It was a shock to learn last night that my dear friend Paul Cantor had passed away. He was a great Shakespeare scholar and in Shakespeare’s Rome and Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy he showed that Shakespeare had a profound knowledge of the reasons for the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. In the book, he compared Shakespeare’s interpretation of Christianity to Nietzsche’s. I had a long message from him on January 5 about this book, discussing a review of it that I planned to write. He was also a leading authority on popular culture. He was for many years professor of English at the University of Virginia and also taught at Harvard.
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