William Shakespeare’s women display virtue while being tested in extreme situations not of their own making. One of the greatest of them, Viola in Twelfth Night, is in extreme circumstances to which she must apply the virtue of patience. That “patience is a virtue” has been proverbial since the Middle Ages—Chaucer’s Franklin in The Canterbury Tales [...]
Language…most shows a man. —Ben Jonson Aristotle’s famous statement that virtue is a mean between two extremes is generally not quoted in its entirety. He does indeed say, “In respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean”—that is, a mean between two opposed vices. Courage is a mean between [...]
Critical engagement with Shakespeare’s texts shows beyond any reasonable doubt that his works are interwoven with Catholic references and a Catholic worldview. But does this mean that the Bard was in fact a Roman Catholic? Encyclopedias come in many shapes and sizes. They also come in many stripes and guises. Some should be taken seriously; [...]
St. George’s Day, the feast day of England’s patron saint, is Shakespeare’s birthday and, believe it or not, is also the day on which Shakespeare died. Apart from the astonishing coincidence that Shakespeare died on his own birthday, it is also singularly appropriate that England’s greatest poet should have been born and should have died [...]
From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing, That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue, Could make me [...]
The reason that Shakespeare is not of an age but for all time is that he serves the Holy Spirit and not the spirit of the age. Soul of the age! The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage! My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie [...]
Black is my color. As a priest, everyday I step into my uniform and become one of the Men in Black. But once, when one of the schoolchildren asked why priests wear black, I did not have a good answer, except to say that the color was considered a somber and serious contrast to the [...]
Justin Kurzel’s “Macbeth” features many streams of spilt blood, but a deeper current moves below the surface. It is animated by an awareness that life, though vulnerable, is an intrinsic principle and fundamental desire. It may seem absurd to leave after seeing director Justin Kurzel’s new adaptation of Macbeth* and to think, “Now that’s pro-life.” [...]
Blessed John Henry Newman wrote that Shakespeare had “so little of a Protestant about him that Catholics have been able, without extravagance, to claim him as their own.”[1] Hilaire Belloc, echoing Newman, insisted that “the plays of Shakespeare were written by a man plainly Catholic in habit of mind.”[2] G.K. Chesterton, reaching the same conclusion, [...]
Almost four hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare remains one of the most important figures in human history. Standing shoulder to shoulder with Homer and Dante, he is part of the triumvirate of literary giants who straddle the centuries as permanent witnesses of the permanent things. It is gratifying, therefore, that modern scholarship is [...]
Fy on Love without Money! —John Wodroephe, The Spared Hours of a Soldier, 1623 A perennial question for some persons of every generation is: Shall I marry for love or for money? It is typical of the open-minded Shakespeare that he finds nothing wrong with marrying for both. There is in him no niggardly stinginess, no [...]
One of the worst crimes committed by the modern academy is what might be called Shakespeare abuse. It takes many forms. There are those who say that Shakespeare was a cynic who sneered at religion, or those who claim that he was a homosexual, or those who claim that Shakespeare was not really Shakespeare but [...]
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 mob’s victim, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the justifications and defenses of the lies of myth. The lies of myth are offered in the [...]
As I write, news is breaking of the horrific killing by a white supremacist of nine people at an African-American church in my own home state of South Carolina. This sickening murder highlights the pernicious nature of racism in its ugliest and most violent manifestation. The person who committed this crime is a throwback to [...]