Shakespeare
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Moving and Being Moved by Shakespeare’s Sonnets April 26, 2024
Shakespeare is widely recognized as one of the preeminent poets of the English language. Throughout his poetry, readers encounter both the lighter and joyous, as well as the darker and more burdensome moments of human existence. Although few scholars...
Statecraft as Stagecraft April 25, 2024
Kings, presidents, and corporate titans may not undergo Shakespeare’s seven parts in their careers. But all rise to power, exercise it, and fall from it. That basic and perennial fact about leaders is Eliot Cohen’s first lesson in The Hollow Crown: S...
Macbeth’s Politics—And Ours April 19, 2024
Macbeth is a play about two things very much on Americans’ minds—regime change at home and whose children will inherit the kingdom. Macbeth seizes power successfully, yet his line has no future; even in victory he is a failure. Americans are locked i...
The Day O.J. Simpson (Almost) Confessed April 19, 2024
No one ever really gets away with murder.If O.J. Simpson had played football in the ’60s for Bay Shore High School and taken Harold Anderson’s humanities class, he would have known this. Mr. Anderson would have lovingly encouraged O.J. to play less f...
On the Bard’s Four-Hundred-Year Legacy March 25, 2024
A rule of thumb in linguistics gives any language a thousand years. At that point, linguistic drift will have made the mother language nearly incomprehensible to its descendants. That drift is inexorable, a feature of language itself, in spite of the...
Shakespeare vs. the Transhumanists March 11, 2024
I find these days that even friends with no religion have begun to speak in religious terms. Recently, within a single week, I heard the word “demonic” used five times, four times by people who don’t believe in demons. Stranger still, and not long af...
War is Boyish and Fought by Boys January 22, 2024
Author Robert Kaplan once shared with me what he believes is the military's greatest weakness: “The general officer corps is sometimes asked to be strategic and understand the world beyond their capability. They are creatures of systems and lack the ...
How Shakespeare Helped Shape Christmas December 25, 2023
This Christmas is a troubled time — a season of war rather than peace from the Black Sea to Bethlehem.America is full of political foreboding, and Christmas itself has become a source of controversy.Some find the holiday adrift from its true meaning,...
In Praise of the Tangible Sacredness of the Printed Word November 14, 2023
An imposing six foot by six foot steel box in mid-century medical gray with two projectors on either end and a pair of binoculars in the middle, the Hinman Collator looks more like something used by neurologists to diagnose brain tumors than a machin...
Shakespeare's First Folio November 01, 2023
In 1632, John Milton published his first poem in English. Long before Paradise Lost had even been conceived, an unsigned sixteen-line poem appeared in the front matter of Shakespeare’s Second Folio. Penned in 1630, the poem is commonly called “On Sha...
To Defend Shakespeare Is to Defend the West August 01, 2023
Long before American higher education became almost a wholly owned subsidiary of progressive thought control, literature departments fell much earlier to many of these same forces, with the deconstruction of classic texts by “new historicism,” “cultu...
