Regina Mara Schwartz is a professor of English at Northwestern University and a former fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Her books include Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism and The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. This essay is adapted from her book Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare, by permission of Oxford University Press.
Somehow love is regarded as a “soft” subject, fit for the arts and fine for private life, but not for the tough business of the public sphere, of making hard choices, negotiating power, and forging contracts.