"William Shakespeare and the Roots of Western Civilization" - Paul Cantor

[Music] so our speaker today is a very prominent conservative scholar he is from the University of Virginia where he is the Clifton Waller Barrett Clifton water Barrett professor in the English department ASL italic I will go at the University together he received his PhD from Harvard University 1971 and he's written a lot of plays and not only bike shakes but about Shakespeare in Shakespeare's time but he is also a very prominent powering of popular culture in all aspects not not barely its connection to the literary greats but the popular culture has made a famous series set of art forms among the bookies written for example the bane of popular culture is unlike this time Gilligan the unbound pop culture in the age of globalization he is an authority we'll see if he says much about it on Wall Street and economic economics and I don't know how many people know more about Austrian economics emptier mr. Kanner but he's he's written on that literature the economics of Liberty spontaneous or at a culture that in 2010 back in 1974 in Shakespeare's Rover the plays like to meet nominal family and most recently and I just had pleasure of reading it and limited to about tomorrow but you see later on website Shakespeare's Roman Philip and that's only a small amount so you're in for a treat and let's get rid of me and get on thank you for that introduction and I'm very proud honored to be here at Texas Tech um I'm gonna try to give you the big picture on Shakespeare today and relate him to this theme of Western civilization I believe that Shakespeare is one of the pinnacles of Western civilization maybe the pinnacle in terms of cultural achievement why restricted to Western civilization I think Shakespeare represents the pinnacle of the cultural achievement of humanity in fact I'd be willing to bet that he the pinnacle of cultural achievement of the entire solar system maybe even of the Milky Way galaxy I don't know about Andromeda but this guy is big and I think one of the reasons is that he has such a grasp of what we call Western civilization that as I'll try to show you today he understands the roots of our civilization in ancient Rome but he also sees how much the development of Christian culture and the Middle Ages contributed and finds many ways in which the classical and Christian traditions work together but also many ways in which they are at odds and in tension and that produces some of the greatest tragedies in Shakespeare's plays and I'm going to stress the incredible historical and geographical range of his work that his plays ranged all over the Europe of his day and they also go way back in time not just in English history but all the way back to ancient Rome as well and I think he honestly is capable of understanding different nations and different time periods now in a way that may seem obvious it's one of the reasons this plays as timeless but in fact there's a lot of scholars who deny this about Shakespeare who see him as an Elizabethan English men who view his horizons were sprint restricted rather narrowly to his time period there are many critics for example who say that Shakespeare's Roman plays are not really about Rome that is Romans are just Elizabethan English men with togas on and that is incapable of imaginating himself into the ancient world now I think that's wrong and I think it's fundamentally wrong there's in fact a kind of irony to this that Shakespeare towers above his contemporaries that's why we read him and we don't read his contemporaries anywhere near as much and often do it only to get another angle on Shakespeare we are interested in Elizabethan period because somehow it produced Shakespeare but many people try to reduce Shakespeare to the Elizabethan period and that's what I'm gonna try to counter here I think of Shakespeare there's obviously a great poet a great dramatist but also a great thinker and worthy to stand among the great philosophers in human history I have found over the years that what really helps me understand Shakespeare is going back very specifically to Plato and Aristotle among his near contemporaries reading Machiavelli in my new book Shakespeare's Roman trilogy I have an extended comparison between Shakespeare and friedrich nietzsche on ancient rome so me striking was very odd but I found it very helpful in understanding shakespeare's view of Rome to see what another of the very greatest figures about Rome said so I want to treat Shakespeare as someone who goes beyond his own age and I'm going to in many ways focus many ways focus on politics here and use the issue of monarchy as my entrance into this for whole generations it was assumed that Shakespeare was somehow a monarchist he lived under a monarchy and people assumed he he must have believed that monarchy is the best form of government and to know what Shakespeare thinks about monarchy we were directed to read all these second and third rate Elizabethan treatises on monarchy now there's no evidence that Shakespeare ever went out in the street with placards saying down with Elizabeth to hell with monarchy he would have been killed feet on that which is an indication that maybe we can't obviously know what he thought about monarchy and in recent years people have begun to see that there may be ways in which Shakespeare found monarchy challenging how could you not looking at the kinds of people that ended up on the English throne and fairly recently a man named Andrew Hadfield wrote a book called Shakespeare and republicanism and that's where the small are that challenged this assumption and I had been challenging it since 1976 and my first book Shakespeare's Roman Republican Empire but it's an interesting fact and what I'm going to show you today is Shakespeare displayed a remarkable curiosity in Republic's that he went back to ancient Rome to study the Roman Republic and he even took a serious look at Venice in two of his most famous plays Merchant of Venice and a fellow and I hope to get to them today as well and it looks as if he was trying to figure out this hey what's this new thing called a republic and how's it working out on the Italian cities and some people find this so hard England was a monarchy no one was talking about Republic's fewer than 30 years after Shakespeare's death England was a republic Oliver Cromwell comes out of nowhere and establishes a Commonwealth part of our problems the Elizabethans didn't use the word Republic they used the word Commonwealth but it means the same thing and where did that come from maybe somebody was thinking about Republic's as early as Shakespeare's day and that's that's what I want to suggest here so what I'm gonna do a very easy task I'm going to cover Shakespeare's history plays then his Roman plays and then Merchant of Venice and a fellow so maybe I'll cover about let's see 9 plays for you I'll throw in something else if I have time and what I'm doing in a way is ridiculous but this is way too much to cover in one tall but on the other hand sometimes we do have to step back and see the big picture Shakespeare's greatness is evident on the level but it's also there on the macro level so we could I could give you a 90-minute lecture on one line and one of Shakespeare's plays that's why I make the big bucks and if obviously I could give you an interesting lecture on one of the plays sometimes though we have to step back and figure how do these plays work together I think Shakespeare's actually created a universe in these plays the Shakespearean cosmos and I'll say this if one wanted to understand Western civilisation one could do stupid things than to spend one's life studying Shakespeare's plays I think if one ever could understand how they all fit together and by the way I don't claim to do that but if one could I think it would give us a deep insight into Western civilization and what are our it's components are and how they work together and how they work against each other so let me begin with the history plays and again my aim here is to show Shakespeare had a sense of history I he knew that the human condition changes over time and especially that it changes when politics changes and that changes in regime changed the whole ball game they create new human possibilities and shutoff old ones and to me this is why Shakespeare is so profound so his history plays our a substantial part of his achievement of his 37 or so plays 10 of them are history plays I'm going to concentrate on what we scholars call the second tetralogy which is Richard the second Henry the fourth part one and two and Henry the fifth these I'll say or as most mature history plays his best nursery plays they work together as a tetra oh gee and reveal his understanding politics in general and kingship in particular and indeed when you study them you see how complicated the question of kingship is in Shakespeare's mind that one cannot simply say he's for or against kingship because there's so many different kinds of kingship and this set of four plays turns on the difference between to use our term medieval kingship Shakespeare didn't have the word being evil but medieval kingship and modern kingship and that's the difference between a feudal monarchy and a modern centralized monarchy now feudal is f EU da l that kind of feudal but if you heard it as futile you got the point because shakespeare's point is feudal monarchy is futile monarchy he sought is deeply problematic and not succeeding in its own fundamental goal of providing a succession of effective Kings now the particular aspect of feudal monarchy that Shakespeare concentrates on is the division in sovereignty that this whole system of feudalism was essentially one where the king is first among equals that's exaggerating it but the point is that there are these great Baron's in the land they have their own armies they have people directly loyal to them and effectively they could counter the Kings power all these famous civil wars and Shakespeare the Wars of the Roses which he treated in his first tetralogy that Henry the six plays of Richard the third or for that matter the battles going on in the second tetralogy they show that the king is in the medieval model is just not strong enough if the Barons gang up on it and that in itself is a problem the other problem is the position of the church in the medieval world where it is an independent power independent of the Kings sovereignty and owns vast amounts of land and affected mound armies and so many of the difficult moments for shakespeare's Kings are when an archbishop or a bishop joins in a rebellion against the king and that happens throughout Shakespeare's history plays and again it's another issue of divided sovereignty what Shakespeare's histories play show is the emergence of some kind of centralized sovereignty under what we would think of a modern monarch Shakespeare shows it ultimately happening with Henry the seventh in his play Richard the third and again a model for this ultimately was Henry the eighth but already in the second tetralogy it's second in order of composition but deals with earlier events historically he shows Henry the fifth as a king who's finally unifying England I mean it's very important for Shakespeare to become bring some kind of stable sovereignty to the land now this set of four planes begins with Richard ii and richard ii really begins in the medieval world the high medieval world the opening scene is almost straight out of King Arthur and as Knights we've got almost a tournament we've got two knights knights in shining armor showing up ready for a ritual combat and for Shakespearean ritual combat is a sign of everything that's glorious and everything that's screwed up about the medieval world ritual combat is to settle the dispute to settle an issue of justice - Knights fight to the death and the one who's alive is the just one now that's not the way to settle issues of justice it presumes that God will only let the just one win historically that doesn't appear to be the case and indeed what we see the opening the play is this wonderful world of chivalry Knights are taking olds it's very ceremonial and ritual and all the banners are flying and there's a dispute over who killed somebody and a noble named Bolingbroke is going to fight some guy named Mowbray and it really is everything that feudal monarchy is everything political is saturated with religion now at that point Shakespeare has one of the great cuts cinematic cuts in all his plays as we go from seeing one of Richard the second - scene to scene one is this beautiful public display of chivalry and nobility scene two we see Richard in private with his inner councillors and they're just trying to figure out how to extract as much taxes as they can from the poor citizens of England to keep financing Richards incredibly extravagant and luxurious Court and we reach a point later in the act where guy named John John of Gaunt dies an important noble Richard's uncle and Richard just seizes his land violating every principle of right and really undermining his own claim to the throne as many of his counselors try to advise him so on the one hand Shakespeare shows this medieval world is hypocritical you got all these public pronouncements of religious faith and undergirding the regime by religion it turns out just to cover for a corrupt Court and moreover richard ii expresses faith and the Divine Right of Kings as with the very premise of ritual combat he thinks the hearts going to defend me I'm the anointed king I can deal with any rebels what he lacks however his arm and he thinks that is his defense is somewhere up in heaven but he's down on earth and it turns out this guy Bolingbroke who will become King Henry the fourth is able to muster a greater army then Richard and defeat him and depose him and again Shakespeare recognizes how beautiful this kind of medieval monarchy looked but it was fundamentally weak especially because of the divided sovereignty and this assumption that God would come - it's a the aim of this regime whereas Bolingbroke goes by the principle of god helps those who help themselves and in particular one thing Shakespeare shows is a lingering fascination with the Crusades in medieval monarchy now these events are in taking place in the 1300s after the Fourth Crusade but it's actually interesting Shakespeare shows how much people are still obsessed with the Holy Land in England one of the Knights Thomas Mowbray when he's banished now says I'll go off to the Holy Land and Henry the fourth in his plays keeps talking about wanting to lead a crusade and at the very spoiler alert at the very end of the second part he reveals he had been a prophecy he was going to draw die in Jerusalem and he's dying and he says what room were the palaces in say oh this is the Jerusalem room it's all mad did I have that one wrong and Shakespeare sees something serious in that I I always found this very kind of abstract point a couple of years ago I was in Bodrum Turkey formally halaqa diocese and there's a giant crusader castle later I think the largest one left order st. John's when you get up to the top there are these towers in the English Tower of the French tower and there there's a tower built in Bodrum Turkey and it has the Lancaster coat of arms on it and Henry the fourth had that Tower built because he still wanted to contribute to capturing the holy land and this would be the late 1300s Shakespeare's aware of that that this is a problem that that's an unrealistic goal to reconquer the Holy Land at that point and that's one thing that Henry the fourth son Henry the fifth learns let's conquer France instead of the Holy Land it's just of course lee in this channel there's a lot of money there let's go win back France because of course his line is ultimately from the anglo-norman so French and that's the kind of shift in politics I think Shakespeare thought was needed it shouldn't sound so strange to us the idea was to take religion out of politics now eventually this became our principle of separation of church and state England with the National Church never quite got there but still what you can see in Shakespeare is the idea that politics is divisive enough without introducing a religious component into it so that for example in Henry the fifth what Shakespeare shows about what in many respects I think is his ideal picture of a monarch is that Henry the fifth makes sure that he's got the church in line Henry the fifth opens bizarrely for us with a scene between the Archbishop of Canterbury and I believe the Bishop of edye and they're discussing a bill in parliament to seize the church land and they've made a deal with Henry that if he leaves them their lands they will support his claim to the throne of France be great interpreters of texts they will read the French salic law which governs their inheritance so that it means not what the French think it means but what the English think it means and so the church is made a deal to give Henry what it wants and he'll let them maintain their lines this by the way is a forerunner of what Henry the eighth was to do when he established the Church of England and did seize all the lands of the Catholic Church and again I think this is an attempt to create United sovereignty the other thing is that Shakespeare shows Henry the fifth uniting the nobles behind him by getting them to join him in a crusade but not for the holy land but for France and he assures them there are plenty of rewards coming you'll all be richer and ennobled if we win our conquest in France and Shakespeare and I think there's a real sense that this is how a monarch has to run things the other remarkable figure shows about Henry the fifth is that he's in touch with his people that in rallies the people too inside and by the way not just the English people but quite self-consciously in the play he is rallying the Welsh and the Irish and the Scottish to the British cause very very important movement for an English monarch as we could see even today when they've got to worry about Scottish independence and Shakespeare in Henry the fourth part one shows the education of this Prince Prince Hal will go on to become Henry the fifth and it's presented as puzzling to everybody he's not hanging around court he's hanging around the taverns of Eastcheap he's hanging out with criminals he's drinking a lot and everybody's puzzled by it but but what the prince is doing is learning his people he knows he's going to have to leave them some day and he says at one point I could drink with any tinkerer in the land in his own language Shakespeare shows he's learned they've learned their language they called drinking deep dying Scarlett it's really important that he can talk to his people and seems trivial of at the time and yet when it comes to a crisis in the Battle of Agincourt when the British are outnumbered 10 to one by the French he's able to go about among his troops as common people troops and talk to them and and and rally them to his side and now it's in this Shakespeare doesn't show this in the spirit of modern democracy in fact Prince Hal has a real aristocratic contempt for the common people there's one point where he said says more or less I'm paraphrasing and I'm not as good as Shakespeare I can't believe I'm hanging out with these low-lives and he he sensed and one of them you know you you got two shirts whoa one for today the weekdays have one for Sunday and yet despite that and I wait Shakespeare sees this as a great achievement that despite his aristocratic contempt Henry the fifth the future Henry the fifth does not make the mistake that the other Qinglin Kings have done and and show is contempt for the common people but rather he's he knows their importance and has learned to speak their language and what I see here is that Shakespeare was hoping to modify English kingship pointed in a new direction which he hoped had a basis in the English spirit he wanted to moderate English kingship he was worried about the absolutist claims of the medieval marks and so was hoping to to create what's called a mixed regime in England where yes the king would be the ruler but he would make sure that the Barons the great Nobles felt they were on board and were getting their share but also that the common people would too and you know this is reflected in what emerged as the British constitution with the House of Lords and the House of Commons and so on now that's some idea of Shakespeare's sense of English history and it's not static he sees kingship changing over time and he understands the trade-offs and the the medieval monarchy seems spiritual and it it claims such a nobility and yet in many ways it was corrupt and in any case it was unstable and Shakespeare wants to move to something we would call more modern and really starts to see some ways project back into the reign of Henry the fifth what was to emerge as the strategy of the Tudor dynasty under Henry the seventh Henry the eighth and good Queen Bess now there's some interesting touches so in Henry the fifth I hear there's a comic Welshman named Fluellen and he's always referring to how the Romans conducted their Wars and there's a bit of a patent and he keeps insisting that the Romans would have done this and the Romans would have done that as if the Romans are his great example and then in a chorus that begins at five Henry's returned to London after the triumphant Battle of Agincourt which was on my birthday by the way the chorus comparison to a Roman general returning in triumph from a great victory that's a very interesting moment that it shows that Shakespeare looked back to Rome as a model and thought it could suggest ways in which England might improve its regime and so let me move now to the Roman plays and what Shakespeare does there and now without openly calling for England to become a republic I think he felt that there were ways in which the British monarchy could be reformed in Republican directions so that for example in the 18th century the great French political theorist Montesquieu called England a republic masquerading as a monarchy which in a way is how you could describe it today as the descendant of that long long process so why was Shakespeare didn't wrong if he was so restricted and horizon this arises to Englishness well Rome looked incredibly powerful to him its achievement its political achievement seemed unparalleled now Rome was a fascinating subject to this day we were fascinated by it I think if you look at the History Channel Rome would rank fourth as the most interesting subject after Hitler swamp people and ancient aliens I'm fascinated in Rome I just love it I've been there twice and I've studied Roman ruins all over Europe and some room is pretty impressive to us today but just imagine how impressive it was before the days of new weapons just how impressive something like the Colosseum looked during Shakespeare's lifetime not that he saw the Colosseum but he probably heard of it and of course there are great Roman ruins in Britain like Hadrian's Wall and everywhere you looked in Shakespeare's day you saw reminders of Roman greatness you could see it even in the English language the multitudinous seas incarnadine it's a line from Macbeth Shakespeare who knew how important Latin was to the English language and so on and so like so many of his contemporaries here Machiavelli would be a great example in his discourses on Livy people look to Rome as the greatest political achievement hitherto in the world and they understood that Rome had conquered the entire Mediterranean world and much of Europe and how did it do it and I think the Shakespeare was interested in that and he really did imagine himself into an utterly alien world and see how deeply different Rome was and for that he wrote a play called Coriolanus one of his three great Roman plays Judah Caesar and Cleopatra and Coriolanus now Julius Caesar and Cleopatra are wonderful plays they deal with great subjects we would know Abdullah's Caesar or ranting Cleopatra if Shakespeare had never written play is about them I don't think many of us would know about Coriolanus if Shakespeare hadn't written a play about him and I think in some ways it's a more remarkable achievement because there Shakespeare is thinking himself back into the earliest days of the Roman Republic essentially when it formed in reaction to the expulsion of the Etruscan Tarquin Kings in Rome and it gave Shakespeare a chance to examine an utterly alien community one which was complete pagon completely Civic and completely devoted to war now I'm not saying that Shakespeare was a war monger and indeed I'll suggest he shows great limitations to the world of Coriolanus but it is a kind of experiment for him what would a community have to be like to be so totally organized about war around war that it could beat any kid on the block that it would defeat every army it ever faced and if they lost a battle here and there to a Carthaginian they'd eventually raised Carthage to the ground and so the fields with salt and so much for Carthage and again that's a many ways a limited human achievement but it's in some ways a pretty impressive one and Shakespeare portrays this early Roman Republic in all its alien character for example it has a purely Civic religion it is the gods of Rome are the gods of the city they are these Roman gods they are not universal gods as we find in the great trans political religions of the world today and that gives the kind of focus to things and a focus on political life Shakespeare shows there's no belief in immortality at least personal immortality in the early Roman Republic as a result if someone wants to make himself immortal he's gonna have to win battles and win them big and that's how you become immortal in Rome and that puts a premium on great warriors as he portrays in this character Coriolanus who could almost a feed a foreign city single-handedly moreover it's a very small city and everybody knows everybody else and the entire weight of the community is brought to bear as we see in the play on young boys to raise them into warriors one of the consuls in Rome one of the great leaders says at one point it is held that Valerie is the chiefest virtue you know I I ask myself could an American politician get up today except maybe in the military funeral and say it is held that valor is the chiefest virtue there'd be a firestorm and what about compassion what about diversity in $1 the chief is virtual , but Shakespeare wants to look at a community where valor is held to be the chiefest virtue you know it's not a Christian community where charity forgiveness would be held as as chiefest virtue and again I'm not saying Shakespeare is advocating this but part of his effort to study humanity is to study it in all its various forms and for that you have to look at different communities because different communities emphasize different virtues and bring out different aspects and watch Shakespeare you read that play or see that play and you can understand why Rome produced one great conquering general after another and again the smallness of the city the civic nature of the religion the focus on on valor and the fact that the whole community was oriented towards politics and in a way to encourage participation in it Rome never had a single ruler in the history of the Republic it always had two consuls and that meant that and they served only one year so it meant that there was a lot of turnover and it was much easier for a young Roman kid to dream of bead console than it is say for an American to dream of being president because there's only one president of time it changes every four eight years this this Roman Constitution gave the nobles a chance to serve the Senate and portray participate in politics that way and then the council was the great leader chiefly the leader of the armies the consuls were the great generals and there was a lot of opportunity to become counsel you couldn't succeed yourself so every year you had two new consoles and also Shakespeare shows again the console was largely gold for the nobles so not entirely in the history of the Republic but the common people in the Roman Republic had this institution of the Tribune aid they would choose their tributes who were their representatives that survives in we name newspapers like the Chicago Tribune the idea that the newspaper represents the people and so even the common people have a say in the regime because the Tribune had a veto power over everything that the Senate could do and so Shakespeare shows again this was called a mixed regime in antiquity Aristotle discusses in the Greek historian named polybius applies it to Rome and the idea was there was a kingly element and aristocratic element and a popular element in this Roman regime and there I think Shakespeare saw the formula which he tried to work out in Henry v that again without trying to have an open republic you might have a monarchy which acknowledged the aristocratic element and the popular element of the regime as the Roman Republic had done initially now Shakespeare doesn't offer the rules Republic is perfect and it's a rather limited world the goals of these people are rather limited of all Shakespeare's plays Coriolanus is the least erotic there's almost no sign of love between man and woman Coriolanus addresses his wife my gracious silence hail so woman's voice is very much subject in the world Republican Shakespeare understands that and again he's not offering this as a universal idea it's a kind of hypothetical imperative one might say if you want a warlike community that will conquer the world this is a pretty good way to shape one but you might not want to do that and understand there's a trade-off here that you can't pay a price for that exclusive focus on politics and indeed what Shakespeare shows in their own place is that over time the Republic decays I won't go into detail so you can read my book if you're interested in seeing it spelled out but basically the Roman Republic is corrupted by its own success as it conquers more more territories it encounters foreign ways of life that are very alien and which work to subvert that principle that Valores the chiefest virtue for example the Romans encountered the Greeks and one thing Shakespeare shows in Judas Caesar is a colonization of the Roman Republic that famous throwaway line of Casca it was Greek to me when he his Cicero speaking but it was in Greek in casco claims not to understand it it's it seems a trivial detail but actually we find it yeah there's a lot of Romans speaking Greek in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and that it particularly means Greek philosophy there's a stoic in the play Brutus there's an epic unity to play Cassius Cicero is in the play and he variously is thought of as a play missed or an academic skeptic there's a cynic who interrupts Brutus and Cassius in their argument and we suddenly see there's this Roman Roma's infected with Greek philosophy and indeed there were many Romans like Cato the Elder who said it's gonna be the end of the Republic if we start listening to these Greeks this weak and corrupt Greeks now there is you know in some sense it's a great thing for Rome that it's now exposed to Greek philosophy there's no philosophers in the world of Coriolanus on the other hand it turns out that these philosophies tend to be a political or anti political and they do work to undermine the regime something similar happens in Abney and Cleopatra that from having this very narrow civil religion Rome starts to be exposed to foreign mystery religions they start worshipping Isis in Rome I haven't time to go into it but I believe this is a kind of code word for Shakespeare to Rome's exposure to Christianity another mystery religion out of the east but in any case you see the Roman virtue is being undermined by being exposed foreign influences and above all the once Julius Caesar comes along and establishes one man rule of the city and and then Octavius be eventually becomes Augustus Caesar and establishes the Empire all that political participation of Romans in civic life and political life disappears no more two consuls changing every year there's one Emperor for life now that meant they killed a lot of the Emperor's and there's the famous here of four Emperor's and so on but but it does mean that political participation is tapped down under the Empire and it needs to be because the last thing the Emperor wants is someone challenging his rule and being ambitious and the Roman Empire encourages vice self-indulgence Julius Caesar's famous line Antonius let me have men about me that are fat I've always liked that line but the notion is I don't know that Cassius has a lean and hungry look Caesar doesn't like the old style ambitious Romans he wants someone like Marc Anthony who party party parties all the time and so here's an interesting example again change the regime change the way of life the Rome of handing Cleopatra is diametrically the opposite of the Roman Coriolanus and I think that relates that Shakespeare relates that to the change from Republic to Empire again the he actually sees how with the emergence of the Roman Empire it dissolved all the ancient cities and created life political life on an unprecedented and gigantic scale and that changed everything and again all the again I the point it is an issue in Shakespeare is not what he advocated in political terms it's what he understood about human life by understanding how changes in politics changed the very terms of human life and again either closed down certain possibilities as they open up new possibilities and again to me the most remarkable achievement in a way and all of this is to have imagined a community in Coriolanus that is the polar opposite of the way politics worked in Shakespeare's day now let me quickly turn to the modern Republic again one of the most remarkable things in Shakespeare because it shows him anticipating so many developments that were just beginning in his day and here he was fascinated by Venice again wrote two plays about Venice shows a great understanding about Venice talks about the city as if he'd been there there are these theories there's this lost period in Shakespeare's life where we have no record of where he was it's actually surprising how often we really do know where he was because he was involved in so many lawsuits that it is depositions he has to give us address but their superior early in his life where some people think he went to Italy miss ish you know he knows where the Rialto is in Venice now I don't think he had to go there I first learned about Venice by going to Las Vegas and seeing the Venetian I felt that was fine for a while it's a lot cleaner for example but undoubtedly Venetian merchants came to London and one of the most popular things to do was to go to Shakespeare's theatre because it was known as the best theatre in Europe he probably met somebody ssin merchants and draw a little map think of writing a play drawing a little map of Venice here and more to the point he understands what makes Venice distinct and that is it's something new it's a commercial Republic it is a community which brings people together for the sake of commerce it is a city of merchants who are trading all around the world and that means the city has to be cosmopolitan in a way that even Shakespeare's England was not and certainly the ancient Roman Republic was not that is if you're trading with people around the world you have to be open to them and to their different ways of life so that just on the surface of it what Shakespeare shows in Merchant of Venice is there are Jews in Venice and they're there for the sake of Commerce they're not light their religion is not respected but it is tolerated and you may not know this but the Jews were outlawed in England that during Shakespeare's lifetime now there are estimates that there may have been as many as 10,000 Jews in in London masquerading as Christians but in any case on the law books I guess it's Edward the Confessor had outlawed Jews in England of course the Jews were kicked out of Spain in that curious year 1492 and here was Venice admitting Jews and in a fellow Shakespeare introduces the issue of Muslims and a fellow is the moor of Venice now he is a Christian he is a converted Christian but to the Venetians he's a moor that's how they refer to him again and again and that means whatever he may say they think he's Muslim and for example of an Asian gentleman is not happy having this more marry his daughter if he did not have prejudices against Muslims he wouldn't be so upset with this so Shakespeare showing something remarkable about Venice and this new kind of Republic that people a community could tolerate differences it sounds very modern to us and it should sound modern to us and it's very interesting how Shakespeare can think ahead to this and it's very important in Venice that what it will do for the sake of commerce when is trying to get his bond with Antonio and force the Duke of Venice says we gotta stick to the law because our whole reputation depends on it people will not trade with us if we don't stick to our laws and Shakespeare shows understands the connection between rule of law and Republic's and what commerce requires and there's a lot of things admirable about the Venice he portrays just as there were historically without Venice it was not always a decaying tourist trap it was once the greatest power in the Mediterranean and its height the Venetians controlled the entire Adriatic coast including the city that's now Dubrovnik and was then called Ragusa it controlled the majority of what's now Greece it controlled the island of Crete the island of Cyprus roads it was an incredibly powerful force and it had the largest Navy in the world and it eventually was key to standing up too soon among the magnificence Navy for control of the Mediterranean so it was in a it was the most advanced city industrial ii in europe its arsenal a that produced its warships was a model almost what we now call mass production they were turning out hundreds of ships a year anyway if it doesn't look so impressive now but it was very and Shakespeare was impressed by it but as always he sees the defects and the virtues of everything and in a way there's no deal Virtue's without defects it's why he was such a fundamentally tragic writer and the problem is that venice sacrifices a lot for the commercial spirit to prevail and here there's a wonderful moment which I believe I'm the first person to notice in the beginning of her Merchant of Venice this merchant Antonio is very sad and his friends can't figure out why and they think oh maybe he's in love and he says no and and what if the merchant says well he's worried about his cargo he's got all these ships out and he's nervous about that he says after all when I sit in church and hear the sermon I'm always thinking about my ships and how they may be sinking and it's just a mel's you everything about Venice this is the typical Venetian he's sitting in church they gave his merchandise and checking his insurance it's just a throwaway line but I finally really that that's what Shakespeare is telling us about this community that it places commercial interests above religious interest and in fact the two people that don't fit into Venice are the Jew and the Christian not just the Jew but also Antonio the sincere Christian he won't he won't just let commerce prevail in his life and and at one point describes the strangeness of the community when he says to Antonio and again I'm paraphrasing I will buy with you sell with you deal with you but I now yeah I will not eat with you drink with you or pray with you now we can understand that today that's really the principle of the United States I mean we have to learn how to deal with people who are of different religions but that was a very new idea just beginning then because the the idea that you the community of people who don't pray together that was very strange to people well into Shakespeare's day and Shakespeare's looking at this new possibility of the commercial republic and he shows the problem with it that that this community is because its commercial has special needs of farms for example it's a commercial community largely of Christians but they can't take interests from each other it's prohibited in Deuteronomy and so that's why they need Jews because he can't be merchants without a money market and so Venice admits Jews to perform an act it regards as irreligious maybe taking interest look at a fellow Venice is largely a community of merchants they're not warlike they're not brave and courageous yet they face the Turks a very warlike people so Venice decides we'll get our own Turk we'll get this guy a fellow who's fought the Turks claims is Christian now but really he fights well against the Turks because deep down he is a turret and you see the problem in Venice that it admits people to the community for services it absolutely needs commercial Republic's gonna need money markets commercial Republic is going to need to defend itself in this case against the Ottoman Turks but it's in itself it's not a warlike community it's against taking of interest Antonio is vehemently against the taking of interest and so that's where we get this situation what we would call second-class citizens in Venice that when push comes to shove it does not accept these foreigners shock at the trial and that for suddenly finds himself prosecuted and by a law that applies to aliens he thought he was a citizen of Venice and certainly with a fellow as I mentioned how much of a citizen is he if it's thought of as dubious that he marries a Venetian woman now I could go on and on about about this but I do want to say that again is remarkable how Shakespeare was able to think his way in to the nature of a commercial republic when they were just appearing on the horizon in Florence and in Genoa and in Venice and soon to be in the Netherlands and he sensed I don't know if you'd say this is the wave of the future but he sense this was a new possibility but once again it was going to change the human condition so that it would reduce the importance of religion in human life in the name of Commerce and would you know set three free all sorts of commercial energies as you know Venice was the richest community in Europe at the time and still dominate the trade routes in Shakespeare's day even despite Columbus and Bosch Vasco de Gama but he saw that there were going to be problems with this Venetian community as well so the writes a tragedy about Venice and Othello and Merchant of Venice pushes a play as far as you can to tragedy when he can still rescue comedy by the extremely force v Act which really never convinces anybody as a resolution so we've had a brief romp through history and geography with Shakespeare again I've spent my whole life trying to figure this stuff out but I thought was worth trying to compress it into one ridiculously brief lecture to give a sense again of his range and especially his ability to imagine himself out of his own circumstances as a 16th century Englishman and imagine what a fifth century BC Roman was like or a contemporary Venetian I think ultimately this is what makes him the greatest of all authors and that has given him the timeless character he has that he was not restricted to his own age but his imagination reigns freely through history and geography the house I'll stop here well again for example Deadwood there's a very great Shakespearean aspect to know and in fact in the third season David Milch introduces a Shakespearean actor and there's a sequence where he splices built splices in dialogue from Henry the fourth part to between silence and shallow into the diary of the show no indication I'm quoting for Shakespeare but he shows that he can his dialogue is as good as Shakespeare's because you can't pick out the Shakespeare lines from there no one's noticed this that I've seen but it's a remarkable achievement and you know Milch was a professor at Yale thanks to his cocaine habit and his compulsive gambling he had to go to Hollywood and write these shows to finance his bad habits as a result we have dead one which is I think one of the five greatest shows of all time and I've just completed an essay called the Macbeth of meth the tragedy of Walter White in which I use Macbeth to understand bad and I take another hour to explain that but I think Vince Gilligan and David Milch are two examples of people in Mill just cases directly influenced by by Shakespeare [Music] I mean Milt worked with clean at Brookes and Robert Penn Warren at Yale very literary figure Gilligan is from farmville Virginia so maybe not so literary but I think in his case he worked his way and in fact i you know i i've been using macbeth because I think Walter White is a tragic hero and people are hung up on the idea that he's a villain and he does villainous things but so does Macbeth I mean Macbeth kills little children just the way Walter write to us and I'm not advocating the killing of little children but I think it is true that you can still be a hero and get caught up in a sequence of events that leads you to do terrible things and I find it interesting that the concept of tragic hero is absent from the vocabulary of people who write about popular culture and for good reason I mean there were no tragic heroes and I Love Lucy and you know for a long time television was unsophisticated but in the past ten years I've seen what people have talked about the emergence of the antihero but I think in many cases it's the tragic hero I first noticed this actually writing about John Ford's The Searchers we're ethan does terrible things but he's basically a heroic figure and you want him on your side if you're in trouble and when i noticed that there's a kind of simplicity to the criticism of popular culture which is usually appropriate to the simplicity of the works of popular culture but now that we are getting these incredibly sophisticated works emerging we have to turn to people like shakespeare to help understand it try to think what else would be Shakespearean in nature can I'll stick with Breaking Bad and Deadwood what was going on stage yes I the the fact is that most of the things not all but most of the things we think of as high culture today were popular culture in their day and all these fancy schmancy things like Italian opera and Shakespeare's play they were just the popular culture of their day and there's a kind of optical illusion that we now look at only the best of the works in the past and isolate them and think oh you know Shakespeare's plays are so great and they are but you should look at all the plays we have I mean there's a play called a Christian turn turk by a man named robert de Bourg it's the single worst Elizabethan play I've ever read and it's as bad as the worst thing you've ever seen on television and it's obscene on top of all of that and is there anyone in this room who's read a Christian turn Turk the big scene of the play is a circumcision and the audience must have went wild seeing that I staged I'd like to see the stage directions for that one but so yeah I think we we have an illusion that popular culture is somehow uniquely the base now but it's always been the base I recently discovered what's called sturgeons law theorists Turgeon was my favorite science fiction writer when I was a kid and I discovered he formerly the most important law a law of culture 90% of everything is crap I think he underestimates it it's more like 95% and so there's a lot of crap on television now there's a lot of crap in Shakespeare's day it's estimated 40,000 novels were written in England in the 19th century who reads even a hundred of them anymore so I think what we have to understand about culture is that and every time there's all this stuff going on and most of it is lousy but it is what you need in fact what I'd say is what you most need for culture is a broad base and access to cultural production so that he was great in Shakespeare's day that there were several theatre companies in England and they were rival theatre companies going after playwrights and it's clear that playwrights thought the young men thought wow if I'm ambitious go to London that's where the money is that's where the fame is and had many opportunities and it's the same let's say with the Victorian novel or Italian opera and you know for me the big moment in television was the breakdown of the try appellee of the big networks ABC NBC and CBS the younger people in the audience can barely imagine the era of three channel TV but at that point as the great producer of Gilligan's Island Sherwood Schwartz pointed out there were three people in the world who controlled access to television the program directors at ABC NBC and CBS Rupert Murdoch broke that with Fox and so much of the most original program it came on Fox including The Simpsons and the x-files and now with cable and our streaming it's the greatest moment in history to be a TV writer and TV I think the most sophisticated narrative writing in the world today is being done for TV because so many big rewards so many opportunities and you can get started very easily now and if you look at the great years of culture almost all them before university-based modernism you will find that the great achievements and culture rested on some kind of broad base often commercial in nature and it's like evolution nature is prodigal nature does not sit around producing the single perfect animal it just tries all his species and sees which ones last and at the end it looks like oh this was perfectly designed so on but we know is the process of evolution I think culture is similar in that way that's what my next books going to be about not a scholar as a philosopher please slowly one entertained was pants now consist of living for you I don't see why these things are incompatible or why people Shakespeare was a very ambitious man and I believe socially ambitious he wanted a coat of arms he wanted to be a gentleman I think his childhood was humiliating when his father got thrown out as essentially mayor Stratford and I think you know he he did everything to make money he became a millionaire not in terms bought land land and more legs you want to be a gentleman eventually got that coat arms but that's entirely compatible with his being a great thinker and he he had an oh what a very rare talent to be a profound thinker and also to entertain people though it's not you know it's not unprecedented and there are you know novelists like dusty F Skeeter Thomas Mann have philosophical depth and yet were popular wrote bestsellers and and so on walter kaufmann set of shakespeare he was able to give the odor of sty to his pearls before casting them before this swine and it is astounding you know how popular it was in his own day and has continued to be as somebody you know he's such a magnificent poet and such a great dramatist but I do think there's this deeper level I mean that's what I was stressing tonight and to me it's the thing that is most enchanted me about Shakespeare and I will you know III think ultimately his goal was philosophical in the sense that it was understanding he wanted to understand human nature and indeed you can say that because of how profoundly he grass through nature he can write plays that peel to human nature I actually think that there he may have had a sort of political program I I I do not think that Shakespeare shaped the modern British regime but I wouldn't underestimate his role in shaping it that generations upon generations of not-so-bright British aristocrats saw these plays learn them by hard to some cases and and it had an effect as I said I think it was a kind of moderating effect of holding up and ideal of the British monarchy that was reshaped on the bowel of the normal probably that makes it sound too programmatic I realized but you got to put it some way and I'm trying to get across the the idea and Harold Bloom has famously claimed that Shakespeare invented the human I'm more modest to say invented the Englishman and you know we're so tempted to look at his place it oh it's just like the English and you know it the the verbal facility of the English is so extraordinary you just have to watch boxing and listen to an American heavyweight champion interviewed compared to Anthony Joshua a British heavyweight champ it's just astoundingly inarticulate this of say a Mike Tyson and don't tell him I said that because he still packs a punch but these Lennox Lewis for example the British heavyweight champion I mean the guy was incredibly eloquent talking after the matches and you know maybe that's genetic but maybe it's that they've all grown up with Shakespeare in a way that is more intimate than we do and now again you want to see Shakespeare was English and his verbal exuberance and fecundity probably comes not but he certainly had a great effect in reinforcing it and making these people the most verbal people on earth so and I do think he had an effect in British politics and sometimes at the highest levels like Winston Churchill yes not Vince Gilligan could I just being in the whole of Western civilization Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that'll stop yet and he was he was I mean he he makes Leonardo look like a one-track mind because he was anyway you know if I had to pick one person that would be character and if this was an audience of Germans you'd all be applauding that's a there's a question over there I don't I I do sense get out a Stratford was a big aim in his life and so one you know there's all sorts of rumors by I hate to dignify them I was telling Steve this though earlier I do think it was an incredibly ambitious man who knew how great he was knew how smart he was and knew how I mean here's a guy who not a single day in his life was he not the smartest person in the room and even if he met Francis Bacon which I don't think he did but but and here he was you know one-horse hick town Stratford and where his father embarrassed himself and where he seems to have been forced to marry a certain woman because he got her pregnant and so on and it looked like his life was over I think when that happened and I think he just gritted his teeth and said I'm getting out of here and eventually got to London I was just as I've mentioned to see he probably had a heavy work shear accent and there's in this right as you like it a character named bill shows up and he's an incredible country bumpkin and I think that's how Shakespeare must have felt when he came to London dazzled by the big city saw all these university educated men writing plays and he had only been to high school though it was a very good high school and he learned Latin better than kids in college do today and and so on and and and it must have been humiliating to him and people tried to humiliate him called him an upstart crow and the only shake seen in the language is a big joke about him and I I think he fought it and he stayed and prevailed at the end and as I say the who know I mean you have this sense he was wandering was trying to figure out what he to do the one thing he didn't want to do stay in Stratford would this perhaps this feeling about feudal monarchy maybe be the reason why he avoided the topic yeah it's a very interesting issue because some of you may not know that Henry's brother his older brother was named Arthur and the Tudor dynasty was hoping to establish itself by reviving interest in King Arthur it was it was little art that got married Catherine of Aragon leading leaders for the problems when Arthur died young and we had Henry Henry the eighth instead and you've got Spenser's Faerie Queene an enormous effort to repackage the Arthurian legend for Elizabeth times you know John Milton originally considered writing an epic on King Arthur and then he decided it's untrue these stories are legend I'm not going to base the greatest epic ever ridden which I'm gonna write on an untrue story and so yeah I mean it's interesting I mean Shakespeare does he wrote King Lear he wrote Cymbeline I mean he does go back to that material but I I think he was trying to write about what looked to him like historical England and he worked with sources and you know Richard the third was as evil as he portrayed him and that sort of thing so we had an agenda but you know I mean when I started studying this stuff reading about Shakespeare was all the Tudor myth and that shakes were bought into it and he was just supporting and I don't I don't think that's true for a moment I think it was very skeptical about it and he understands that there's a mythic element to kingship and Henry v illustrates that the guy creates a myth of Agincourt on the spot indeed after winning it by the single most dubious action in all of Shakespeare namely executing the French prisoners suddenly Henry's saying all credit to God I had nothing to do with this victory okra and that's an example of mythologizing to sharpen role rule but I mean a Shakespeare thinks they're you know reaches the second problem was his rules all poetry and no reality Henry the forest problem is it's all reality and prose and no poetry and the thing you can say about Henry the fifth is he learns to put together the prose and poetry and base his regime on some very Machiavelli and realistic principles but give it the aura of some kind of sanctity he knows that his task is to restore sanctity to the regime after his father committed the sacrilegious act of murdering the anointed king even though that was necessary one last question oh yes well that's interesting I think he'd be writing for TV I think he would have long loved long-form narrative and that's where the money is now and the fame and so he'd be there you know it's her it's hard to say I I've often said this looking at the twentieth century in America I think the two subjects Shakespeare would have been most interested in or George Patton and Douglas MacArthur and I think Coppola --zz screenplay for Patton is one of the most Shakespearean things written in the 20th century I mean when you look at Shakespeare's heroes they are flawed military heroes who achieve glorious things but screw-up when it get involved with domestic politics and so it is so I mean the obvious thing he would write about I think are the the you know it's arguable there's something tragic about the car and and patent the interesting thing is whether he would have made the jump to the modern hero let's say the entrepreneur whether he wouldn't but I am suspicious of that so but the earth he'll say is his mind that imagination was so much greater than mine and that you know if I could answer your question I'd be writing the greatest play in the world today people always say to me you know what's the next great TV show and my answer is if I knew that I wouldn't be wasting my time at the University of Virginia I'd be out in Hollywood creating the show and it is something too we sometimes don't face the fact that the great authors like Shakespeare are simply in another league from us I point this out to my stews if Shakespeare had died at age 20 we wouldn't know that we were missing King Lear in Hamlet we couldn't imagine that and so I will do such things what they are I know not but they shall be the terrors of the earth that's King Lear that's the way they will show me the wonders of the earth there Shakespeare alive today we couldn't begin to dream of what he'd be doing so get out the DNA kit cloned the guy and let's see what happens but but I will say earlier he would have been doing movies now I'm pretty sure to be attracted a TV because TV is a writer's medium in the way that movies or not and certainly aren't now okay that's a good way to end it [Applause]

Channel: Western Civilization, Texas Tech University

Views: 3,931

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: Paul Cantor, Steve Balch, Stephen Balch, The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, Western Civilization, Texas Tech University, Lecture, Shakespeare, Shakespearean Scholar

Id: UOpcR9lZBPY

Length: 82min 32sec (4952 seconds)

Published: Tue May 29 2018