Virginia Woolf once noted that all Shakespearean criticism was autobiographical: the Bard's works are a mirror in which critics see themselves. Adam Smith, the famed 18th-century economist, comes in for similar treatment, as he's variously been portrayed as a rabble-rouser, a Marxist, a heretic, a bumbling professor, a Scottish nationalist, a rampant capitalist, a bore, a Tory and a mummy's boy. He has been embraced with gusto by Republicans and Democrats, Brexiteers and Remainers, central planners and free marketers.
Today, we mainly remember Smith for his landmark work of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, and we regard him first as an economist and second as a philosopher. But during his lifetime, ‘economics' existed neither as a profession nor a discipline, and he saw himself among other things as a serious literary scholar. He helped pioneer the academic study of English literature; he lectured on the arts of writing and rhetoric; and he took his most powerful rhetorical device—one that became his catchphrase and the most overused metaphor in economics—from Shakespeare.
Smith was born precisely a century after the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio, the first authoritative collection of the Bard's plays, including the occult play Macbeth. It's from here that Smith found the phrase “invisible hand,” now inextricably tied to markets and capitalism.
From Act 3, Scene 2:
LADY MACBETH:
What's to be done?
MACBETH:
Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,
Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;
And with thy bloody and invisible hand
Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
Which keeps me pale!
Smith uses the phrase once in The Wealth of Nations, once in a similar passage in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and once in his essay on the ‘History of Astronomy'.
The Wealth of Nations also contains other allusions to Macbeth. In an important discussion of the division of labor, for example, Smith compares the types of people to the breeds of dogs: ‘By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a grey-hound, or a grey-hound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd's dog.'
In act 3 scene 1 of Macbeth, Shakespeare similarly compares the varieties of people and dogs:
Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are clept
All by the name of dogs: the valued file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him closed; whereby he does receive
Particular addition, from the bill
That writes them all alike: and so of men.
In an excellent piece of sleuthing, literary scholars Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter showed that Shakespeare seems in turn to have borrowed those lines and others from George North's unpublished 1576 manuscript, A Brief Discourse of Rebellion.
The connections between Smith and Shakespeare don't end there. In 1762 and 1763, Smith delivered at Glasgow University a series of lectures on Shakespeare and other notable authors. The timing of the lectures is important, as at the time, Shakespeare was seen as racy, irreligious and somewhat disreputable. Smith's academic interest in Shakespeare was a rare pursuit, and even a radical one. It wouldn't be until six years later, in 1769, that the ‘Shakespeare Jubilee' was held at Stratford-upon-Avon. David Garrick, the greatest actor of the era, was responsible for organizing this fashionable event that involved much pageantry and gourmandizing (but no Shakespearean performances). As a result of the Jubilee, Shakespeare's exalted status as the ‘national poet' was assured, but Smith's lectures, pre-dating the event, were ahead of their time.
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