Any attempt to mould Shakespeare into the image of what Evelyn Waugh called “our own deplorable epoch” is ridiculously absurd, and “queer theorists” who seek to do so should not be taken seriously as scholars or critics. If these critics were able to empathise with the past, they would see Shakespeare’s sonnets as they truly [...]
While painful, suffering can have good consequences and enrich our personal lives. Overcoming adversity can produce in us sentiments of satisfaction and fulfillment. When we confront tragedy with courage and honor, we experience a growth in character that stays with us for life. In Virgil’s Roman epic poem, The Aeneid, there is a famous scene [...]
Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is often taught poorly, if even taught at all. At the root of the problem is the tendency to remain trapped in hell, never venturing forth into purgatory and paradise. This is a consequence of the way that Dante has been taught for decades—indeed, for centuries. Lovers of the Great Books argue [...]
Why characters in Homer’s “Iliad” laugh, and why readers are invited and entitled to laugh, are complicated issues. Quite distinct kinds of humor emerge from and contribute to the epic’s predominantly tragic, painfully serious project. In Homer’s myriad-minded narrative, it is often but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous—and the reverse. Mockery and [...]
John Milton’s “ancient liberty” is not the liberalism of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke, where the telos governing human liberty is dispensed with. Rather, “Paradise Lost” cultivates Christian virtues by reclaiming an ancient liberty within the traditional epic verse form and by returning to that which is first or most ancient: Divine Will. The opening [...]
A key lesson of Sophocles’ “Antigone” is that fanaticism results when public actors fail to practice the one virtue capable of moderating the excesses of human nature: political prudence. In an insightful essay (“Idolatry in Lockdown,” Law and Liberty, January 28, 2021), Spencer Klavan reflects on the contemporary significance of the conflict at the heart [...]
Rome does not occasionally become relevant in our understanding of political upheaval. Rather, it forms part of our very identity as Christians and heirs of the Western tradition that it helped shape. No one saw the essential drama of Rome more clearly than William Shakespeare. In the current issue of Atlantic magazine, editor-at-large Cullen Murphy [...]
Not swayed by popular enthusiasm, Edmund Burke was the first substantial thinker to address the full-blown entrance of radical ideas into the political sphere and the first to express a truly conservative umbrage at the imposition of abstractions onto a world of particular, distinctive circumstances. Juniors at Wyoming Catholic College have just read in Humanities [...]
Dostoevsky’s “Demons” remains relevant more than a century after it was written as it invites readers to a melancholy symphony of self-reflection. The novel’s flailing revolutionaries are not caricatures of archaic belief systems but embody the very structure of human conflict. Dark, funny, and frenetic, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons is a startlingly accurate portrayal of possession [...]
“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 was the pattern exhibited on that infamous day? […]
Our own life’s journey, like Dante’s, is fraught with temptations and trials. We modern pilgrims should exercise the gifts of free will, reason, and a capacity for love in such a way that our choices lead us ever closer to the source of all Love and away from those occasions, near or far, that would [...]
One thing that is abundantly evident from the demands for the cancellation of Shakespeare in public schools is that none of those demanding his removal from the curriculum have been able to read or understand his work. Had they been able to do so, they would know that Shakespeare’s plays show us relevant, perennial truths. [...]
In the wellspring of classic nineteenth-century American literature, a spectacular theme unites our greatest authors. They, in various ways, challenge the naïve optimism of the “American Adam” and American liberalism. They are deeply conservative in their skepticism toward human and civilizational progress and perfection. It is true that the classics, especially Virgil and Cicero, along [...]
American democracy has proven to be a success in its representation of interests but a failure in cultivating citizenship; it has protected some civil liberties while allowing others to erode away. One lesson we can draw from its history of successes and failures is this: For a republic to succeed, institutions are not enough; civic [...]