Meet Me in Montana: A Shakespearean Odyssey
Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer. Gretchen E. Minton (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020). Montana, like…
The Best Shakespeare Story Ever
Shakespeare of London. Marchette Chute. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1949. It was a classic when it was first published in 1949, but it remains…
Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity
How the Classics Made Shakespeare. Jonathan Bates. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Jonathan Bate is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Shakespeare. He is a…
Liberal Education and Politics: The Case of The Tempest
Everything is Political Just as I began my college teaching career thirty years ago, the whole academy seemed to have accepted as axiomatic the assertion that “Everything…
On Nietzsche and Hamlet: How Shakespeare Mirrors Sick Moderns
Our stark choice is indeed as Nietzsche puts it, says René Girard. It is a choice between Dionysus and the Crucified: between the Biblical concern for the…
Shakespeare: Three Plays About Human Desire
In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theme of romantic desire prohibited by the parents is treated in a very deliberate way. When parents, in opposition, stand…
The Death of Eros: The Tragedy of Love in “Antony and Cleopatra”
Antony and Cleopatra is one of the most mature of William Shakespeare’s tragedies. As such, it is arguably one of his finest and deepest works. Pride, love,…
Shakespeare on Love and War
What hath Shakespeare to do with the politics of regime change? Given the long and unsuccessful history of what we call regime change, from the installment of…
The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom
The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom. Khalil M. Habib and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. In…
Beware the Ides of March: Everybody Loves to Hate a Scapegoat
“Beware the Ides of March!” As it does every year, this March fifteenth affords us the opportunity to contemplate the recurrent patterns of history. Yet what exactly…
Why Don’t Nihilists Remain Silent? For mickvet
Shakespeare’s Macbeth speaks the following lines: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time;…
The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom
The Poet as Teacher of Statesmen This volume joins a growing chorus of scholars who approach Shakespeare as a political thinker.[1] The chapters that follow explore how…
The Problems Are Everlasting, the Bard Indispensable
The Soul of Statesmanship: Shakespeare on Nature, Virtue, and Political Wisdom. Khalil M. Habib and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., eds. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2018. In 2015…
Of Infinite Variety: The Promise of Comedy in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Shakespeare’s comedies can generally be understood through their endings in marriage. In marriage, two particular individuals, with diverse and even opposing desires and interests, are reconciled as…
Teaching Hamlet: The Play’s the Thing
Consider a famous question asked at dinner parties: If you were stranded on a desert island and had only one book, what book would that be? The…