life that makes a life worthwhile, and that includes mortality. King Lear taught me that after a long, slow conversation with that play.

BOGAEV: Laurette, have you had this kind of long conversation with Shakespeare as well?

DUBÉ: Well, my conversation with Shakespeare was that I have been going every year to the Stratford Festival since 1992 with my late husband. So, we are talking about 30 years of vicarious exposure that really made me understand and appreciate Shakespeare’s work in all its richness and how relevant it is for us to understand oneself as human, and, thinking through what does it mean for me as a human but also what does it mean for me as part of mankind and the system we are building together? That’s really an important underlying pillar of our work.

BOGAEV: Well, I can’t wait to hear what comes next. You’re just really on the threshold of this. Thank you so much for telling us about it.

YACHNIN: Thank you, Barbara.

DUBÉ: Thank you, it was a pleasure.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Paul Yachnin and Laurette Dubé, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica and Jenny Lawton. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster.

We had technical help from Ellen Payne Smith in Montreal and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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