Pints With Aquinas - Shakespeare's Life, Work, and Religiosity w/ Dr. Aaron Urbanczyck

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Dr. Aaron Urbanzyck is the Chair of the English Department at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He received his PhD from Florida State University. His teaching and research interests include: the great books of Western civilization, Literary Theory and Criticism, Dante, Shakespeare, ancient Greek literature & philosophy, and the Philosophy of the Human Person. Show Sponsor: Strive 21: https://strive21.com/matt Exodus90: https://exodus90.com/matt Hallow: https://hallow.com/mattfradd  

All right You have to make it seem professional you see we don't even need to do that we just see the cool people do it All right, dr. Aaron great to have you on the show Matt it's a privilege to be here Thank you for asking me. How do I say your last name or Bancic a burnt a Bancic? Is it Polish or by the grace a bansik is it polish or uh by the grace of god yes it is polish well i know i i know i chose the right fella to come on the show to talk about shakespeare when i texted you and said uh text when you get here no rush and you texted back if it be now tis not to come if it be not to come it will be now tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now yet it will come. The readiness is all. And then I said,

okay, I'm on the fourth and markets. Yes. I've chosen Hamlet to speak for me today. Amazing. The readiness is all. I got, you know, after my conversion, I was 17 years old. I'd never really read a book in my life. Isn't that crazy? 17 years old. I just somehow made it through high school,

pretending to read and wasn't interested in reading. Why would I be? I had television. I wish to share with you something from, and I say this without too much irony, one of my great life coaches, Henry David Thoreau, and he famously says in Walden, many a man, and I famously says in Walden,

many a man, and I'm paraphrasing him, many a man has marked a day in his life as a turning point by the reading of a book. Well, I didn't have such a point until I was 17. So after my conversion is when I got this hunger to read about the saints and things like that. So as soon as I began to read fiction, I immediately became pretentious. And I did so I didn't go from, you know, like the easier books, I went almost almost all right to like Dostoevsky. The point is, it

was my pride that led me to Dostoevsky because I wanted to be the kind of person who enjoyed Dostoevsky and then I accidentally did did I fell in love with him. Shakespeare is someone I would like to like and there are a lot of people who would like to like but it's difficult and they don't even know how to get into him or they would like to be the sort of person who enjoys good literature and so that's what today is about is to try to help. If you can help me by the end of this episode think Shakespeare is fantastic because I know nothing about Shakespeare almost nothing. Oh Well, you know, I've done your job wonderful. Well, I look forward to that conversation I

Remember a conversation with a colleague of mine This was at my one of my first academic positions at that Baylor I had a postdoc at Baylor in Texas and I was speaking with one of my colleagues and he said, how do we make a defense for the great books? And my response was, they don't need a defense, we just need to show them to people. And so I think it's a type of acquiring a sense for what an artist is doing, coming closer to a position of simply seeing what's- or acquiring a sense for what an artist is doing,

coming closer to a position of simply seeing what's- Bring that mic up to your mouth just a little bit. Oh yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of simply seeing what's happening. And once the vision comes into focus, the vision in Shakespeare is simply overwhelming. It is, it's entirely overwhelming. So the good books, the great books, um, it's an acquired taste. I, I try to think it would be like if you were raised on McDonald's and soda,

and then someone introduced you to this thing called a medium rare steak and a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, you know, like it might be disgusting to the person who's only eaten sugar and junk. And likewise, I think we kind of spend a lot of our time doom scrolling or watching Netflix. So the idea of sitting down with something like this is very overwhelming and at first not even enjoyable. Has that been your experience with your students? Oh, it is. It is. I mean, people come from many pathways in life in terms of their own formation, the things that have influenced them. But if I could talk about Shakespeare in particular in this sense,

one of the first things I say when I teach Shakespeare is that this is first drama. So it is intended to be to be acted and intended to be seen and intended to be heard. Now there is great pleasure in reading Shakespeare. I think there is also a particular pleasure in, in seeing him acted well, seeing him interpreted well, seeing him appropriated well. And it, it, it really brings to life the,

the almost supernatural power that this man has to show us to ourselves. I might say if I could summarize Shakespeare, which is hard to do, but if I could summarize Shakespeare, I would, I would, uh, it, I'm drawing from something Dr. Samuel Johnson once said that he, he is, he is the great diagnostician. He shows us ourselves. He shows us human passions. He shows us ourselves. He shows us human passions. He shows us human action and human language. He has created an astonishing number

of almost infinitely complicated individuals who once they come to life, one can scarcely stop thinking about them. They become in a sense interlocutors for you. I think so that's one of the things that great literature does is that it, and in Shakespeare's case in drama, the personalities are simply overwhelming both for good, for evil, vice virtue. It's, it's, it's simply extraordinary.

I see myself in the four brothers of the brothers of Karamazov, for example. May I ask which one? All of them, yeah. Well, yes, in a sense, yes. I'm wicked, like Ivan. Yeah, I'm passionate, like Dimitri. I'm sometimes reflective, like Alyosha, you know. You're saintly like Alyosha. Well, please God, yeah.

Yeah, so that's, I definitely see that. When you read, it's like what good comedians do. You listen to a comedian, the reason you find them funny is they say, look how ridiculous I am. And you're like, you are. And then they go, I'm you. And you're like, you, I am. Like you're articulating this part of my experience

and inner life that I didn't know anybody else was experiencing. And so when a comedian can do that, it's this kind of, you feel less alone. It's like a relief of some kind. It's interesting, this kind of you feel less alone. It's like a relief of some kind It's it's interesting you you you mentioned comedy because I mean Shakespeare. He's unusual because he's He's powerfully adept in tragedy and

Equally adept and powerful in comedy which is a rarity in dramatists that you know you seldom see someone who's so good at both. And you touch upon something in comedy that when I teach the comedies, I think within the nature of humor and comedy, this just occurred to me, and your point about comedians made me think about this, that the things we laugh at

are always the most eminently serious things in life We we don't we you know there is triviality but work human sexuality Marriage God the state. I mean humor the things that we laugh at are really the most fundamental things and I think there's something deeply communal about Comedy and about humor is that it brings us together around in a shared consensus that these are really the things that are important and that it's it's almost a type of relief because it's so hard for us to talk about them in the way in the way the comedians do and in the way comedy does in Shakespeare I mean that's

the concept of comedy the humor and it always revolves around these these really fundamental things. Well let's zoom out and I'll let me ask you the question who was William Shakespeare? Oh, that's a big question. Many people have made their careers trying to answer that question. So William Shakespeare was born in 1564, he died in 1616. And I suppose we may talk about religion,

but he was living in England at a time of tremendous, um, change of tremendous, uh, changes within the fabric of England. Henry the eighth had had his day. Um, Queen Elizabeth and King James were the monarchs during most of Shakespeare's life. And, um, so it was a time when England, of course they're, you know, they're at war with the Spaniards and so on. Um, it is a newly reformed place because, um, you might know your history better than I do, but probably didn't Henry VIII

have a dispute of some type with the Pope? I think something, I think he disagreed with the Pope about something. And the result of which was he declares himself the head of his own national church. So which is, you know, it's a reformed movement. So this had happened prior to Shakespeare? Yes, if I had that date in my head, I would quote it, but I don't. But he is on the cusp of an England which had just cast aside its very long Catholic past. And so the doings of Henry VIII and certainly Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, and her ultimate successor, King James, were really solidifying England as a non-Catholic Protestant nation. If by Protestant you mean it's not

Catholic. I mean, it was the Church of England. it had, you know, as you know, some similarities liturgically, but it had distanced itself from Rome. So he's growing up in what I think is a deeply troublesome and toxic time in terms of religion and culture and things like this. So he's coming up and so he was baptized on April 26th in 1564. And the tradition seems to be that three days prior to your baptism, or three days subsequent to your baptism was the birthday. So his traditional birthday is April 23rd, which I think is conveniently also St. George's Day. That's good for England. And so this is 1564. He was the son of a Glover named John who likely could not write.

Maybe he read, but he likely could not write. And John was married to Mary Arden. Shakespeare had two children or had, I'm sorry, it had two siblings prior to him who died in infancy. And then he was the youngest of five that lived. And he happened to grow up at a time where there was a very severe plague. So in many ways he's lucky that he made it. It was a devastating plague that broke out in one of the baptismal registers or

one of the registers in Stratford. There's the Latin phrase, Hic and Chipit Pestis on the very year that he was born, you know, that the plague had started. So he was lucky to make it. Was he baptized Catholic? Um, no, at this, at this time, this, no, the, um, you know, I should have looked at that prior to coming here. You could edit that out. But, um, I, my, my, I don't think so.

I don't, I don't, I don't believe because it, if, if my memory serves, you know, this is one of the things I forgot to check on is that who was the Monarch when he was born? I don't happen to recall when Queen Elizabeth, you know, when, when she began to reign, but, um, but it was his early life going into his young adulthood was, was well under the church of England. Okay. So, my, my guess is that he was baptized Anglican, but we, you know, we'd have to, the historians could tell us this. So, you know, his, his father was, was a glove maker.

And for the early years of Shakespeare's life seemed to be a very prosperous man. He had held several very important positions in Stratford in, especially going into the 1570s, 1560s going to the 1570s, holding a position even as high as something like the mayor. So he was a person of civic importance and when Shakespeare was a boy. Another interesting thing is that several theatrical troops

had come through Stratford. This is well documented that several theatrical troops had come through Stratford. This is well documented that several theatrical troops had come through Stratford and Shakespeare would have had the opportunity as a boy to witness actors and acting troops were maintained by aristocrats at the aristocrats expense and they would tour around for entertainment. So he would have had the exposure to the, to the stage. Um, and he very likely attended, um, maybe proto public education though, something called the King's new school in Stratford. And because of his father's position,

he would have attended the King's new school where he would have had an excellent education in Latin and rhetoric. He would have known the reformed Bibles like the Geneva Bible or maybe the Tyndale Bible very well. So he had a very elaborate rhetorical training and linguistic training, especially in Latin literature. So by, and this brings us to about the time he's 15. And unfortunately, by the time he would likely

have finished school, his father's fortunes were seriously beginning to decline. So his father had gone through a period of prosperity and then declined just as Shakespeare was becoming a young man. And this is an interesting thing. There are several gaps in his life that drive the scholars crazy.

One of them, this would have been about 1579, Shakespeare would have presumably been finished with the King's new school. And between then and when he married Anne Hathaway, there are a couple of years, 15, I think 1579 to about, I think around 1582 is when he married Anne Hathaway. Nobody knows what he was doing. And that's one big gap.

And in Shakespeare scholarship, these gaps just are, they drive people crazy because everyone wants, well, because they want to know what he was doing. It's just a few years, isn't it? It is, but they want to know what he was doing. This is, if, listen, if you and I, I mean, maybe you'll be famous, I won't be famous, but you know, when Urbansa goes to meet his maker,

no one's going to care about the gaps in my life. Everybody cares about the gaps in this man's life. I mean, this is, subsequently we're just, as I was mentioning to earlier, I don't know of another figure we're more preoccupied about to track down every dimension of his life. More that I've seen with William Shakespeare and all of my academic work. I, I, it, it's with the possible exception of our blessed Lord for religious reasons, I, it's,

it's very difficult for me to think of someone where the level of obsession and the sheer quantity of scholarly inquiry and historical inquiry matches in Shakespeare. And when the evidence fails, the wild speculation. Yeah, I was going to ask you, what is a reasonable hypothesis? Well, I'll share with you. So I mentioned we're gonna talk about religion. Now one of the most, I have an uncle who's an economist and he said you ever want to start an argument, get a room of economists together and ask him if the economy is improving and then they'll start bickering. So you get a group of Shakespearean biographers together into a room and ask them whether he was a Catholic and just watch the fist fight.

You know, it is a hotly contested point for reasons of both religion, and ask them whether he was a Catholic and just watch the fist fight. It is a hotly contested point for reasons of both religion, ideology, and historicity. And it's just, as they say down south, it's an absolute hot mess. It's a very complicated situation. Because as we have discussed already, England is in this immense transition and there's all this question about how Catholics

should we be. Henry VIII, the act of supremacy, Queen Elizabeth codifies the requirement for you to be Anglican, but there's all this sort of long-standing Catholicism in various quarters in England. Okay, so it seems very likely that Shakespeare and his family were either old Catholics or highly sympathetic to it. I mean, one of the most contested things about Shakespeare's scholarship is the last will and testament of his father. St. Charles Borromeo, you may have heard of this fellow. St. Charles Borromeo, let me step back and say this. I'm a Catholic, I'm always on the side of the church. But this is just a difficult situation because the Pope of Rome is over here and you're the queen, Elizabeth ex communicating you there.

You know, sometimes you should bring out a Reformation age scholar. There are allegations that the church is trying to send in people to assassinate the queen to cause, you know, and so on. And the Pope of Rome is sending Jesuits and maybe others, but into your reign, into your regime, to ask people to explicitly retain their Catholic faith, which you can imagine at this time is not just a religious matter, it's a defiance of the crown. So here's Elizabeth, you know,

you've got these problems on your hands here. And so she codifies the, and she basically says there will be no public Catholicism and lays this out that you have to attend the church of England and we are going to watch you. And if you don't, you're called a recusant. And they kept track of who the recusants are. And his, his father, John ended up on a list of obstinate recusants. Now, and for those in the back, what did they do to recusants? Well, it depends. It could be a financial, um, it could be a financial penalty.

There, there could be prison involved or, you know, if, if your recusancy was, was, was a deeper and more opposed, there could be even more, more violent punishments from the state. Now, but see, see, this is where everything now gets contested because there's a very, there's a scholar I admire at Notre Dame. He might be retired now. I don't know, but his name is Peter Holland where the, the list of recusants that John Shakespeare appears on There are various categories some of which are people who are

Recusants for the purposes of avoiding debt and John Shakespeare was deeply in debt at that time So it raises the question was he avoiding going to Anglican Anglican services out of religious Conviction to Catholicism was he going to Anglican services out of religious conviction to Catholicism? Was he going to avoid debt? So the, the, the, uh, the agnostic or the Shakespeare is not, um, a Catholic camp will say could point to this and say he was avoiding debt. Everybody knew he was in debt. So, you know, his reasons for being a recuse and are even open to multiple interpretations. And, and I would say this, I'm not an historian by training,

but I understand the methodology and, and some of this, some of these questions are quite legitimate, but because you don't really know why he wasn't going. And it was very clear from recorded documents that there were a variety of reasons why people refused to go to Anglican service. So, so anyway, that's, that's something about religion and his father. But his father was a known recusant. Shakespeare, one of Shakespeare's daughters was a known recusant. So he kind of moved in circles of people who were pulling

back from and willing to pay the consequences of not aligning with the Church of England. So that's definitely, I mean, whatever the reasons might've been for his father being a recusant, it would seem to be in the fave, in the favor column of him being Catholic. If both his father and daughter were willing to undergo penalty for, or at least be known as recusants and be open to the punishments. And, and so, so I just, I just have to say, I mean, all of this is, is maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. This whole discussion of Shakespeare's Catholicism, if you ask me personally, is, is maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. This whole discussion of Shakespeare's Catholicism,

if you ask me personally, is, is, it is, it is an overwhelmingly circumstantial case that the man was perhaps a Catholic and perhaps even devout. It is, it is, and it is overwhelmingly circumstantial. Some scholars, I think, Pierce, Peter Millward, Claire Asquith, there are others, who just pull together and amass all of this evidence

that Shakespeare was so aligned throughout his life with known recusants, with people who were purposefully old Catholics. What does old Catholics mean? Well, I guess I mean retaining the old faith. Okay. So just to be clear on that. Was he on the list?

Was Shakespeare on the list of recusants? I mean, that would seem like. I am not aware that he was ever identified on a list of recusants, and which is one of the things where, for myself, I look at all this and say, it's very clear. Many, many, many known associates of his were almost dangerously recusant to the point

where it could get you in some trouble with the crown. And his family seemed to have strong recusant tendencies. He himself is just simply an enigma. And the plays themselves, I mean, He himself is just simply an enigma. So I think, and the plays themselves, I mean, this is where maybe some of my co-religious and I would disagree. I don't say that they're not Catholic, but he seems to be largely religiously disengaged.

Let me make a point of contrast. Dante is not religiously disengaged. C. contrast. Dante is not religiously disengaged. CS Lewis is not religiously. Those are guys who are seriously engaged with, with deeply religious, Dostoevsky deeply engaged. You know, he's pulling his fiction overtly into the Christian narrative. Shakespeare, I think, um, I'm going to quote the title of a book by Harold Bloom. I like he calls, he calls Shakespeare the invention of the human. Shakespeare is the poet of

humanity. He is the poet of the human condition. And from my reading of the texts, Claire Asquith is, is a, she's a, I think she's a, she has it. She's a, she has a title in among the English lady Claire. She, she seems to be in the vectors of aristocracy. I say this with respect to her. It seems to, she wrote a book, I can't recall the exact title, might be something like the Shakespeare Code,

but she advances the idea that the plays are coded Catholicism. And- That feels too good to be true as a Catholic. I wonder how much of that is isogesis. Yeah, I'm hesitant to accept the code, um, to accept her, her evidence is that he had many Catholic connections. I, that's beyond doubt. Um, but that, that the plays themselves are a type of,

and now I will say this, the corpus of his works are eminently consistent with a Christian worldview morally from the human point of view, from a political point of view, it's his, his general view of the world. And here's where I would differ from many of my secular counterparts. It's obviously Christian. He's not interested in subverting it. I don't think in any serious way, but some claim he might be interested in subverting the Protestants.

That's what this woman's, I don't know. Well, she's saying, well, you know, because the idea, and this is true in England at that time, you had to be a very secretive person to be a Catholic. You had to disguise things you had to get, unless you were willing to have your head cut off, you know, or, you know, because it's treasonous. And, and, and, and Queen Elizabeth, I know less about James, but Elizabeth was, was known at times. I mean, if, if someone directly challenged the monarchy, you know, you have to punish them. And she, and she did, she punished them quite severely. And in the flesh,

you know, speaking politically, like a Machiavellian, you have to do that. If you've decided we are going to be Anglicans and we are not Catholics, and you're at war with the Spaniard and the Pope of Rome's I was communicating you and he's sending Jesuits in convincing people not to essentially be loyal to what you want of them You know, she said so she she was pretty vicious in her repression and suppression of Catholicism But it was really for political reasons. It wasn't I I don't believe she was as as religiouslyly engaged as saying, look, this is what my father was doing. This is the direction in which we're going. Um, the Spaniards are sons of the church and we hate them. So, so it,

it seemed that it was her interests in suppressing Catholicism were, were really for the most part political. I can imagine somebody listening to this and going, okay, okay, who cares? Like Anglican Catholic, they're close enough. Why does it even matter? You know, um, what you, you, you raise a, um, uh, a, a bigger, a bigger question. Yes. Cause in, in one sense, if, if, if you were not influenced by Western education today, you would look at Western civilization to say, aha, there it is deeply Christian.

It is influenced by Christianity and so on. So there are two reasons why everyone cares about this. One is we are dealing with perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived. So everyone wants to know. T.S. Eliot once famously said, Dante and Shakespeare had divided the world between themselves and there is no third.

As it pertains to literary expression or genius in general. You know, certainly literature. I might. I would, I think it's most, it pertains most to literature, but he is certainly in a very small category of absolute cognitive geniuses whose influence upon the world is, you simply can't calculate it. Now in literature, I would say, of course,

you have Homer, you have Shakespeare, you have Dante. I sometimes thought maybe Eliot didn't have a proper estimation for Dostoevsky because I think he's pretty great. But there are these just towering figures in philosophy. Of course you have Plato, you have Aristotle, you have St. Thomas, you have St. Augustine, you have in terms of just sheer influence,

I might throw Cotton Hagel in there. I mean, just where they're like the Himalayas, they're there and you have to contend with them. But I would argue Shakespeare in terms of just cognitive genius, expressing human thought is in a very, very small list of just geniuses that are incomparable, that are suiurus, they're unto their own and so on.

So that's one reason why everyone cares about this because I care about him Yeah, well, yes, because we care and that's why but in the second reason is is because You you probably know very well the the kind of hard turn That that education in the West has taken, especially mid 20th century and going forward, um, it becoming more increasingly postmodern becoming a precinct, increasingly secularist and materialist and so on. And, um, you know, this, this, this casting aside of, um,

the pillars that uphold civilization, like religion, the family, the stability of the state, gender, you know, we could multiply things. And so the humanist, the humanities thinkers in the West, in the 20th century have been interested in co-opping Shakespeare as a materialist, as someone who subverts religion, as someone who subverts gender as a sort of, as yes, as, as a homosexual, as, as,

as someone who is really capturing the spirit of the age, which is, which is becoming increasingly irreligious. So, um, you know, because it ultimately, one doesn't educate from the, from, from nowhere. There is no view from nowhere. I mean, as an educator, I have my presuppositions. I stand in tradition. You, you may have some affinity for, for this, for this fellow Chesterton, Gilbert Keith Chesterton. You may have some interest in it. No, but I love the way he talks about tradition

because it informs you. You stand within it, you stand upon it. You have learned from it. It has given you a vantage point. And in Chesterton and in the Catholic tradition, this idea that this isn't just, this isn't just my particular perspective, that's what the postmodernists would say.

What, what Chesterton and the Catholics and the Catholic intellectual tradition would say is that, um, I was sharing this with someone recently that I said, Catholicism to me is not a way of looking at the world. It's simply a depiction of the world as it is. It clarifies things and so on. So, um, you know, so the, things and so on. So, you know, so the the academy teachers, people teaching what's left of the humanities, certainly within our lifetime and a little bit before it, have been very interested in co-opping a William Shakespeare who was a dependable postmodernist, who dependably conforms to their views on things,

from politics to gender to religion and so on. And he would be less useful if he was an ardent Catholic. Interesting. So what kind of pretzels do they have to tie him up in? Well, this is the problem. This is why I'm kind of marching through his life a little bit, is that the gaps in his life and the ambiguities in his life are sufficient

enough where you can, you can, you can take your surmises about him and, and push them in a certain direction. And his texts are so human and so filled with human variety, human complexity, human passions that, you know, they, both, you know, both the proper passions and the improper passions, they're all there on display. So like how people attribute atheistic arguments

to Dostoevsky because he's able to articulate them so well. Oh, so beautifully. Is it like that? And in a way that's so believable, because Yvonne, you know, there's a little Yvonne living in me and, and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the voice of your religion, the, the, the, the hostility to God just comes alive

in Yvonne and, and you know, his, especially that young existential inability to say, you know, I will, I'm going to commit suicide by my 30th year, because the world is so, is, is so incoherentent and, um, and he's, he's just so, so vital. And so on. So, and that's also with poor Dostoevsky. If you, you, you, you take the, um, I slipped right out of my head, uh, the grand inquisitor, you know, you take that, which is often excerpted and out of context, it almost makes him look like a sheer nihilist because it's such a bleak and dark story that Yvonne is telling.

Not to mention notes from underground and his other works. Oh yes. Yes. No, notes from underground is, I love that work. It's a notes from underground. I think, I think to put tersely, that is the postmodern psyche. It is, it is, it is so bent upon itself. It is so isolated. It is so unable to impotent and bitter because of it. Yes. And it can't relate to others and it sees ultimately it hates the world as it is, but it doesn't see any, anything redeeming. So, you know, so,

so do you think that the modern person doesn't understand why someone could describe the human condition without it being evangelical as it were, you know, these modern movies were so sick of the kind of woke evangelism. Like, whereas there's like the preaching is more than the story. Do you think there's some of that? Like we, we have to think he's making a point in our favor or, or in favor of our ideology. Oh, I think so. And see, as an educator, I am a Catholic, of course, I try and be a devout and serious Catholic, but when teaching the humanities especially, you can't be programmatic.

I resist from the left and from the right the idea that we need to make something out of this text. I say, first, you see what it is and what it gives you. It will be right about some things, very likely. It will be wrong about some things, very likely. And you have to step back and allow it to manifest itself. And I very firmly believe in the formative value and the formative power of that experience. It's like the fairy tales. I don't want a little nice summary of the lesson it teaches me. I just want to immerse my children in that.

Oh yeah. And the story does infinitely more than you and I can even articulate if you engage with that story. C.S. Lewis, everybody loves Lewis, but nobody ever reads his more, his academic stuff. I mean, it's among sort of the popular Christian enthusiasts. And I wrote a little article once about his experiment and criticism, where he's really talking about what the proper way to read literature is. And it's not unlike his more apologetic works.

It's really about, in a sense, it's a work of literary theory. And he comes to the conclusion that the ultimate benefit and value of you exploring literary texts of whatever type is that they teach you otherness. They make you aware of other selves and narratives that are not your own. And he says that in and of itself is,

is the beginning of literary reading where you are, you are no longer, you are no longer within the solipsistic echo chamber in which you live. That literature dispels that and vicariously puts you into a narrative, not of your own making. And that's very different. And that, you know, you start to experience these, the narratives and in Shakespeare's case, these astonishing other selves. And what's the advantage of that? That might be a simplistic question, but why is, why is literature good for that reason?

Why is it not enough just to live in my own story and that be enough? Well, you know, that's a very interesting question. And I'm not sure I have the gotcha answer to it. Other than to go back to Aristotle and other theorists of narrative, where I wanna begin with this idea that storytelling, nothing could be clearer to me than this fact, that story creation and storytelling

are anthropological compulsions. We are made to tell them. We are made to tell stories that are not literal, that are not real and the technical kind of empirical sense. We are, we crave them. If we had a book burning on fourth street of all the books, people would be writing new ones tomorrow and rewriting the old ones, not because anybody made them. I'm fond of telling my students, I said, look, the great literature is not great

because people like me are foisting it on people like you. It survives all of us. It calls to all of us. So I wanna answer this by saying, so it's almost like asking why you need to breathe and why you need to be loved. It is within, we are designed to be creatures who gauge ourselves against symbols,

against aesthetic objects, against narratives, against stories. We were just made to be that way. Um, all of our technology and artists still like this. I mean, look at what's, first of all, I hate video games. No, I mean, I played them as a kid, but that was much simpler. But one thing I've observed in, in the turn video games have taken for, um, right. And I want to talk about this. You can't just open that up without us discussing it.

I need to push back against video games. And then we'll talk about why you hate them. So, well, I will talk about why I hate them, but, um, but they've taken a turn, which they, they never had before, I'd say in the last 15 years where they become a story, there's all this elaborate story and you're sucked not into just the, the stimulation of shooting the gun or collecting rings or something like that. Where the characters come out and there's dialogue. And so in a sense, it's almost like what they call

the graphic novel where the comic book is now, stories have now taken on that graphic form. And so let me just say this, what bothers me about the video game is that it's one more thing that puts you And so I get, so let me just say this. What bothers me about the video game is, is that it's one more thing that puts you in front of a screen. It's one more thing that pulls you into something

that's deeply solipsistic. And the- Okay, I need to press back. Yeah, by all means, absolutely. I wanna agree with you, but I wanna argue with you too. Sure, sure. So I mean, how is that any different from a novel leading you into a story that could

be described as solipsistic? Or if it's just one more excuse to be in front of a screen, what if I get rid of the other reasons to watch a screen? What if I just replace it with movies? Especially since these games are becoming more sophisticated in their narrative. As good luck would have it, I have a cognitive psychiatrist with me right now. No, the reason I say this is, phenomenologically, the difference between, so first of all, I'll say the act of reading is I think perhaps one of the most sophisticated and utterly complex activities

any human being can engage with. The solitary act of reading, or even reading in a communal sense. Because it's, you're dealing with language, you're dealing with thought, you're dealing with comprehension, and you're learning how to articulate the page. Or even if you're reading on a screen is stable and you are working your way through it. There's also something kind of unusual about literary reading, whether it be a poem or a play or a novel that in a way that all the literary theorists try and

articulate this, the barrier between you and what's going on gets effaced. Like you're watching a movie, all of a sudden enter into it. It's the willing suspension of disbelief. That's what some theorists call it. So this happens, now this could happen with, with games too, I suppose, but, but just, but phenomenologically it's, it's you, it's the text,

it's cognition, it's language acquisition, it's language articulation. I'll make a little caveat and tell a story. A friend of mine in Nashville, once, once he said, Oh, you know, I need to, I need to do more public speaking. He was in the music industry. I need to do more public speaking. He was in the music industry. I need to do more public speaking. How am I gonna do this?

I know you were friends and I said, this is what you must do. I gave him a book of poetry. I said, line your kids up every night and read these poems. He said, so why, he said, I said, just do it. Line them up, read them with feeling and emphasis for a couple of weeks. And he was astonished.

He said, what it taught him was cadence, pronunciation, poise. So I would begin with just even from below here, phenomenologically, the difference between reading the text and the type of stimulation that's going on with the multimedia video game. I really... So I would accept what you're saying here, but I would say we're really dealing with apples and oranges here.

It kind of intrudes upon you. It acts upon you as opposed to you acting upon the page. But there aren't movies like that. Would your same argument hold for movies? Perhaps. And, you know, we've seen this in the way movies and films are now fed to us, but I would say this, that I'm not sure you could say reading is addictive in the same way that video game stimulation

becomes addictive, and I would grant your premise that, so I would say normally no, because there are these limits to films where it begins It ends you get up you walk away but one of the the the the nasty things that the technology has done through things like Netflix and all these things where it Just starts cycling itself. So it's getting closer to I think the addictive nature of the video game there. Yeah And that is a good point. I mean, even you go watch a movie, it's done. But a lot of these video games today,

but what's interesting is that seems to also be a positive because you would think if you're just playing Sonic the Hedgehog running on a two dimensional platform, collecting rings, this is a lot less sophisticated to modern storylines in video games. So in that sense, it would seem to be a point for the video games, but they take some of them hundreds of hours to finish and you're spending a lot more time

in front of that. I mean sure you could binge the entire Marvel universe from start to finish, a lot of people don't do that, so that would be a negative, but I would think that the sophisticated storyline on modern games could be a good thing. Like imagine if there was a modern video game that was Hamlet and you got to play one of the characters, okay, walking around and but it had to follow the basic script of Hamlet in that sense. Would you? I mean, this might be an unfair thing because that isn't what video games are.

But yes, I'm wondering if you have a problem with video games kind of per se. And if so, why not with movies? Maybe you've alluded to that. Well, you know, those are some good questions. Let me let me make one more comment and I'll try and come out that. The it this is kind of an engineering response where the video game is like the app and certain other things that are on mobile technologies where it is designed to keep you engaged. It's like the literally like the slot machine.

It's designed to do that. So the nature of the stimulation and the, what it gives you, that's why I wish we had the brain scientists with us or something, you know, the dopamine and just the stimulation, and, and just the, the stimulation to the eyes and the way that trains you and conditions you, I think that is profoundly different from either watching a film and it's certainly different from reading.

And that's one of the reasons why the more of these type of screen-based stimuli you get, the harder it's becoming for many, many young people to engage in what I would call solitary reading. Some literary people call solitary reading. 100%. It's almost extinct in many young people. This is where, so maybe per se it's not intrinsically evil, I think that would be too much to say, but it is now packaged and presented in a way which it's hard to see.

Well, let me put it differently. I might ask someone, I would say, what human benefit for your life, for your education, for your maturity, for your ability to grow, are you gaining from large amounts of exposure to the video game? So I've articulated my concerns, and there's a whole literature on this.

I could say conversely, show me the benefit. You know, it's- Sure, you slipped in the word large amounts of exposure into your argument now. So it sounds like you're saying, because I don't think one needs to engage in activities that advance their intellect and humanity if it's not done with large amounts of occupation.

So in other words, it's presumably okay for me just to kind of zone out for 20 minutes if I've had a rough day Right and you wouldn't say to me. Well, how is this advancing you as a human being? But then you just slipped in large amounts of so I would agree with that I mean if you're spending large amounts of time playing video games That's time that could easily be spent elsewhere, especially we're gonna be judged for and but and but I would still add this to and this is just kind of a Human prudence and and kind of observing habit formation is that they're not designed for you to spend small amounts of time on them

They are simply not I mean there are all these geniuses morning and late video games today I tried I used to like them as a teenager. I've tried to like them now I can't like them because they require a ton of time. Yes. Just to enjoy it. Like the latest Zelda game seemed interesting enough to me. I tried to like it. I got a family, I had a job. I got things I got to do. I can't actually engage in it unless I'm willing to sink an ungodly amount of time into it. I also think about these things from a, not just, see,

we tend to discuss things in the abstract, which is often a mistake because it's, it's also the question of what you're not gaining. So these quantitative, excuse me, quantitatively large times on the phone, on the video game or whatever, it is, it's, it's what you're not experiencing, interacting with others, walking in nature, what have you. And you're also being, and no one wants to accept this, you're being socialized by it.

I don't think in a proper way, but you're being socialized by it. You're being socialized by your primary interactions. And the more that those take on what I'm calling these kind of surreal, not surreal, but inward, narcissistic, solipsistic, escapist. I mean, all of these technologies have those strong, strong tendencies and they, they're the opposite

where I was telling you about Thoreau earlier and many others talk this way, where there's something almost healing and liberating about what I would call solitary reading, whether it be religious, whether it be religious, whether it be literary, whether it be philosophical, you know, even something just of general intelligence. You know, you step back from your day and you read

and you think and it's all, and I- I like what you're saying. So you're saying that like large amounts of time on the video game, we often think of it as, is this a sin of commission? But what about the sins of omission? What are you neglecting? What do you fail reports of vacuum when you're doing one thing? Yeah.

And I really do believe that these, these things are, are no one, no one wants to accept this, but they are, they are socializing us. What does that mean? What does socialize? I think I know what it means, but what does socializing mean? It's, it's, it's loosely speaking, the definition I would use for socialization is it's the constellation of interactions that through repetition, habitually form you on how to interact

with anything and anyone, the world, people, social groups. Yeah, and we've all had the experience of engaging with somebody who's a video game addict, who doesn't know how to look you in the eye or pause to allow you to speak or something like that. Precisely. No, I mean, because this is all just simple socialization is that we, we don't, we don't as, as civilizations and as cultures,

there isn't a handbook for, for how you socialize a child. The child grows up in a family where you have to rub up against your mother, your father, probably a couple siblings, maybe an animal, the neighbors, and there are all these very human interactions where you're gonna learn, oh, I was acting like a jerk here, maybe I shouldn't do that. Or you're going to learn, you're gonna rub up

against things and you'll be taught. And whatever the habits and the discourse and the speech and the customs of your groups will be, will inevitably become your own. And, um, and this is, this is what bothers me about, um, this is going to sound odd coming from a Catholic intellectual like myself. This is, this is Marxist theorist. I like a lot named Guy de Borde. He wrote this book called the society of the spectacle where, um, and it's,

it's, it's largely a Marxist critique, but I'm, I'm in wide agreement with a lot of what he says and He wrote this in the in the early to mid 20th century when things like the TV were coming around But what he's saying the problem here is Not just that you're being bombarded with the image But you're being taught and trained to consume the image as a solitary individual I mean this guy was like a this guy was a prophet

because he didn't even see how true that was going to be. And that he says, and you're being fed this spectacle in ways over which you have no ownership, no autonomy. You're just being fed the spectacle and you're being taught to consume it. And he says, and the problem is it cuts you off from the collective, from the social, you're being trained to consume it in a solitary fashion.

And I thought, this is brilliant, because he put it exactly right, and he really pegged it. The medium is the message. It is, and I would say it's the solitary message, meaning you're alone. I don't care how many likes and tweets and this and that, you're connected. You're by yourself consuming the spectacle. And how is that different from reading alone consuming a spectacle? I want to tell you about a course that I

have created for men to overcome pornography. It is called strive21.com slash Matt. You go there right now or if you text STRIVE to 66866, we'll send you the link. It's 100% free and it's a course I've created to help men to give them the tools to overcome pornography. Usually men know that porn is wrong, they don't need me or you to convince them that it's wrong. What they need is a battle plan to get out. And so I've distilled all that I've learned over the last 15 or so years as I've been

talking and writing on this topic into this one course. Think of it as if you and I could have a coffee over the next 21 days and I would kind of guide you along this journey. That's basically what this is. It's incredibly well produced. We had a whole camera crew come and film this. And I think it'll be a real help to you. And it's also not an isolated course that you go through on your own, because literally tens of thousands of men have now gone through this course. And as you go through the different videos, there's comments from men all around the world encouraging each other, offering to be each other's accountability partners and things like that. Strive21,

that's Strive21.com slash Matt, or as I say, text text strive to six six eight six six to get started today. You won't regret it. And how is that different from reading alone, consuming a spectacle? I would say there's a world of difference. Yeah. Um, just going back to some of the things I said is that you're not being stimulated in the same way by any means you're actually acquiring. This is a great quote from Seamus Haney's translation of Beowulf, and I love Beowulf, where this idiom, there's this Anglo-Saxon idiom called the word hoard. You have to expand your,

your vocabulary, your ability to exercise good diction. You have a broad word hoard and there's only two ways to get that, that I know of. One is through speech and the other is through reading is that you expand your, your toolbox of phrases of words. And, um, Mark Twain just famously once said the difference between the almost right word and the right word is like the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. You know, the right word is like lightning.

That's rhetorical power. It's what people love Lewis. You know, it's word is like lightning. That's rhetorical power. It's what people love Lewis. You know, it's like, it's like, this is why people love CS Lewis. He writes so clearly. It is, it is so, but it's so beautiful and so graceful. So beautiful. Yeah. No, it's very accessible,

but it's, this is someone who is deeply rhetorically trained. I mean, this is a man with an enormous command over the English language who can communicate at many, many levels with incredible eloquence and with incredible grace. To the, to the strand of thought we're on right now. I mean, people, I've heard people say that we don't necessarily read less today. Some of us read more. We're just reading in fragments like tweets and news articles and headlines.

So we're still the amount of words that are going into our heads are still occurring. But when but I think it kind of trains us to lack concentration when you sit down to try and read a paragraph or God forbid a chapter or more. And I felt that I know what that's like. I mean, one of the reasons for the last several years, except last year, I've given up or I've given up. I give up the internet every August. I just, from start to finish,

give my phone and computer away. The reason I do that is so that I can then invest time in reading. I'd say other times like this, when I haven't given it up, I find it very difficult to apply myself to deep reading or any long amount of reading because the internet is firing at me and it's bombarding me with different stimulations and it's interrupting deep thought.

I don't know how to live within internet land and not have that. Other people clearly do. I don't know if there's something wrong with me or not, but it really does mess with my head and so I think it's probably a lot of people it messes with their head But they're unaware that it's messing with I think you you've said a lot. That's that's very insightful there and and I Could say several things one of them is again. This is this is by design I mean the internet is designed to be you know highly stimulating Yeah, and even in the media platform you probably don't have a smartphone because you're cooler than me

But on the smartphones that the pull down refresh that's very much like a One-armed Bandit, you know, they call the the poker machines So if you're on your email app and yes, you you pull it down to refresh and oh, maybe I got a new email And so there's this fear that I might be missing out. Oh, yes. Yes I mean the truth is I do have a smartphone. Okay. How is that for you? Do you, do you feel like it owns you or are you pretty good at putting it in its place?

I'm a human being too. There are some times when you, you, you do get sucked in. I don't use, I don't use mobile apps, but I like to listen to YouTube for, for lectures. I, it's just, YouTube is just this, in the internet in general, it's an undifferentiated sea of beautiful things, garbage, distract, I mean, it's just, but it's undifferentiated.

And so, with people my age, my wife and others, I talk about this and people are astonished that someone could have gotten through college without the internet, which I happen to have gotten. So it's really kind of as an adult, I've explored this. And in my years as an academic, I often go to YouTube to listen to lectures, to listen to academic things.

And there's so much wonderful stuff out there. I mean, you could gain, if it was curated properly, boy, what an education. Or if you had the self control. Well, that's it, yeah. And if you didn't succulent to the other things. I think that's the thing. Like when you're interfacing with this object,

you're actually not capable of engaging self control because of how it's set up. I had to give up doing this because I would sometimes go to YouTube just for some news, but boy, does that suck you in. And then it never ends. So, no, I mean, I'm like everybody else. I need to set my limits, but I don't use any other applications, and I try and I'm very happy when it's not,

I'm not seeing it there and it's not telling me things and, you know. Okay. This is really helpful. I know we just went off on a big side tangent, but I enjoyed it. How do we make our way back slowly to Shakespeare? Well, um, well, I think one of the reasons, one of the ways we got on this was talking about how the modern university system has sought to either get rid of Shakespeare or to subvert him into their

cause. That's how we got onto this. For sure. Tell us some horror stories as to how this is happening. I'm sure you're, well, there's one anecdote. Oh, for sure. Tell us some horror stories as to how this is happening. I'm sure you're... Well, there's one anecdote. Well, the simple one is that Shakespeare has either been removed or marginalized out of curricula, because the, I have this,

I was working on this article where I discussed some of this. I hope it'll come out soon, where I, in of this, I hope it'll come out soon, where I, part of, in part of the article, I articulate the, what I take to be the contemporary approach to literature curricula, those that are still around anyway in American universities. And it's largely a program of social engineering. It's largely a program of this idea of diversity, equity, inclusion. There are marginalized voices which have been marginalized

and there have been the privileging of, you know, the cliche dead white male. So we need to tear all that down. It just so happens that the dead white male is better than the rest of them. That's why we enjoy him. Not because he's white or dead or male. You know, I, I will, I will be happy to admit that I have been very influenced by the late great Harold Bloom of Yale. I never studied with him personally,

and I wish I could have, but he's, he's a critic. I disagree with about certain things and I agree with about other things, but what a brilliant, he was a brilliant reader of Shakespeare and a brilliant theorist from whom I've learned a great deal. And, but he took a lot of heat. Now he, culturally and politically,

he was very much to the left, but he had made the argument that the canon is always, always has to be a type of struggle for, you know, the best of what's known and thought. That's what it means to work your way into the Canon. It's agonistic, it's a struggle, but it's a struggle based on the, the sheer cognitive and artistic power of the individual.

And so strangely enough, a guy like Bloom is very, he would have certain things in common with Chesterton where Chesterton says, look, the democracy of the dead will vote and they will vote and their vote will not be an arbitrary one. They will ultimately acknowledge the things that are the most powerful, that are the sources of wisdom that speak to humanity. So what's happening with the postmodern academy is that, you know, but, but they're, they're of course very influenced by socialist and Marxist paradigm. So they're

saying, okay, we need to bring about the revolution. Right. You coming in before me are a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a transphobe, whatever you want to say. And what we're going to do in the humanities is reprogram you so that you are a dependable postmodern liberal and thus fit for society. So I would say what they have right is yes, you need to train people who are fit for society. But this, you know, I, I, I, I, you know, we probably don't have time to articulate the whole problems with the

postmodernist Marxist paradigm. But you're welcome to. Well, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's, but the idea here is in the curriculum is that we need to, because ultimately all the the centrality of figures, be they Shakespeare, you know, be they Dante or Chaucer is, is that they represent the hegemonic, patriarchy, forces of oppression. And through pushing them out and bringing in the voices from the margins, that's the euphemism they like. Black, tranny, disabled, abortionists. That's why you're going to see, and you, the students sitting in front of me, filled with your racist, sexist, homophobic ways, the literature will be a tool by which I will

re-engineer your sensibilities. And you will come to be more tolerant. You will come to share the views of kind of the liberalized establishment. And that's largely because they're saying, we need to make room, we need to give more voices and so on. And here's an anecdote. I think this was at the height of the whole BLM thing with George Floyd, just in the height of this.

And you could look this up online. There's this, a building at the University of Pennsylvania, Penn, I mean, Ivy League institution. Presumably this is where literature offices are and so on. But there was this great big portrait of the great William Shakespeare. And it was torn down and replaced with a portrait of Audre Lorde.

Audre Lorde, who was a poet, she was an African-American lesbian feminist poet. So she told him, was her poetry shit. I want to be fair. I've read some of her poetry. She's not without skill as a poet. I don't like to be in the business of cultural prediction. I don't know she'll be remembered. I mean, to be frank, I mean, so I say this having read a small amount of her poetry

It's it's very programmatic about issues of race, which is not on its on its face a problem in a poem But you know, you know, there are you know, some of the the sexuality interests there It's got the kind of the more radical approach her radical thinking is very it's but it's it's it's message driven poetry Yeah, and it's heavy on the message. So they tore down, what was it? A painting? Yeah. A portrait painting of one of the, it may have been the Shandos portrait. There are three famous images of Shakespeare, but they,

they took it down and as a political act of, and it's a political statement, um, you know, because you're, you're, you're really dealing with, with, with two entirely different people, William Shakespeare's accomplishments, Audrey Lord's accomplishments. And I say this with all due respect to Miss Lord. It was a political statement saying the voices on the margins have to be put in the center and we have to push these things out because they've too long peddled narratives that are only of a certain culture only of a certain race only of a certain view and we need to decenter that and

Now we need to bring in these other voices so it's it's an obliteration of the whole idea of a continuous tradition and a canon and a hodgepodge of Movies films whatever poems and things like this and a hodgepodge of movies, films, whatever, poems and things like this, which are, they're just, they're purely programmatic in character. They're just for the purpose of the message. It's like the abysmal and just gruesome thing

that passes for children's literature in the libraries now. You know, the nasty books about how, you know, we need to teach you now that, you know, there can be the family with two dads and we can need the books with the, with the graphic sexuality for the six year old. It's, it's, it's purely programmatic. Its purpose is quite simple. They're not artful in the least. Their purpose is to change the way you think and normalize certain things.

I mean, so they have that literally that radical impulse and that's been going on in literary studies. So to get back to why should we care about Shakespeare? He is, he is, I would agree with Bloom and with others that Shakespeare is at the absolute center of the Western canon. I mean, he is, he is one of its great pillars. And there are for sheer genius, is one of its great pillars. For sheer genius, I'll go back to the Elliott quote, I don't know of anyone who has generated more astonishingly brilliant individual works

than William Shakespeare. I can't think of one. We drifted away from talking about his life. By the time he dies in 1616, this is unusual. I would love to get some more, maybe some better Shakespeare scholars who could help me think through this, but I have never in any of my readings about Shakespeare,

one of the enigmas about him is it's not clear how much he ever cared about his own work outliving him. So he dies in 1616. In 1623, his collaborators, I'll step back and say, to go back to the genealogy, because this will help me finish this point, by, I wanna say it about, from the late 1580s to about 1592 is another big lost phase of his

life. Nobody knew what he was doing. And again, there are all these hypotheses about it by the late, you know, by, by probably around 1592 or so going into the 1590s, he's clearly established in London. So he's, he's been married. He has three kids. He left Stratford, went to London and by 1592 he has become known in the emerging scene of drama in London. And I like to explain this to people is that this was an emergence of popular education or popular entertainment that I think is, is almost like the emergence of television,

that the idea that there would be public theater, just it was coming into being as Shakespeare was becoming a young man. So the whole mode of public entertainment where you could for profit, where you could make money was the doors were wide open and he went to London to get in on it. And so by the 15 nineties, he's known as a playwright, even garnering kind of some, the attention of others and criticisms of others. He eventually becomes associated with in a share in a theatrical company called

the Lord Chamberlain's men. And eventually the Lord Chamberlain's men become directly patronized by King James the first, and they become the Kings men. So the scholars tell us, multiple times his, his, his company performed before Queen Elizabeth and before King James. So he was personally known to them, not as a friend, but I mean, his, his work was known to them and they were directly brought to entertain court as well as other nobles. So he was a very successful guy. I mean, so I always tell people this is not some artist off in the corner and in a, you know, down at Leonardo's at the coffee shop thinking, I mean, so I always tell people this is not some artist off in the corner and, and, you know, down at Leonardo's at the coffee shop thinking, I mean,

this is a working playwright involved in almost every element of putting on plays and he's doing it for a living and he's extremely good at it. Highly successful, very successful. I think it's might've been, I can't recall it might've been around 1597. So he lives in London He's supporting his family back home. He buys them one of the most grand homes back home in stats for Stratford That's how successful he was. It was called new place. I believe it was called so he becomes very really affluent I'd say

Probably more than moderately affluent. He becomes very, very successful. And he's very much an engaged professional and he's just banging out. So to get back to this, so this is a working playwright. This is not someone who is a leisureed artist just having leisure thinking, writing, doing what he wants. I mean, this is a guy writing for the stage. And so by the time he dies in 1616, So by the time he dies in 1616,

the scholars dispute exactly how many plays are Shakespeare's. But by the time he dies, a number of them, I think in the ballpark of half had been published as quartos. So they were, and I'm not exactly sure. Quartos. So it's just, it's, it's, if you, if you fold a sheet of paper into four, it's a little booklet. And they would sell them in the book stalls in London. Okay. And that was a source of income presumably

for Shakespeare and for his company. And so quite a few of them were published. And so you have manuscripts that people would even read and purchase as well as go to the theater and watch. So he dies in 1616, but at least 18 of his plays, we don't have any quarto for them. So he dies in 1616. Several years later in 1623, his buddies, John Hemings and Henry Condell, two of his actor, long time acting collaborators,

get it in their head to publish the complete works of William Shakespeare, which contains 36 plays. Okay. And, um, I, again, I think it's about 18 of which we have no quarter for. So listen to this, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, um, the Tempest as you like it, as well as the number of some of the, my, but those are very famous plays. I, I, I could scarcely imagine Shakespeare without Macbeth I mean, so these were only published in in the first folio and it's completely unclear Whether he ever really cared, you know about any of this when he died and so on

It's just he might have but it's just we don't we don't know so 36 plays you're saying is that well 36 are in the first folio the first folio 36 are in the first we'll put together by these together by his buddies Hemmings and Condell and And you know they may have had their own motives. You know they're gonna make some money because he was a well-known playwright. Yep Ben Johnson famously wrote this this beautiful essay about William Shakespeare not essay, but poem about praising Shakespeare And they organized them into the tragedies, the comedies, and the histories. Now, I'm enough of a Shakespeare scholar

to know that if you look at some of the quartos, sometimes what it's called in the quarto is what was Hemings and Condell called it in the First Folio, and sometimes it's not. For instance, Richard III is called a tragedy in the quarto, but they call it a history. So they just, but they grouped them, and they claimed that this was based on the Shakespeare's original manuscripts that's what these guys claim so 36 in there and

And those are all the famous plays. So how many is in that book there the complete? Have to count them. This is the signet here The scholars want to put it between about It minimum 36 at most, maybe 40, because there, there is, um, there, there is a play called the two noble kinsmen, which many will now put in, I think it's in this one here that he seems to be collaborating, I think with John Fletcher, who was another, it was another early modern playwright. Uh,

there's some discussion about a play called Edward the third that some scholars believe he may have collaborated with and been involved with. There is some evidence that he may have written in a play called loves labors one that's mentioned in a registry somewhere, but we have no, we don't have the text for it. And allegedly he also wrote a play called Cardenio, which is based on a story from Cervantes Don Quixote, but we have no text for that. So depending on, you know, how you want to count them, you know, maybe 37, maybe 38, he might've produced up to 40, but at least two of those manuscripts, we don't, we'll never have.

What's his most famous work that's disputed? Some scholars want to say that parts of Henry the sixth, that he wrote two historical tetralogies and some scholars want to say, there seems to be other hands in parts of Henry the sixth, but probably the two noble kinsmen, which is not one of his most well-known plays. Most of his big marquee ones, there's very little. I haven't seen much scholarly discourse

that's questioning the big comedies, the big tragedies. You name the famous ones. Now, nobody's arguing Romeo and Juliet had a co-author. And so to go back to why I care about Shakespeare, linking this to his biography, I mean, so you've got 38 to 40 plays, which is an astonishing number of plays just for any artist.

If I met down on 4th Street, a playwright who's in his 40s and say, I've written 40 plays, I would say hats off to you. That's how old was he roughly when he died? Oh, let's do the math here. So he died in 1616? 1616, 1564 to 1616. Not an old man.

No. I should know this stuff. I'm bad at math, so I'm not gonna try. So our viewers can do the math yourself and you'll see he was not an old old guy. And so that in and of itself, plus 154 sonnets of astonishing power. You know, the phrase, shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Sonnet 18.

What is a sonnet? A sonnet is a 14 line poem in English, typically written in iambic pentameter. So it's, it's 14 lines, whatever you have to say, you have to get in 14 lines and there's usually a particular rhyme structure. And there are variants to it. There's the Petrarchan sonnet, there's the Shakespearean sonnet, the Spencerian sonnet, but it's 14 lines.

And it was used in early modernity, Renaissance time, as a popular mode. It's still around today, but people would also write sonnet cycles. Those became popular where you'd write a whole bunch of sonnets about a similar theme, often love. So Shakespeare, not only does he have these at least 36, 37, 38 plays, 154 sonnets, several other very long poems, the Rape of Lucrece, the Venus and Adonis, which was very fashionable.

Those are kind of love poems of sorts. And the Phoenix and the Turtle, which is a very strange allegorical poem. So this is in a, that's just the amount he generated. If no one cared and he wasn't that good, you'd have to still say, that's pretty impressive that someone could produce that much. And he did it as a working playwright.

I mean, he wasn't, this is not a leisure aristocrat. So, um, and starting in the 1600s up until when he probably retired, he generated just astonishing plays. Uh, most of his most famous tragedies were generated in the 1600s. I mean, you can imagine that if someone, uh, I don't know, you might be familiar with Hamlet or at least loosely familiar with him. Yeah, Ruff Lab, watched the play a couple of times.

If he had written just Hamlet, he would be in all the literature anthologies because it's such a powerful play. But he wrote Hamlet, he wrote King Lear, he wrote Othello, he wrote Julius Caesar, he wrote Macbeth, and then among the comedies, he wrote The Merchant of Venice, astonishing play, absolutely amazing play. He wrote The Taming of the Shrew, he wrote The Tempest,

he wrote As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, and these are extraordinary plays, filled with extraordinary personalities. And among the histories, the early Tetralogy, he wrote two historical Tetralogy. What's a Tetralogy? Four plays. Okay.

And there, many of the scholars like to say that these two Tetralogies are really dealing with the famous war of the roses between the house of Lancaster and the house of York in England. And I'm not, you know, deeply studied in that dimension of history, but, but, but, you know, Shakespeare saw that as fertile ground for plays and certainly plays Englishman would like. But, um, so the first one is he writes Richard the second,

and then he writes Henry and, um, and Richard the second has his throne usurped from him by Henry of Lancaster becomes Henry the fourth part one and two. Um, let's see here. There's Richard the second, Henry the fourth, part one, Henry the fourth, part two, and then Henry the fifth. Um, let's see here. There's Richard the second, Henry the fourth part one, Henry the fourth part two, and then Henry the fifth. So, um, where you have the user, you have Richard the second, who is a weak King and he's usurped by his rival. And then in Henry the fourth part one and two, the rival becomes the King. So let me digress here for a second and say,

Shakespeare's political plays are fascinating. He's really interested in what happens when So let me digress here for a second and say, Shakespeare's political plays are fascinating. He's really interested in what happens when there's political instability and just how ugly political disputes become people taking from others usurpations, um, you know, and the violence and the duplicity that goes on. Maybe later I'll share a little from Richard the third, but you've got Richard the second Henry the fourth part one Henry the fourth part two and Henry the fifth

Where it's so you have the usurper and then he and then his son takes over as Henry the fifth and So that's really powerful and you so you have the young Prince how you have this astonishing character named Jack Falstaff who's one of the most vibrant and amazing comic characters. He's a glutton. He's a byword of iniquity. He's an endearing but deeply vicious man. The young prince falls in with him, but he has to differentiate himself from him. So astonishing stuff. So that's the first one. The second one, see if I get this right here, you have Henry the sixth part one, two, and three, which I think are not as good as the Henry the fourth plays.

But then you have Richard the third, which is the end of that one. So put together many of the literary historians and historians see this as Shakespeare thinking through the disastrous war of the roses, which was, you know, a, a, a very bloody type of civil, uh, dissent, you know, a rending and jockeying of position for the, for the, for the throne. Um, and, and so his political plays really, they, they just shine the spotlight. It's, it's just like, nothing changes in human nature.

You see just the raw crass desire for power and the anxiety that comes with it and the difficulty of maintaining it. All of that's in Shakespeare. And that's why those, those eight plays are to this day still really gripping. So brilliant artists don't tend to walk alone, right? I'm thinking of, um, uh, where you got Dostoevsky and Tolstoy who are then who were inspired by Pushkin as well as others. Um, you've got the Renaissance painters and sculptors who were

kind of around at the same time. So were there any other famous contemporary playwrights or who did he draw inspiration from? That's a great question. Um, his most famous contemporaries were where Ben Johnson, Christopher Marlowe are probably the two most famous Thomas Kidd. There were a few other sort of minor, but you know, so this doesn't say much cause I don't know much about anything.

I haven't heard of those fellas. Uh, it does he tower above them or are they comparable in skill? In my view, he towers above them. I mean, Ben Johnson was a good playwright. I don't particularly like his dramas. I'm not attracted to them. Christopher Marlowe wrote a magnificent play called The Jew of Malta. It's an extraordinary play and he did a good play on Dr. Faustus as well. So Marlowe was,

it was a gifted playwright. You know, I'm, I'm maybe not being fair to Johnson. I, maybe I need to learn to like him better, but, but you know, he was certainly very popular and he was a great poet too. So, you know, there were some impressive figures around him, but that's another part of the enigma of Shakespeare biography. And this, so this sense of,

in 1592 a guy named Thomas Green wrote a little pamphlet called A Groat's Worth of Wit, where he's complaining about Shakespeare. And I think he's not too indirectly saying, he's competing with the so-called university wits, the real educated men who know, you know, are educated. They've gone to the universities, they know the tradition. This guy's bombasting out his blank verse

and, you know, he styles himself. He's adorning himself with our feathers, as he says. And so there's this sense of him being an upstart. I mean, Green calls him an upstart. So he's on the London scene. You have the university wits, you have these better educated men. And so this ties back to the question

of where Shakespeare came from. That's part of the enigma of this man is that he's the son of a very likely illiterate glover who received an excellent education at the King's new school, no doubt, but didn't go to university. In his immediate family, they didn't go to university. In his immediate family, they weren't particularly educated people.

So that's part of the kind of the miracle of this guy, is that it's almost as if the heavens opened up and this person of unbelievable skill and creativity and capability just found his venue. Do we have historical evidence that he was thought to be brilliant in his time as he lived? I mean you already said that he was more famous than maybe some people realize. realize, but I would just, I would simply point to any serious study of his adult life in 1592 from London until his retirement would show you that he was an eminently successful playwright. He was known by reputation to two monarchs favorably.

The King James, the first directly patronized William Shakespeare's acting company. And I'm not saying it's solely on the strength of Shakespeare as the writer, but he was clearly a major commodity. I mean, his name alone carried tremendous power, because of the success of his work. So his reputation and his success as an adult his reputation and his success as an adult in the London stage world seems beyond any question.

He was enormously successful. Which makes it even more unusual that it's, why he didn't seem to leave any indication of what was to become of his own work. That's what that's just a big enigma. But let me raise another interesting thing. I was once, I remember once reading James Weisheibel's biography of St. Thomas Aquinas and realizing how absolutely strange the, the medieval world was about gaining relics from people.

Cause you may have read about this about, you know, when, when, uh, the medieval world was about gaining relics from people. Because you may have read about this, about when poor St. Thomas dies at Fasanova, the monks, you know, they did to his body. Yeah, you should read about this sometime. I won't recount, it's in James Weisheipel, the American biography. But he dies and Reginald's trying to get his finger and all these crazy things are happening.

So I don't know why I thought of this, but, but, but, um, so, you know, he's, people, you know, wanted something, you know, from, from the dead there, but, but to go back to Shakespeare, um, it's, it's, it's unusual that he, we just don't know what his interests were about his, uh, about what his interests were about his, about his extant texts going forward. There, there, we just, we don't have anything there. And, um, and you know, so it's, as good luck would have it,

his colleagues several years later decided to go ahead and publish the first folio. Um, and, and that really, I think that really cemented his reputation going forward because it gave the full, the full list. All right. So if my math is correct, he's born in 1564. Yeah. Correct. He retires at 1592. Does that mean he's done riding? No, no, no, no. He gets to London in 1592. I see. I see. So he's 28 when he gets to London.

And likely, you know, this is another sort of hole, but so from 1592, so probably at least 1611 or so, he's living in London, and he's just doing his professional work and really establishing himself. It seems that by, the scholars are, I'm not sure anybody knows exactly when he definitively left London and went back to Stratford, but at some point he retires and goes back to Stratford. But at some point he retires and goes

back to Stratford for the last few years of his life where he's not writing any plays anymore and so on. And he'd already established his reputation and made a lot of money. So he's in London and he's doing his thing. Have you memorized any of these, what did you say these 14 line poems are? What are they called again? Oh, the sonnets. Have you memorized any yourself? Oh, I'm not sure if I could give you a whole one. Um, I gave you parts of, uh, of some, you know, there's the famous, I believe it's sonnet 18, you know, shall I compare thee to a summer's day that are more lovely and more temperate

rough winds do shake the darling buds of may. And that's about where I'm falling. But it's, it's a, it's, it's an extended comparison between the speaker and the object of his affection. And it's this, the argument of the poem is that the object of his affection is even more magnificent than the most exquisite summer day. It's, it's a, it's a very beautiful poem. You know, but let me say this though. I, this is, I got off track and I wanted to mention this.

So when you talk about Shakespeare and his peers, where I was trying to circle back to is this is again, just when you think, oh, and this is what made me think about St. Thomas, just when you think Shakespeare biography could get a little bit weird, it gets weirder. There are, there are multiple movements called the anti-Stratfordian hypotheses, where Shakespeare, see, cause you asked this question,

how do you account for Shakespeare? Who are his equals? Who influenced him? A number of scholars seem to believe that the son of an illiterate Glover from Stratford simply could not have written. And this is based on no serious evidence. This is largely, it's a classist argument where they're saying this guy's just, he clearly can't be the one producing all this. So they propose, there are all these theories. The most famous one is Edward Devere Earl of Oxford.

And I'm not studied in why they think it's him, but, but you know, they, they come up with, you know, there was Edward Devere Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, some of the crazier ones. Was Bacon a contemporary? Yeah. He was, okay. Enough, enough of a contemporary. Yeah.

And some of the crazier ones have, they've proposed Queen Elizabeth herself. They have proposed King James. They have proposed the Archbishop of Canterbury. I mean, it gets wild. And this is primarily because he shouldn't have been this brilliant given his father and limited education. I forgot that I was, I was reading some, one of these anti-Stratfordians,

it's somehow this, this lowers the dignity of England to suggest that the son of an illiterate Glover could be our greatest. It's just a class-based argument. They just simply can't. But here's where I concede something to them. And it goes back to your question. There really is no accounting for the unbelievable power of this man's creation, his skill, his genius.

It just seems to literally come out of nowhere. Um, it's, it's very difficult to account for. Okay. I'm looking up this sonnet. Shall I compare the, I've never read this in my life. Well, let's have a read. I've barely, I've barely watched any shakes. I think I watched Hamlet twice, maybe I know nothing. When I grew up, I was watching horror movies and pornography to my shame. Well especially the pornography. It was awful. So I think a lot of people are boring

like me and they want and they regret and they're sad about the fact that they never had a great books education which is why I wanted to have you on. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, and summer's lease hath all too short a date. But sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often in his gold complexion dimmed, and every fair from fair sometime declines by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed. But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou oust. Ouest.

Ouest, right. Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, though wanderest in his shade. When in eternal lines to time thou growest so long as men can breathe or eyes can see So long live this and this gives life to thee Forgive the poor rendition of that. Oh, no, that was beautifully done Beautifully done. All right. Help me like Shakespeare pretend you got five minutes. Give me something. Oh, I mean other than his life. Oh, I like Shakespeare, pretend you've got five minutes, give me something.

I mean, other than his life. Is it too difficult? No, I've been accused of ruining this play for many people. So I have to say a few words about the sonnets, and then we'll talk about this play. So the sonnets were published in 1609, and there are 154 of them. And it's manifestly clear that the first 124,

I believe, are set within this context. There's an older man who's addressing a much younger and really good looking man, and they have some type of relationship with each other. At very least, they're friends. But it's clear that the speaker is much older this sonnet You think this is one of them. All right, it's it's one of the most famous of all the sonnets because of the famous opening line and

so the The speaker who is it clearly an older man and he's also very clearly a poet because it's self-referential He talks about even there. He says so long lives this and this lives life to the, my, the resolution of the problem of this poem is that, Oh, you're so beautiful and so good looking. You're, you're even more beautiful than nature, but Oh, you know, time and, um, and decay are going to come for you. But how are we going to resolve this? You will live forever. Your beauty will live forever in my poem. So that's on its face.

How do you know he's talking to a fella? Well, this is where I say if you just sit down and read all of the sonnets, this is firmly embedded in a sequence where, I mean, if you read the first one through 17, quite a few of them are the speaker speaking to the young man, begging him to procreate. No, no, this is part of a sequence. And that's where many people have told me you've ruined this. And I thought this was a love poem. I thought, well, if it is a love poem, it's not the love poem you think it is.

So is there a reason, is that one of the reasons people accuse him of being a homosexual or a'm so rich always in the fact that he may be a homosexual. He was he a homosexual Like with many things in Shakespeare There is On its face in his life There's no evidence to think he was if you if if we did another show when I walked you through all the sections in some of the first 124 sonnets, um, you could see why people might come to that conclusion. I mean,

they're not overt references to anything crass, but it, the level of effuse praise for, for this young man in one, I'm probably badly paraphrasing. He calls it, he calls him master mistress of my heart. You know, I mean this, it's this effusive high elaborate language praising the beauty and, and just gushing over the, the friendship with the youth, the fair youth. So this is going to give ample evidence for those who would

like to. So my, my position on this is that all we have are these poems. And we have nothing from the man's life to suggest he was a bisexual, he was a homosexual. There's nothing there. There's just what the poems give us. And there are, as with all things Shakespeare, multiple ways to try and come at this.

There are those who will argue that these were elaborate bids at patronage for a young aristocrat. The, the most, um, the most often referenced names are William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, to whom the first folio was dedicated. Um, Henry Rossley, the Earl of Southampton to whom Shakespeare dedicated two other lengthy poems. So that, I think, is a credible way to look at this excessive praise, and also this, you know, really, you want to get married,

you know, you're such a good looking person, but this elaborate, this hyperbolic, excessive rhetoric could be explained in that way. And someone might counter it, but I think it was W.H. Auden, the great poet W.H. Auden, it might've been him. One of the critics is of the opinion that Shakespeare never could've intended for these to be published

because they're so deeply personal. And the affection between the older man and the younger man is so, it really is quite moving. I mean, if you just take it on his face and so on, now it could be a bit for patronage. Maybe it wasn't a bit for it. So it just, it, it, it leaves the door wide open as within Shakespeare with, with where to go with it. But one thing that is true is it's 124 sonnets of an older man to a younger

man. So, but that specific one we just, that I just read is there's nothing in that specific sonnet. No. Yeah. So I can memorize this and say it to my wife and I'll be okay, is what you're saying. Well, absolutely.

As long as, you know, if anybody ever really calls you on it, you can say, well, I do realize it was about the fair youth, the young guy, but for my purposes. And the other thing I want to say about the sonnets is, now, so from about 125 to 154 is what's clearly a heterosexual man and a woman. And it's an older, it's a mature man, meaning just an adult and his mistress,

could be his wife or probably not his wife, but that's about your more traditional man, woman. But it's not about sort of young love, it's about a grown man and a grown woman. And there's a lot of sort of very deep references to the trials and travails of mature people being in a romantic relationship in those. But sonnets one through 124, when I teach them

to the students, I like to point out, if you set aside the preoccupation that Shakespeare must have been a homosexual because of all this, if you set that aside, they are poems about the absolute power of friendship, because they're not just all about the beauty of the fair youth,

they're about the relationship that they have and how friendship can be deeply painful to someone, but also how friendship can just deeply painful to someone but also how friendship can just be restorative and rejuvenating the thing that makes life worth living so I would say in the big picture son is one through 124 or so or they're really about friendship even though it's an unequal friendship and it's an older man and a younger man but they're really about I recently taught the whole cycle to our students and, and they,

they really began to pick up on this that, and you know, if you've been friends with someone for more than a week, you go six months, you go a year, you go 10 years, you know, that relationship goes through all types of ups and downs and you know, you feel hurt, you feel betrayed, you feel, you know, it's so happy about this friend. This friend saves you and gives you hope. I mean, all of that is in these sonnets. So they're, they're really very beautiful in that way. You feel, you know, so happy about this friend. This friend saves you and gives you hope. I mean, all of that is in these sonnets. So they're really very beautiful in that way. You know, if you could bracket the, uh,

would that be your recommendation then to someone like myself who'd like to get into Shakespeare is to begin with some of his sonnets since they're shorter and less complicated, presumably than his plays. Uh, um, a provisional yes, but you have to get used to reading early modern sonnets and it will be like coming to wine. You're not going to enjoy it the first couple times. You're going to need to become accustomed to the form of the sonnet. But once you become accustomed to the form of the sonnet. And, uh, but once you become accustomed to it,

it's sort of like, uh, people who read modern theology books and then try to read the Summa for the first time, they're shocked not just by the Aristotelian lingo he uses, but the structure. No, I, I, I often talk with my students. One example would be someone like Robert Frost. I love Robert Frost poetry. He is a deep and subtle poet, but you could put Robert Frost in front of anybody and you just get drawn in. I mean, his language is, the speaker is very personable,

is the language is very inviting and simple. And Elizabethan poetry is not like this. You have to sort of get used to, the example of St. Thomas is pretty good. You have to get used to his rhetoric no matter what you read, you know, this scholastic Latin rhetoric, you have to become accustomed to it. And once you begin to see what's at the core of it, it's very powerful. So I would say the same is true with the sonnets that, you know, for, I think for, it would be the type of thing that would be good to get some guidance on, to sort of sit down with someone who can teach you a little bit about it and so

on. But, but I would say, again, I'm with Chesterton on here. The democracy of the dead has voted that these are some of the most moving poems, um, you know, in, in, in world history and that they, they have a great deal to teach us. Man, have you checked out Exodus 90 lately? If you've heard of Exodus 90 before, you're probably thinking of cold showers on Lent. But the Exodus 90 app offers so much more. It's a daily companion to help you grow closer to God and to become the man you want to be.

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this year on the Exodus 90 app. We will awaken to invisible realities and enter into the spiritual battle that rages around us all the time. Go to Exodus90.com for a 14-day free trial to the Exodus 90 app and to learn more about St. Michael's Lent. That's Exodus90.com to join us for St. Michael's Lent starting August 15th. Mason Harkness All right. Well, what about, I know we've kind of demonized movies a little bit, but what kind of movie rendition of a Shakespeare play would you say is excellent? And maybe, maybe, uh, that's what I'm going to need. I'm probably going to need something like that.

Oh yes. To then. Um, you know, I would say anything that, not anything, but most of the things the Royal Shakespeare Company does and the BBC does are really worth watching. And these are, are they filmed plays or are they? There's sometimes what the Royal Shakespeare Company will do is make a video of something at the Globe.

I mean, they rebuilt the Globe, which was one of the, it was the primary venue that they used for a period of time. But the Royal Shakespeare Company, both online or you could rent them or you could probably rent them through Amazon or something. Okay. And the quality of the acting is usually top-notch.

And so they're very good. And I would also say the Royal Shakespeare Company's website is a beautiful place for just information about Shakespeare too. Now I will make one caveat about the films and the plays. The only thing you'll run into every now and again is when someone tries to take one of Shakespeare's plays and make it into what I would call a message play, where it could be a message about race or sexuality or they'll cast, they'll put, you know, um, they'll,

they'll put a, what, a figure of one gender in, in another role, which for, for clearly political purposes. And they'll really kind of ham up that dimension of it without moving from the text too much or, or they'll, Denzel Washington was recently, I think in a version of, I want to say Hamlet, but I might be wrong. Oh really? On, on Apple. Yeah, I'll have to check that. He's a, he's a capable actor. So I saw Ian McKellen deciding Hamlet to be or not to be.

That's from Hamlet. Yeah. Yes. He has played that several times. Outstandingly gripping. Oh, well this is, this is kind of a pop culture way into Shakespeare is that I tell people, that's what I need Ian McKellen is a classically trained Shakespearean. He did Richard the third He's done Hamlet. He's probably he's been in many others I'm sure and these are is this from the Royal Shakespeare Companies, would you likely find him in those or no? I don't know because I've been watching the more recent ones But and I don't happen to know whether he personally was in the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was just in many Shakespeare

plays. He did. It's, I don't, I have a little bit of discomfort recommending it. He did Richard the third as a film. It's a rated R film. With, you know, they just should have excised a few things, but he was so good as Richard the third. And then I stick to the script All they totally yeah for the most part. Is it is a sexual content? Is that why it's it's it's yeah it's it's very very brief to you know, and it's got to do with with the the

The heir to the house of Lancaster and the daughter of York getting married So the stage the screenplay is is largely close to the text. And, but you know, Ian McKellen is just magnificent as Richard the third is one of the greatest villains ever. I mean, he is, we may get to it today. I'm going to read you something of Richard. But this one that Ian McKellen's in that you said was the brief sexual thing. What is that called? What's that movie? Richard the third. Okay. Good. Yep. And, um, so, you know, and he, um,

I heard he, I think he did Hamlet as a film a long time ago, but I heard he was doing another one. Um, you know, Mel Gibson has done a Hamlet, which is pretty good. Yep. Um, though I have to say the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet is outstanding. And these are all, these are all movies. These are movies. Okay. So, so yeah, Mel Gibson, I can't remember the year. It was a while ago. He did, he did, um, he did a Shakespeare, he did a Hamlet where he played Hamlet. And, um, so it now we also have, uh, Kenneth Branagh.

You clear, you probably know who he is as an actor. I may if I saw him, but I'm not, he's an older guy now, but he's been in many films. Okay. Um, and he did a hamlet, which was outstanding. Um, you might know David Tennant, the actor, you know, David Tennant, he was a wonderful hamlet. Now you can watch, that's a BBC production. Boy, that was first rate. That was really good. What play has most been turned into a a film or a play? It's,

you know, I haven't counted them, but I'd have to say Hamlet. And what's the reason for that? Is it because it's the best? The most interesting, most exciting for modern people or just, all I would say is that I think Hamlet is unique in the Shakespearean corpus because of the sheer preoccupation with the person of Hamlet. He is just a figure nobody can stop thinking about. He's just, he's unlike, I think, any other Shakespearean figure in the depth of his intellect, in the depth of his soul, in the depth of his angst. I think one of the reasons he, this play is staged,

I haven't counted it, but I think I'm a fairly close ground to say if it's not the number one It's real close to number one for being staged for being made into a film. And I think it's because Hamlet is Hamlet is is just the perfectly modern figure. He's tormented. He's he's deeply He's deeply, that he is overly conscious of himself and he just draws you in as a figure. I mean, Hamlet's just an astonishing play. And that's why I would say an actor of the caliber of Ian McKellen, David Tennant, Kenneth Braddock.

I mean, this will test, this will test the range of any actor to play Hamlet properly. Um, because he, he's just the interiority of the man is almost unmatched in world, in world literary expression. I would, I would, I would make that claim. I'm not sure you can find a single character with much greater interior complexity than the, than Hamlet Prince of Denmark as an individual. I would say it's almost Augustinian, where I love the confessions.

You're probably, you know, you're familiar with it. And just the depth that Augustine takes you into himself is just astonishing. And one of the few places I've seen that mirrored and perhaps even excelled in terms of Is is in Hamlet it'd be he just pulls you so far into into his psyche Wow I think I so I that's why I would say I think that one's Attracts more attention than just about anything else. I see you have some notes there is there some you want to open up?

Oh sure. Yes what do you want me to do if you just tell me I'll do it okay all right so you've you've brought a book this is the this is the works of Shakespeare this is the works of Shakespeare this is your attempt to make me like him so yes and and and of course if, um, And of course, if I don't end up liking him, we know whose fault that will be. That will be mine. No, no, no, no, no, mine. My point is it won't be Shakespeare's. This so I have arrived at them.

I'll share a number of them. This is a sequence from Richard the third. So this is a chance to comment that Shakespeare's villains are just a thing of beauty. He, boy, can he make a villain. Um, you know, some of them are less subtle, but you have, I would point to in Othello, the character of Iago, what, what he's almost Miltonic. I know that's going ahead because John Milton hadn't lived yet, but just he he's just an infernally wicked man and He captures just this intense hatred One of the things

Shakespeare has a gift for capturing human passion and and I've seldom seen in literature such a successful capturing of the them seen in literature, such a successful capturing of the amazing human ability to just hate another human being to the absolute core of your being. You want to find that, you read Othello. And Iago, he hates Othello and he just devotes himself to destroying Othello. So I'm the subject of Shakespeare's villains. Another and this is a bit controversial, I think for more kind of political reasons,

but Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, who I'm going to read from, is another just extraordinary villain. And what complicates saying that these days is that he is a Jew, and that play is very much dealing with the tensions of Christianity and Jews in Venice in early modernity. Um, but he's so, and he gives some speeches where he talks about how he's mistreated as a Jew, but, but he's just this intensely, um, he, he is the villain of the play and his, the level of hatred he has for Antonio. Um,

and we could talk about that in a moment again, just, and, but it's pretty mutual. You have these two people that deeply hate each other. Um, what else among among Shakespeare's villains? Um, I'm sure there are others that are there slipping my mind, but, but that are, are, are just astonishing. And certainly Richard the third is one of them in, in the initial preface, he comes out in this monologue saying, now he is physically disabled. He's got a hump He's got and so on he says because I am misshapen

I am going to pretty much exact my vengeance upon the world and do evil deeds and And he's just a wicked villainous and just malignant. I mean just intelligent malignant Okay, so this this I want to share with you and if this doesn't make you love Shakespeare Maybe it's just because it'll be my own failing but think about politics today. Mm-hmm thinking about politics today I'm already angry continue and What an absolutely appalling? Theatric spectacle it is. Yes, everybody presents himself. I am You know, I am just the selfless I am the, you know,

I am just the selfless servant of the people. Yes. And I'm here, you know, so the, the degrees to which people construct what everybody knows is a very false persona. Um, and they act this out to accolades and it's all scripted. It's all, you know, it's all produced. I would say you're amateur. Shakespeare is as Shakespeare's way ahead of you So I want to share with you. So Richard the third through murder through intrigue He is a villainous to quote another character Don Don John. I think it's from Much ado about nothing. He's a plain-dealing villain Richard third is so he's

He's killing off people and moving in on the throne, but he's, he's clever. He doesn't just take the throne. He orchestrates a scenario where some of his, his conspirators and collaborators come to him and beg him to take the helm of state because the ship of state is without a captain. And the whole thing is orchestrated. So I want to share with you some of this and to see this act that out as a thing of beauty. So his buddy, his lackey Buckingham says, okay, so they're about to basically stage

a coup. Buckingham says, the mayor is here at hand, intend some fear, meaning act like you don't want to be king. Be not you, be not you spoke with, but by might suit and look you get a prayer book in your hand and stand betwixt two churchmen Good my lord from the ground I'll make a holy decant and be not easily one to our request play the maid's part Still answer nay and take it. I mean, this is magnificent He says stand with a holy book in your hand You've got a couple priests in your pocket put them right next to you and devote yourself.

He's in holy prayer. And I will come and say, Richard, you must be king. And deny, make it clear that you're not the ambitious type. Okay, so this goes on. And to see this acted out, I mean, later on, Richard literally comes out with a bishop on either side of him with this prayer book, supposedly. And he says, who calls me forth from my prayers?

And this whole thing is very successful. The mayor and the people are saying, see where his grace stands betwixt two clergymen. I mean, this is all spectacle. It's all spectacle. And Buckingham says, two props of virtue for a Christian prince. I mean, this is all fake. This is so beautiful. And eventually, so I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit to where Richard protests. You know, Buckingham says, my lord, this argues

conscience of your grace, but the respects thereof are nice and trivial, all circumstances well considered, and so on. So he gives this speech about how you must take the throne, and Richard says, alas, why would you heap this care on me? I am unfit for state and majesty. I do beseech you, take it not amiss. I cannot nor I will not yield to you. And then Buckingham storms off, well then we'll go get one of the illegitimate princes because you have renounced your duty. He storms off and Richard calls him, call him again. Will you enforce me to a world of care? Call them again! I am not made of stone, but penetrable to your kind entreaties, albeit against my

conscience and my soul. And Buckingham comes back and then they all say, God bless you. And Richard makes a point of saying, um, and he emphasizes this to all of them for God doth know, and you may partly see how far I am from desire of all of this. Yeah. I mean, it's so, it's so malicious, but it works like a charm. It's so, it's so magnificent. I mean, literally it's, I mean, think of this, you see this at the religious conventions, you trot out a religious figure to have at your right hand or to have as part of the program, you know, to, as, as to give the aura.

So he comes out in the company of bishops protests that no, no, I can't take the throne. And in the meantime, he's, he's viciously murdering his, his everyone. But, but it's, it's, it's the, it's the theater his everyone. But, but it's, it's, it's the, it's the theater of deception. And you know, again, Shakespeare just shows it for what it is. I mean, it shows this, this deception and this evil for what it is. So he's a magnificent villain and you know, to the end, you know, he, he,

he tries to hold on and eventually gets killed. So this is who? This is Richard the third, the third. So he is, he is one of Shakespeare's truly great villains I mean, he is an absolute snake. He is He is the the perfect Machiavellian type of yeah This Elizabethan English has it been altered at all for modern readers or is it exactly as it was? Was written down this stuff is as it was written with, I think, some, usually some minor smoothing out of a letter, perhaps, but this is, this is close to the discourse.

Ignorant question. Is this how people just spoke back then, or was this elevated English even for his time? Well, this touches upon a convention of tragedy. Excuse me. Pardon me. This touches upon a convention of tragedy. All the way from Aristotle to Shakespeare, the convention of tragedy was that the protagonists, the characters are men and women of high estate. That's the convention of tragedy. So you're already always dealing with the upper class.

Aristocrats, monarchs, people of elevated estate, of higher education, of higher status. So it would naturally be an elevated discourse. Now in Shakespeare, every now and again, you'll have a gravedigger or you'll have a clown or you'll have some low class and their discourse is very different. But for the most part,

Shakespeare stays in the tradition from Aristotle through early modernity. It's not until I'd say that really the 20th century that the, um, the theater or even the, well, there was no film, but the theater of the common man, you know, um, death comes for, or the death of a salesman. You've got a character like Willie Loman, uh, you know, the American, um, play where he's a schmuck, but he's a normal guy.

So Shakespeare is still working in the convention that you're dealing with men and women of high estate. And it's interesting, I would step back and sometimes people would say, well, why doesn't he write about the common man? But there's something about the stage which seeks the exaggerated and the slightly better than normal person.

Even in films today, which appear to be about normal people, the protagonist and the antagonist are usually elevated in some way. They're not like you. They're smarter, they're better, they've got something. Even if they appear to be like you. That Batman, yeah, exactly. You know,

I'm headed the joker, the villain and the hero exaggerated. This goes back that stage and theatrical representation works upon a type of exaggeration where it's, it's seeking those who are better than us in terms of human aptitudes and not necessarily morally, but in human aptitudes and not necessarily morally, but in human aptitudes, they're, they're smarter, they're richer, they're better, they're, they're people of greater capabilities and so on. And because, and someone could say, well, why? And my response would be, if I was to speculate, it's, it's because in those of highest state,

the moral failures become more evident and they're easier to see than in just kind of the average schmuck on the street. And I would even say that even if you wanted to tell the story of the average schmuck on the street, you would still have to enlarge it in some way where people can... You'd either have to kind of enlarge his character or place him into a kind of over the top situation with the navigation. Something very abnormal where where something something about his character that you didn't know comes out. Yeah. And so on.

Yeah. And that's kind of within the nature of state of the stage of spectacle in terms of it really conveying what I'd say is it's in the loose sense, it's spiritual and moral messages, you know? So this, this type of exaggeration is, is, so going back to the rhetoric of it here, this is almost exclusively in Shakespeare, certainly in the tragedies. Now, so let me make another caveat here.

This is, everything I've said is true about the tragedies. Comedy has always been the low form of expression where you're dealing with more people. It's, it's, it's a hierarchy, but it's, it's more from below the common person is more frequently represented. There's more body humor from the very beginning. Comedy has always been salty and I was going to ask what was, what was meant by comedy in Shakespeare's day. Well, what it was always meant from the Greeks to the Romans,

comedy and its origins in Greece, old comedy was largely political and satirical in nature. You could think of Aristophanes. I love Aristophanes. He's, he's pretty revolved, but, but he's very, very much into, um, you know, um, political, uh, satire, deep political satire. So individuals or political structures are being, so there's a social and political satire, which is very obvious going on. Um, I would recommend his, his play, um, the clouds is, is extraordinarily funny and it's, it's, it's a,

it doesn't even make fun of Socrates in that. Yes. He reinvents Socrates as a sophist who's ruining the youth. It's a magnificent. So it's, it's about large social factories. He's satirizing Socrates. He's playing upon the tradition that Socrates was not the wisdom figure we think he is, but a sophist and so on. So that's old comedy. And in new comedy which really had its heyday more in in a Roman drama So but but certain things have always even an old comedy were present dirty jokes, you know off, you know off-color You know ribald humor salty humor

You know Rabaul humor salty humor The average sort of the middle and low strata of society They are your characters as opposed to the elevated in the high in the aristocratic Okay, so going into new comedy new comedy had its heyday more in Roman Roman drama and it moved more towards the characteristics of new comedy still had a wide diversity of people in it but what would drive it would be You know, it's it's what's common to us now the plight of the lovers you've got the young lovers who want to get together and there's the old parental generation that's trying to stop them because they don't understand them. And so you've got this big intergenerational tension that the young lovers want to

get together and have their fun. And the older, you know, kind of funny dutties are trying to find reasons for that not to happen. So there's this deep tension between generations and that ultimately new comedy gets sorted out, um, where everything kind of resolves, the, you know, somebody, you know, everybody falls in love. Um, and you know, that, that kind of comes to a resolution. What's the distinguishing kind of element of, of tragedies in Shakespeare? Oh yes. Well, so comedy, whether it be old comedy. Because when you said that I immediately thought of Romeo and Juliet.

But that's not a comedy. It's interesting because that's a play that wants to be a comedy, but it really is a tragedy. Because all, you're astute because everything you noticed about the whole, the new comedy structure is present, except it goes very badly and turns into a very painful tragedy. So were people of Shakespeare's day, when they would watch this acted out, would they have suspected this was going to end as a comedy? Is that part of the? Probably not because as you go along, there's not a lot of levity in Romeo and Juliet. Right.

And it is about aristocrats. It is about people of higher estate. And so this is an interesting theoretical difference between tragedy and comedy in tragedy, the vision of human love. And I'm really drawing this from the work of a brilliant critic named Paul Cantor. He really helped me see this. He was at the university of Virginia until he passed away. God bless him recently. But, um, but in, in, in Shakespeare with, with, when there's love and tragedy, it's a love that demands it's you or nobody. And it's the passion is so violent and it leads to imprudence and it brings

about chaos. You know, you think of Romeo and Juliet, you think of, um, Othello, you think of, um, Othello, you think of, um, Anthony and Cleopatra where the obsession with the other is all consuming and there's, and there's going to be no negotiation. It's either you or nobody. And that brings about chaos and violence and destruction. And one of the visions of especially new comedy is that there's a lot of moving around. When you say new comedy, what do you mean?

This is going back to, again, with the Greeks, with the Aristophanes, the old comedy was the political satire. All right, so you don't mean dumb and dumber. When you say new comedy, you're referring to Shakespeare's work. Yes, I'm referring to the tradition he's working in that sort of from the Roman playwrights going, and certainly through Shakespeare,

instead of pure political satire, it's about all the things I was mentioning where you have the young lovers and there's the older generation kind of rubbing against them, trying to hold them back for whatever reasons because of their, their views, their morality, their conventions. But, and, but at the end of the play, um, the lovers usually can, can come together. And one of the other interesting things in Shakespeare,

the way he takes new comedy, is there's a lot of substitution. The way I like to present it is in a Shakespearean comedy, everybody gets somebody. It may not be the person you want, but you get somebody. And at the end, marriage is celebrated, everybody's getting together and society moves forward. Now sometimes the lovers get who they want

So and sometimes they don't but at the end of a Shakespearean comedy You usually have multiple marriages or soon-to-be marriages and there's often they call it in literary Criticism the comic round a loves B But B's in love with C C's in love with D and then D's in love with a and it's just chaos and that's all has to get sorted out. And, but the vision of comedy is that the passions are not so violent, that at some point, everybody has to settle with the person who's there,

who's willing to go with you. And that, but there's a broad social vision that this stabilizes society. As you like it, it's one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. And that has one of the funniest examples of the comic round. And oftentimes, let me add this also to discussing the comedies,

that oftentimes part of this comic confusion in round is good old fashioned cross dressing. Oftentimes a woman will be dressed as a man for whatever reason. You see this in comedy, it's slapstick, where you're throwing aside the roles and you're donning another role. Usually it's for, you know,

it's for some expedient purpose. It's not just, because not like today. It's just there's some purpose to it. So there's situation comedy where a man is in love with a woman who is, or a man is befriending a man who's actually a woman and the woman falls in love with the man. So, you know, there's all types of hilarious comedy

that goes on there, which usually gets sorted out in the end. So that's going on. So at the end of, that's one of the big differences between tragedy where there's love and comedy is that in comedy, everything gets sorted out and people will settle for somebody. In tragedy, it's Romeo and Juliet. If in comedy, everything gets sorted out and people will settle for somebody in tragedy. It's Romeo and Juliet. If I can't have you, I'll kill myself.

If I can't have you, it's death, you know, and the same with, with Anthony and Cleopatra, they'll destroy themselves and their, and their political projects, you know, for the sake of not having the other, you know, and, um, so, so, you know, so there are all these elements to comedy, which are really hilarious. You've got humor, you've got cross-dressing, you've got mismatched lovers. I mean, it's just, it's, it's big fun. It's, it's really, it's very funny. It's better to watch a play than to read a play, presumably.

Is that partly why people don't understand Shakespeare when they pick him up? Well, it's, it's certainly certainly I think one of the reasons if all you ever did was read him that would be a great benefit Yeah, but just to see it. It's the same with a screenplay for a film Yeah But you need to see it act it out and then you you really see then you can go back into it and you kind of Situated oh, yeah, it brings it to life and you begin to because the little that you just read there I mean it sounded interesting, but it was difficult to understand,

which is why you paused every few sentences and told me what was happening. Oh yes. But if I put Ian McKellen doing this, you would just viscerally feel. Yeah, that's what I was, that's what I was thinking. And the actors, I mean, I'm a poor reader and a poor actor, but, but, uh, this, this reminds me when my children were very young, I took them to a park to watch a very funny production of a midsummer night stream and they were howling with laughter and they had no idea what was being said. But it was just, it was so funny.

And it was so humorous and you could, you could just start to intuit a lot of what's happening there. And, and you just, um, so seeing it embodied in acting out really, I think is very helpful. And in my own teaching over the years, I've, I've done a lot more of, okay, we're, we're going to act this scene out just for a few minutes to really help people to help it settle in. And I find that's very helpful. You, I know you haven't, you're not a native to Steubenville,

but we've had some, uh, Shakespeare in the park. Oh yes. A few years. Did you go to any of them? A couple of years ago I saw Macbeth and I haven't been recently, but I need to get tuned into that because those are, I love to watch a production. And, um, well that's why I, yeah, I'm glad that we talked about the Royal Shakespeare Company and these other movies, because this is the thing. I just know that if you were to give me this book, you know,

which I'm not asking you to do, but if you gave me the complete works of Shakespeare, like I wouldn't read it. Or if I did, I'd get exhausted by the eighth line and give up because it was too complicated. Oh yeah. So I do think that something like that is going to be a nice in. Oh, it's, it's wonderful. I mean, you could use YouTube or you can use videos. I, I, I do that a little bit with my teaching. I don't, I don't want to send everyone to film, but, but for instance,

Hamlet's famous soliloquy to be or not to be, I usually give them the Mel Gibson, the David Tennant and the, um, Was he a young man when he did that Gibson? He was younger. It must've been probably 15 years ago. Um, and the Kenneth Branagh. And you just see the, the directors and the interpretive choices they've made. I mean, they all stay with the text, but it's just, it's magnificent to see. Stanley Wells, who's a great, I believe he's still alive.

He's a great Shakespearean scholar. He's an Englishman. Was interviewing lady, or not interviewing, having a discussion with Judy Dench. You may know who she is as an actress. She's a magnificent actress. And they were speaking and talking about Shakespeare and Professor Wells had said that seeing,

and he was complimenting Judy Dench, that seeing an actor interpret a role opens up whole new interpretive vistas. He put it so beautifully, but that's exactly right. Because when you see, and the thing is you could watch Mel Gibson, you could watch, um, Kenneth Branagh or David Tennant and each one brings out elements of that, of that soliloquy that famous to be or not to be,

they each bring out elements of it that are very distinct. And it's only got to do with emphasis or acting, right? There's nothing else. There's no, it's not like they're riffing on the words or no Changing the words or doing what the chosen is doing to the New Testament where it's something of an exegesis No, no, no. Yeah, I mean there's a little bit I mean, I guess there was some of that with Leonardo DiCaprio show Yeah, they did that that was more of a base loosely on the didn't he do a Romeo and Juliet? That's what I mean Yeah, I can't remember since I've seen that one. Yeah

I can't remember how whether it was like while since I've seen that one. Yeah. I can't remember how it was like, it was a modern, wasn't it? It wasn't the handguns involved in modern thing, but I think they kept the language pretty close if I recall correctly, but yeah, it was the idiom and the more I've watched Shakespeare, I used to be a bit of a stickler about this, but these days I, I just say the appropriation of Shakespeare into other cultural environments that are suitable doesn't bother me.

For instance, Ian McKellen's Richard III is set in something like World War I era, but it works perfectly. It just works magnificently. Who was it? The, uh, um, John, I was about to say John Luke Picard, Patrick Stewart did, did a, um, a Macbeth, which was set also kind of early to mid 20th century in something like World War One era of Macbeth. And it was beautiful.

I mean, it was kind of, so putting it into different cultural idioms, I think it's just part of the creativity and the flexibility of Shakespeare. But when they keep the dialogue and the characters the same, I think that's a wonderful, let's just say it's a wonderful interpretation of the play and I think it I don't have a lot of opposition to it. What is your favorite scene of any Shakespeare play? That's like asking me which of my children is my favorite. Well let's start with that one. Which of your children is your favorite? What is one of them? That's two harder questions. So what about one is giving me this is, this is one of them.

This is whole scene where Richard is trying to, you know, is denying the throne as just as a spectacle and so on. Well, you know, the, the, the famous scene, which I could, I could go to right now if you like you like, in the merchant of Venice, where this is another comic cross-dressing moment where the young man gets achieves his love. Her name is Portia, but the premise, you may or may not know much about the story

of the merchant of Venice. I don't. There's a young man who's a profligate and his name is Bassonio. And he has a friend named Antonio, who's a little bit older than him, who's a very successful merchant. And Bassonio goes to Antonio and says,

I'm in love with this woman from in Belmont, near Portia. I need a lot of money basically to present myself to her. I've squandered my estate. And Antonio, for reasons that are not entirely clear, says, whatever you need, I'll give you. All my money's tied up in business, but go try my credit around here. So they go to Shylock, the Jewish money lender,

who, pardon me, who loans him the money on the condition that Antonio, if he doesn't pay up on time, gives him a pound of his flesh. And as it comes out, these two guys hate each other, Antonio and Shylock. And unlike some others who read this play, I think they hate each other because they're rivals. I think primarily they don't hate each other

because one's a Christian and one's a Jew. They use religion to insult each other frequently. But what's clear to me is that, that's almost, I think, a pretext. They despise each other the same way two big dogs on the block despise each other. So in my view, the play is really a little bit less about religion than I think some people

might wanna perceive it to be. So anyway, so he gets himself into this situation and he goes and he uses the money and wins Portia's heart. And as bad luck would have it, Antonio can't pay Shylock back, so he's about to go to court and Shylock's there with a knife. And Portia shows up.

And so Portia, she dresses up like a man and goes and presents herself as a lawyer and basically saves the day. So she gives this magnificent speech about the nature of justice and so on. And it's, she gives this magnificent speech about the nature of justice and so on and it's beautiful. Are there directions in his writings as to how the play is to be staged and set? Like how do you know that the woman's dressing like a man, the man's dressing like a woman? Is it because it all comes out in the text?

Both dialogue and stage directions. The stage directions, this would be one for someone who's a better manuscript scholar than I am. There were stage directions in the various quartos and in the first folio. So there appear to be a limited number of actual directions that Shakespeare had put into the play, but they're fairly limited. They're not too descriptive. They'll just say he goes over here or Richard appears with a, with a Bishop on each side. So they're pretty contained. So the director really has a lot of license as to how to deal with this.

Like for instance, there's one sequence where Hamlet, Hamlet talks about self annihilation, suicide multiple times in his soliloquies. And in the Kenneth Branagh one, Kenneth Branagh, who's playing Hamlet, pulls out a knife at one of the dramatic points of the speech, and that's just great. That was a brilliant. And he's giving the speech to a mirror,

and at the dramatic moment, so he's confronting himself and he pulls out the knife, or make my quiet, it's with a bare bodkin and it's very dramatic. And that's just clever use of stage props, but that's all the director. The use of a mirror, the use of a knife. So the director is, that's the beautiful thing

about Shakespeare is that he leaves much, as all plays do, to the director to kind of interpret, to fill in. So it's within the nature of the thing. And I mean, there's a clear, strong core to the director to kind of interpret, to fill in. So it's within the nature of the thing. And I mean, there's a clear, strong core to the story. And then it needs to get completed by the vision of whoever's going to put it on. And that's why I say I'm open to a lot

of different variations as long as I don't think they're trying to make a cheap political point or something, you know, or What what play would you recommend me read first of all? What would be a good kind of gateway play to be then open to read his others? I would try though. Actually the merchant of Venice might be a place to start Because it's it's it's it's engaging. There are very powerful It's it's a it's a love story Engaging there are very powerful

It's it's a it's a love story There there is a villain. There's this sort of religious tension between the Catholic and the Jew You know it so it there's there's this cross-dressing and saving the day and things get resolved and it's it's it's a neat story It's a powerful story It's a very powerful story. So that you know another one This one is fun to read, but it's even more fun to watch as a comedy of errors. It's, it's absolutely hilarious because it's,

it's about two sets of brothers that get separated at birth and, and they've grown up apart from each other. And the one is the master and the one is the servant and the one gets shipwrecked in the hometown of the other. And it's just hilarious. It's absolutely hilarious. It's very improbable. Is there a way to find it hilarious simply by reading it or must you watch it? With a comedy of errors you could get a lot of the humor but it's very funny to watch. Even they did it at my kid's school over at Central and it was hilarious.

And as good luck would have it we had had a set of twins. So it all worked out pretty well. And they were very funny actors. But so, you know, even in kind of a more, a simple production, the humor comes through. So that's a good one. You start to, probably I would say, sort of the Mount Everest of Shakespeare might be King Lear.

That's a very, very complex play. It's enormously powerful. Good to know. Stay away from that one. Not to stay away, but it's something to work toward. Exactly. Work towards. Yeah. And you know, Hamlet is often taught to beginners with Shakespeare and it's just, it's, it's the type of play I think you need to digest a little bit. So, um, but you know, Hamlet is just so immediately powerful because you get drawn into this man's

psyche in a way that's almost immediate. Like, here's an example where, um, there are many reasons why I think Shakespeare or why, why Hamlet appeals to people, but he comes home from college, presumably, he's been away at university. His father has just died and his mother just got remarried and he comes home and it's the whole family got reconfigured and he's very upset. And so I remember teaching this once and one of my students, I said, do you like this?

She said, yes, I like this a lot, which I was surprised to hear. And I said, why? She said, because Hamlet's in a broken family. She said, a lot of us are in broken families. And I never thought of that before, but you got the reconfigured family. One dad's out, new dad's in, you don't know what's going on. It's very distressing.

And even in act one went before he realizes that the man who was a stepfather also murdered his father. Even before he realizes this, he gives this amazing reflection about how, how hurt he feels by his mother about how the whole world doesn't make sense to him. And he's just in a deep sense of crisis and pain. And then, Oh yeah. And then, and then the ghost of his dad shows up and tells him to get revenge. How's that for pressure? So that this is all in act one.

So then when his, the ghost of his father appears, you know, and he realizes what's going on. And I mean, so he's in this very difficult position where he, he, he now has reason to believe everybody's watching him. He's not safe. Everyone talks about safety these days. He really wasn't safe. If you had reason to believe that your stepdad killed your dad and you're living in the house, you wouldn't feel safe. And so, I mean, so he's, he's, and he's a very intelligent person and he's trying to figure out how to,

how to move through this and see what he could do to respond to his father's request to avenge him. So that's all, that's act one. So by the end of act one, he's in this enormous web of, of, of complexity. And so. Are there, are there times you'll watch a play and you'll think, oh, they went for comedic effect when Shakespeare wouldn't have intended that or vice versa? Like maybe that wasn't meant to be a tragedy that was meant to be comedic. Or is this given to what you said earlier about this wide range of interpretation? You know, in most...

Because I could see the ghost coming to Hamlet as kind of being kind of jarring in a sort of funny way. I could see someone portraying it that way. Or also in a tragic way, not having read it. So maybe. So the short answer is no, there's a type of density to this where it resists ironizing. It was just cheap laughs. I suppose someone somewhere has done it, but it's, it's always rejected. I remember reading a review once of, of, um, you know,

some kind of more progressive director within New York was going to have Hamlet just kind of mumbled that to be or not to be speech because it's so cliche and, and the audience hated it. Good. You know, so in any attempt to really kind of change things or even now, this is, this is one dealing with cultural sensitivities. Now, there is no doubt antisemitic language in the merchant of Venice. It's, it's very clearly present because these two people are insulting each other based on their religion examples. Oh, well, you know, he, it just,

the way Antonio and, um, Graziano and a few other characters refer to, to Shylock, they're just deriding him as, as a Jew. And you know, the, so the references are crass and, and, and just demeaning, you know, and, and, you know, he gives it right back to them. He doesn't like Christians either. And then what's, what's some examples of the anti-Semitic language, unless you don't want to say them.

Oh, you know, he calls, they call him a dog and they spit on him and, and that type of thing. I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's not hard to find in the play. And so it's clear that they're doing that because of his religion. Oh yeah. He's, they're clearly singling him out, you know, because he he's different because of his religion. Oh yeah. He's, they're clearly singling him out, you know, because he's different because of his religion and so on. Um, but, so this, this is where, you know, some might, you know, some of my counterparts might find this really, you know, they, they, they,

they just couldn't stand it if I said this, but, um, so the thing about the merchant of Venice is you, you can't really make that play into a play about a misunderstood and a Jewish figure who's just, who is purely just misunderstood. The guy is a villain. He's willing to cut the flesh off another person primarily because he hates him. So all I'm trying to say is that he's clearly playing the stock villain. Now what Shakespeare has done is created

actually a very powerful figure in Shylock where you he really humanizes this character and and and he says some things about suffering for his faith where you know you you wouldn't question him he says look, look, you know, you, you, you, you, you do all these things to me. Why? Because I'm a Jew. It's, it's the famous Hath not a Jew eyes have not a Jew. You know, it, it's, and you know, so in one regard he is protesting something at a very human level saying, you, you treat me poorly and you use Judaism as an excuse. But in the bigger picture,

you can't produce that play where he's really a nice guy who's just misunderstood. So sometimes you could go wrong in that direction. And that also is not very satisfying because it's very obvious he's the villain. And I'm not saying that the others are necessarily really good, but he plays the role of the villain

and he's a sadistic and bloodthirsty person. So he's not, while it's true that he is someone who suffers from antisemitism and he feels it clearly. He's also a very bad man, who's willing to do some very, very bad things. It's manifestly clear. It's no joke. He's there to literally cut a piece out of this guy, Antonio. And you know, so, so in my own reading of that play, these, these two figures, they, they deeply, deeply hate each other. Antonio,

I think hates Shylock just about as much as Shylock hates him. So this is one, when people read the play, we could, we could, you know, have variances of opinion, but, but, so plays could go wrong in that direction where they try and take someone and make, you know, uh, and make it into something. The play is not intending it to make, like for instance, if, if, if you had someone who was into the whole trans ideology, you can, and some directors have done this really start to ham up and take the cross

dressing in very different directions where, you know, that type of thing. So you can go wrong in those ways. And, but people tend not to like it, to be frank. I mean, they, they, they're not, they don't grip people's imagination because they depart too much. So, so that's a long winded way of saying productions don't tend to let us tend to have staying power very much. If they really depart, I mean, and take wide liberties, that that's my observation. Have I'm sure there have been attempts to modernize the language.

Has any of that been any successful or has it all been pretty bad? It's it's certainly less powerful. And why is that? Cause part of why I find it powerful is it forces me to slow down sort of like when you read poetry more generally, like what is this saying? But, Well, you know, the, the, the sonnet we recited, yeah, you could, you could hear the difference between, shall I compare thee to a summer's day that weren't more lovely and more

temperate? You're bloody as beautiful beautiful today in August. That's it. You just viscerally feel the difference between the phrases, the word choice, the complexity of the language. And that's where what once, see this is part of the beauty of why we ought to study

many types of literature, is that you are forced to contend with things you're not used to. And you know, that's life. First of all, in general, you have to do that all the time anyway, but you have to learn how others have shaped their thought. You have to learn how others have conveyed their thought and you have to wrestle with that. I think of like the Bible. I don't know if I'll ever understand why, why the angel came and felt the need to wrestle with Jacob.

That's a, that's a haunting image to me, but I, I think that's, there's something deeply human about this. You have to struggle against things to gain the benefit. Cause you know, you have to struggle to get the, to get the blessing. That's what Jacob did. And so what I would say is, is of all literature of various times and places, even other languages, the struggle. Now, if this is presented to you as this is a gem and you look at it and say, I don't see that it's a gem. I'm like, trust me, it's a gem.

So it not, this isn't the phone book. I'm not asking you to waste your time. This is a gem, but you have to struggle to, to, to attain it. You have to struggle to get it. So I think that's part of the difficulties of, of education. And I think that's also why, in my humble opinion, and most paradigms of education literature is part of educating the young, you know, literary expression, be it poetry, prose, drama, is just a staple of educating young people.

And you could say why, and I would say there's a whole variety of reasons. We've talked a little bit about the formative power of these stories, but your, I mean, the absolutely, I think language is something that's divine. Its potentials and its malleability are, are so powerful it approximates God himself. There's something very powerful about language.

And when you have to struggle to work your way into another mode of language, I think it, it, it teaches you and humanizes you in, in you in ways nothing else ever could. So that's my apology, you know, is why it's worth the struggle, because the students, everyone says it's a struggle. Let me tell you about one of my intellectual enemies. It's these no-sweat Shakespeare,

these no-fear Shakespeare people on the internet that make books. I don't know, what are they? Well, they're webpages, but they're also these books. They're like this, where you've got Elizabethan English on one side, and you've got this appalling modern rendition on the other. And it's just, I just want to have a book burning,

because guess which one most students will read. Yeah, not the Elizabethan English. And it's just, it dismayes me me because I think the message is that you're too stupid and you've got better things to do than to actually struggle, to learn a different way of thinking and a different mode of language. So, um, I, I want to resist this because for all the reasons I just mentioned, there is, I think there's a blessing at the end of the struggle to use the biblical idiom and Shakespeare is in a very small category of people who,

it's almost God-like the way he uses language and the infinite variety and the power of his language. It's, um, I think it's, it's well, well worth the struggle. Keep going. No, no, that's it. I was going to say as a side note, do you enjoy the King James version of the Bible? I love it. I love it. I love it. It's exquisite.

It's so much more enjoyable than the Douay-Rheims. Oh, it's so beautiful. That's my Catholic guilt. And that's all King James. That's our man. That's the very same King James that sponsored a Shakespeare's acting troop. And I, not as a theologian, but I think it's, it's, it's, it's a miracle of English. It's, it's exquisitely beautiful. Do you read that? Is that you? I do. I read it for myself. I read others, but no, but I do. I, I read it and I think it's very, very beautiful. I think it's very edifying.

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It even has an entire section for kids. So if you're a parent, you could play little Bible stories for them at night. It'll help them pray. Fantastic. Hello.com slash Matt Fred. Well, I have a lot of questions from our supporters and some of these we've addressed. So I'll throw like a lot of these out. You can take another stab at them. We'll go with address that and we can move on. All right. So some of these we've addressed. So I'll throw like a lot of these out. You can take another stab at them or go with address that and we can move on. All right. So some of these we've definitely addressed, but if you want to take another stab, Emily Bacon says, why is Shakespeare considered such a genius?

That's a great question, Emily. If you want to have some fun, you should look at the preposterous anti-Stratfordian theories because there's a sense of, because as we mentioned before, those those theories came up because people look at him and they're looking for a way to explain what made this man who he is. And the theories take root because in a sense that there really isn't, there is no clear explanation for this. I mean, I'm speaking quite technically and quite literally when I say,

I believe him to be an act of God, that the man had a level of genius that has very seldom existed on planet Earth and he was able to manifest it in a way, which has astonished people since that time. And I don't have any other clear explanation as to how he got to be that way. But he is, in a sense, I think he is, he is the great diagnostician of humanity.

He came to explain us to ourselves. And I think in, in, in ways that not even Dr. Freud could do. So I really believe that's, that's one of, one of, I'm not speaking for Providence, but I think that's one of the, the, the purposes of his great genius is to show us to ourselves. Kyle Dowd asks, what are the best recorded renditions of Shakespeare's plays? We've already mentioned them. Oh.

But is there any others? You know, what I'll do is I'll again refer you to the BBC. The BBC has many, many very fine recordings of Shakespeare at various times in the 20th century. The very best I've ever heard was Paul Schofield as King Lear, and this is an audio recording. I just about wept, it was so beautiful. Paul Schofield, that you may know, is, he's an actor.

I am aware of two film versions of A Man for All Season. One has Charlton Heston, and the other has Paul Schofield. Have you seen either of those? Yes, I have, yes. Well, he's the guy who isn't Charlton Heston and the other has Paul Schofield. Right. Have you seen either of those? Yes, I have. Yes. Well, he's the, he's the guy who isn't Charles, Charlton Heston. Right. And he is, I, I, I, I think Heston did a great job, but Paul Schofield would just became Thomas Moore and it was magnificent. And, um, and he's, he's got the range and the ability to, to be Lear.

So I think that was the finest audio rendition of King Lear I've heard. And because you know, And what's it like? Yeah. So how do they, uh, how do they dramatize it in? They do minimal sound effects and so on. And, and, and, no, it, it, this really comes across quite nicely with just a little bit of massaging. Maybe you'll hear some, some hoofs in the background. It works pretty well. This is an interesting question. Mitch wants to know which of Shakespeare's works, if any are as edifying than the Lord of the Rings.

What's it, tell me, give me an analogy for comparing Tolkien to Shakespeare. Well, that's a difficult thing to do because, um, you know, um, I have friends and colleagues who are really into, who are really students of Tolkien and scholars of Tolkien, and they do wonderful work. And one of, so this is a roundabout way to start to answer the question. One of the things that I discuss with them,

because I'm trying to understand it myself, is the genre question with Tolkien. So I'm, first of all, I'm saying, they're kind of apples and oranges here. Tolkien, I mean, we call them novels, but I'm, first of all, I'm saying they're, they're kind of apples and oranges here. Tolkien, I mean, we call them novels, but I'm not sure he's writing novels. I think he might be writing epics. He might be writing a type of romance and kind of the old, not falling in love, but romance in the sense of

chivalric romances, Arthurian types of things. He is, he's writing a type of fantasy, which is not particularly novelistic. It's so it's, it's, so he's writing prose narrative, but he's working in this type of fantasy genre, which has a link in my view to epic poetry. It also has a link to, um, again, what I'm calling the, the chivalric romance tradition and to folkloric traditions. And so Tolkien is, is creating this massive mythic world and through the

contemporary mode of the novel, he's telling this great myth. That's what I think he's doing. So I, that's why as a literary critic, I would say he's not writing novels. He's doing something else. Novels. You think of, no, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Henry James. I mean, it's kind of the realist school. So first of all, I would say Tolkien's project, and maybe this is what he means by edifying,

is a massive myth. And I don't mean myth in the sense of it's not true. I mean, myth in the sense of it's a, it's a cosmic foundational story that's overwhelming and it's just in its grandeur. I don't know if you would accept that, but that's kind of how I look at it. 100%.

And that's why I think both in prose form and in films, people just eat it up. They love it. Yeah. At our jaded age, they love it. Okay. So now what, what Shakespeare is doing is not creating a cosmic myth. This is what I think Shakespeare is doing. So to differentiate it from Tolkien, Samuel Johnson, the great Dr. Johnson in his 1757 preface to Shakespeare,

he says Shakespeare is, his drama is the mirror of life. We are reading human sentiments in human language, not a cosmic myth and not a massive cosmic story of gods and semi divinities and heroes. It's the, it's the mirror of life. It's reading human sentiments in human language. And Dr. Johnson says, by reading this, this is astonishing. He says, if one

reads Shakespeare, Dr. Johnson says, a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world. I want to pause over this. If you've never been around human beings, you're a hermit may estimate the transactions of the world. I want to pause over this. If you've never been around human beings, you're a hermit in the monastery. You want to understand humans, put Shakespeare, you're you will understand just about anything that could come across your way. But he goes on, he says, and a confessor could predict the progress of the passions. That's what Shakespeare gives you. He doesn't give you the cosmic myth or necessarily the broad cosmic heroic myth. He gives you humanity in its infinite variety.

He says so much so that if you never interacted with the world, but you read Shakespeare, you'd understand humanity almost perfectly. And even that last part I want to emphasize is that a confessor can predict the progression of the passions by Shakespeare. and that's pretty high praise. So I would say it's edifying, but in the, in the way that I call Shakespeare, the great doctor of humanity, he's the great psychologist. He shows us to ourself. So in that sense, I think it's edifying.

Philip Z asks Shakespeare is said to have been very inventive with words and use of English. Do you have any thoughts about the foreign translation of his works? Is there even a point? Oh boy, that's a great question. So let me first of all, profess my, or, or my limitations here. And you know, I'm, I'm not, I read a couple of different languages, but I'm just not studied enough in his translations into, into other languages. Um, other than the fact that, that he, he,

how would they translate into the same way they take Dostoevsky over to us? Um, I mean translation is always an interpretation. Yeah, but Dostoevsky was written in the what 20th century. Yes. So, but you know, I'm out of my depth, but I don't, I don't know Russian. And I do know a few people that, that, that do read Russian and there are, there are elements to the text that, that will never come over. So I would think it would be all the greater from that long ago with the way Shakespeare is writing, you know, perhaps the,

but the only way I'll answer this is that I think there is a point to it because history has shown that there is a worldwide appetite for, for the drama of Shakespeare. So you have to, though, he raises a great point. You have to make a concession that the language you're always going to lose language and translation. So there is just, that's, that's a given fact and it's an imperfection. Um, but, um, so that, that's a kind of a granted fact, but the only thing, maybe I'll just answer this with an anecdote.

I had the chance to meet the Jesuit Peter Millward. He was a student of CS Lewis's and, um, but he came to Shakespearean and the Jesuits made him go to Japan and he's a Shakespearean Shakespearean scholar. He's one of the guys that argues Shakespeare is a papist and um, but Millward had shared some stories of how the Japanese appropriate Shakespeare. And he said, they just, they, they can't get enough of him. They, they use their own costumes and they make the story their own.

And this is just one example of, um, you see this in Africa, Japan, all over the world, where people will just take these stories and, you know, put their own kind of cultures into them, but keep the story. So, um, I would say there there's very much a benefit, very much a point to it. Um, and I think it speaks to, again, what I just said from Dr. Johnson here, how much he opens up the human condition, people from widely different cultures respond to it. Um, to, to love treachery, hatred, failure, success.

Um, you know, everybody. So I know, I think there's a real benefit to it. And one just has to accept. You have to accept what you lose in translation. You talked about his friends putting together a manuscript or a, yeah, of his place. Do we still have that, the original, uh, collection of his works? And if not, are there different, uh, manuscripts of his plays the way we have different manuscripts of the Gospels? That's a good question.

I, to my knowledge, there is not much extant in terms of actual, you know, his, his handwritten texts. What we have for Shakespeare primarily are the quartos that were published while he was alive. There were a few published after his death and then the first folio. And this touches upon, so in terms of actual manuscript, I don't, I'm not aware that there is,

I think they have his name signed on a legal document somewhere, but I believe Hemmings and Condell, from remembering remembering their introduction are making this claim that they, you know, they had access to the originals of all this. I'm not aware that those are around because most of the manuscript scholars today, and this is a difficult thing sometimes, where let's say something was published three or four times in quarto form, and then you've got the first folio. So what the scholar has to do and the editors have to do

is put all four of those in front of you. It's like the four gospels, see where they're the same, see where they're different, and make a decision about what you're going to do. And in some cases, the differences are really drastic. Like for instance, Hamlet, the first quarto, it's called the bad quarto, is very different from the second quarto, which seems to be a much more elaborate, probably closer to

what Shakespeare wanted. And that too has significant differences from the first folio. So that's, so to answer your question, it's not as simple as it sounds that they're mostly working from the printed manuscripts and trying to collate those together and then the editor Partly has just has to make a decision Nick Martin asks. What do you think about the idea that Hamlet has written in response to the Reformation? He says Hamlet's wrestling with truth mirrors the struggle of people of the day who are Faced with the church breaking up. I stole this idea from Andrew Claven, but I'd appreciate your thoughts. Oh, you know, in a sense I would not be hostile to that, though I

might want to expand it out more. That Hamlet, you know, I think that's a great question. I would be inclined to even put it in broader terms that Hamlet is the modern consciousness that's dealing with the breakdown of kind of all of the stable structures of society and not just now there is no doubt. It you have a toxic religious situation we've already discussed in England where you've got the tensions of the old faith and the demands of the new faith and the real struggle of conscious that that is certainly present. Um, though I would say that part of my hesitation with with with reading the play too directly in that sense is that Hamlet is a person who seems to oscillate

about whether he even believes that there's an afterlife. He's not a particularly religious person. You know, he'll at times say, you know, I don't know what's gonna happen after death and maybe there's nothing after death and that maybe and then he references God a few times. So he's a person who really is struggling with a wide level of religious doubt. So, but no, I think that, that, that question is touching upon the right thing, but I would say he, he's really dealing with the doubts that are, are,

are afflicting modernity kind of in the broadest sense of the term. So, we have a similar question here from Jacob who asks, I have heard that in Romeo and Juliet, the families actually represent the Anglican and Catholic church. Would you agree was it intended that way? I also want to ask more generally, like how annoying are these questions to you?

Oh, I don't think they're annoying, but what- I don't mean it's a bad question. I just mean we look at these brilliant works and there's so many theories about what they can mean. And I wonder how helpful or how distracting that com, those conversations are for lay people like myself. Well, I think they're distracting, but what they also point to, I mean, they're distracting in the sense because you're,

you're posing this very specific question that your average viewer would, your average reader or viewer would not immediately pose that question. I mean, you put Romeo and Juliet. You would not immediately pose that question. May you put Romeo and Juliet. Yeah. You wouldn't immediately pose that question. Yeah. No. Um, these questions, and I, I, I don't dismiss them. They're good questions, but these questions I think are, are largely generated by just the intensity of the disputes about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic, you know,

and that's where I think a lot of this is coming from because there's a pretty broad literature out there making the strong argument that he's a Catholic, that many of these things are veiled or coded. And is that the thing, is that what would change if we discovered without a shadow of a doubt that he was a faithful practicing Catholic? Would that then cause us to interpret his plays differently than we currently do or to? You know, that is, that is a very difficult question because

let me begin with an analogy that let's say somebody plays the saxophone or you're a pianist or even you're a poet and you know, you make some beautiful. And you know, you make some beautiful things and you know, you get a sense for what the work is about. And then I find out that you're either an atheist or you're a Catholic. In one regard, that can't help but change the way I think about your art.

But in another sense, if I've kind of enjoyed the poem or the song for what it is, you know, the inference of what I know about you to what's going on in the work of art is one, I think that is fraught with all types of difficulties, you know, to say, I don't know if it makes it, you're getting into the realm of literary theory here that is it a Catholic poem simply because a Catholic happened to make it? I would say that's a very difficult question we'd have to start to unpack here.

I mean, what if it's a poem about falling in love and hating yourself because you're rejected by the woman? You know, I mean, you could start to layer all this stuff, you know, but you begin with what you have. So going back to these things here, if we found out that he was personally quite devout, I would still be inclined to look at all this stuff and say, you know, this is I'm with Dr. Johnson here. This, this, this is the poet of humanity who's showing us what human beings he's like

Aristotle. I said, this is what, this is what humanity is like. You want to know what humanity is like? This is what humanity is like. And he doesn't really moralize a whole lot. He doesn't point out, Oh yeah, Richard's a terrible man. And, uh, Porsche is a really virtuous and good person. He just puts them in front of him. He puts everything in front of us. So, you know, to go back to this question, it's your, your, your import. I, I just, I guess I'm, I'm, I'm sort of the common sense critic in this regard that you put Romeo and Juliet in front of someone and it's, it's classical,

it's classic new comedy. The parents don't want you to fall in love. The kids want to fall in love. There's danger. I'm sorry. I mean, it starts like old comedy, but it goes to tragedy, but there's danger. There's violence. There's imprudence. You know, so the idea that this is a religious allegory on its face is very, very far from what, from what makes it, you know, so dear to so many people. Does that make some sense? So I begin there. Yeah.

And to, you know, to say, well, it's the hidden meaning that, that becomes a, that becomes a harder claim to make, you know, I mean, some critics have made these arguments. Oh, well, so and so is a, is a, you know, is, is an allegory of Puritanism and so on where it, I mean, it's, it's, it's asking for so many layers of inference that the common viewer or reader, I mean, it would be, so I don't find them annoying, but, but what I, what I do, what I think is, you know, many of us are Catholics. I'm sure many of your viewers are Catholics.

And they're aware of the whole desire and, you know, body of literature that Shakespeare was a Catholic. We want to claim him as a Catholic. And so my suspicion is that these questions are, are, are coming from a knowledge of, of, of these claims. Does that make some sense? So yeah, I'm, but I'm just inclined to read Romeo and Juliet that way. Well, Daniel Pacelli says, what's with the theory that Shakespeare was really a woman.

I hear that all the time. Do you, have you heard that? There is, yes, there is no hypothesis. So bizarre hasn't been read to Shakespeare. I mean, it's just, it's, the difficulty is that this is what happens when you have gaps in a person's life and people are obsessed with a person is you, you just start to make the most absurd speculation. So there is not a single shred of, of that,

that doesn't even pass the scholarly laugh test. I mean, so people are going to make, I mean, it really does. Any serious Shakespeare's scholar, nobody could take that seriously. You know, unless you have some idea that, well, there was a guy named William Shakespeare, but there was actually a woman behind him who was writing all of it. You know, people have proposed this, you know, they proposed Queen Elizabeth. Recently somebody else proposed some, some early modern woman as maybe the real Shakespeare. And so the, yeah, no,

I mean these things, there is not a single shred, not a single shred of evidence for it. Edward and Cecilia ask your thoughts on as you like it in light of current events, should we give it our time or has the current culture tainted it? And what does she mean? What do they mean? Well, first of all, I'd say definitely give it our time or has the current culture tainted it? And what does she mean? What do you mean? Well, first of all, I'd say definitely give it your time. It is a hilarious play. It is extremely funny You you ought to watch it and see it performed as it is intended to be performed and it is innocent and good That is my view

Okay, so they're touching upon and this happens in quite a few Shakespeare comedies They're they're they're touching. My guess is that they're touching upon, and this happens in quite a few Shakespeare comedies, they're touching, my guess is that they're touching upon the cross-dressing. Because, and this happens, again, this happens in more than one Shakespeare play, where you'll have a character who's, this is terrible, her name slipped right out of my head. So there is a dispossessed daughter and cousin who,

who flee from an oppressive uncle and they dress up like men or we, one of them especially dresses up like men. They're living in the woods. And so the humor Rosalind is her name and she falls in love with Orlando, but she's pretending to be a guy. And so she's teaching Orlando how to fall in love with Rosalind. So I mean, it's all just, it's very funny situation comedy.

She's dressed up like a man and so on. And then she says, well, let me test how much of a lover you are. Pretend I'm Rosalind and court me. I mean, the whole thing is hilarious. So my guess is they're talking about the little gender bending cross dressing going on. But in Shakespeare, see,

in Shakespeare it's intended to be funny. Part of comedy is that you bend social conventions and it's known that this is an aberration and it's often a source of tremendous humor and it's all resolved properly. It's not a glorification of cross-dressing as a way of life. So, um, that's why I say one has to be careful because today you might have some, um, LGBTQ type person who'd want to do a production where you're really valorizing

it and hamming it up. But in, in, in Shakespeare, adopting another person's identity as a part of comedy. The rules get fluid, you pretend to be someone else, and it's all working towards resolution. So I would say have at it and enjoy it because it's genuinely funny. I have a different question here about Charles Dickens. Max says, any comments on him? Longtime favorite author, always wondered about his faith. He has broadly Christian themes and good Christian characters. Oh, you know, that's going to have to be for one of Dr. or Mr. Fradd's other guests. I

know enough. I mean, I have a basic understanding of Charles Dickens. He was a person who became enormously successful as a writer. His religion and his cultural views. I would have to, I would have to say that would be a source for research. I can't speak. I just don't happen to recall how serious a religious man he was. Seth Walton, Walton ski says, what do you think are the best sci-fi works of literature? Oh, that's a, that's a good question. And again, I'm going to have to leave you to a different guest who knows the world,

the sci-fi world better. The only comment I'll make is that science, science fiction has a very interesting history. And you know, I would point to something like actually Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Is kind of early science fiction. So science fiction likes to fixate on the role of technology Yeah, often as something that gets out of our control that man has lost control over his own abilities and Who does that now? I'm just gonna mention two that I like of course, I would count Mary Shelley in that category Jules Verne falls in that category. I would also put, um, Aldo Huxley's Brave New World is, is in the subject of, um,

of, of science fiction. So things that start to get past mid 20th century I'm a little less conversant with. I do want to share though, this is a very provocative novel, but it's one of the best novels about race in America. There's a novel called Black No More by a guy named George Schuyler. He's an African American novelist, mid-20th century guy. He lived in Pittsburgh for a good amount of his life. And he wrote this scathing satire about this doctor in Harlem who comes up with a treatment

that will turn black people white. And it just unleashes massive chaos. And it's one of the best satires, and really one of the best novels about race in America I'm familiar with. And that's science fiction too, because this was published early 20th century, and it's really playing with the idea that we have the technology now to do this.

But it's first rate satire plus being science fiction. So more contemporary stuff. CS Lewis wrote science fiction. Everybody knows this. I don't have strong opinions about his science fiction. But you know, so that's a great question. And so that's the limit of my knowledge. Sounds good. Well, what order, and you have to go through all of them, but what order should Shakespeare's plays be read, studied, watched for the first time?

Oh, maybe, maybe give us three, you know, in, in what order you would think a layman like myself or to, I'm going to go back to this question. If you want to have fun, just watch a good production of as you like it. It's a very funny play. It's a very funny play. You could watch that or you could watch a good production of as you like it. It's a very funny play. It's a very funny play. You can watch that or you can watch a good production of a comedy of errors just because they're just humorous love stories that where there's just

a lot of fun in them. So you'll, I might add, so to start with, you could say maybe as you like it, maybe a comedy of errors. I would say also a Midsummer Night's Dream is just fun to watch. It is really entertaining to watch. And you start to get pulled into Shakespearean comedy

and the whole love interests. Maybe then you can move to, I might suggest as a second movement, what I suggested to you, The Merchant of Venice, that's a comedy, but it's a more serious one. It's a more grave one. As some critics point out, Romeo and Juliet is like a comedy that turns into a tragedy.

And The Merchant of Venice is a tragedy that ultimately turns into a comedy. So it's a more grave, a little bit darker of a comedy. And you start to see Shakespeare's versatility. And then I would say go to either Macbeth or Hamlet. So I'm going to give you options at every level. There are some terrific, terrific renditions of, of Macbeth, as well as Hamlet. I'm trying to remember who did it.

It may have been eight or nine years ago. There was one, it was, it was filmed kind of in Scotland Scotland time specific. It's pretty, it's pretty gruesome. I mean, because the battle scenes, they don't spare much, but it really kind of captures, captures the story. And then, and so, what are some, I'm going to put you on the spot. What are some, maybe a modern movie that's become a classic that you would say even indirectly was inspired by Shakespeare

Oh, let me think for a minute about this People you know what I'm gonna give you I'm gonna give you a musical instead of a movie Why'd this slip right out of my head it's one of the most famous musicals in America Um, why'd this slip right out of my head? It's, it's one of the most famous musicals in America. Thank you. Well done. West side story is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. Yeah. And you know, an enormously, enormously popular, just recast the story, but it's very, very clear. It's a retelling of Shakespeare. And there,

there have been another, a number of other pop movies, but that's very, very clear it's a retelling of Shakespeare. And there have been a number of other pop movies, but that's a very clear example of one where the Shakespearean story just gets kind of reinvented and turned into something slightly different. But it's a clear homage to Shakespeare. Joe Ward asks, Hi, doctor, I was wondering where I should go to get context if I wanted to get back into Shakespeare. I remember in high school, we had books that were almost like Bible commentaries for reading Shakespeare.

It's a good question because you pointed out these, what did you say? Shakespeare with no sweat or something? No fear of Shakespeare. No fear of Shakespeare. You said, don't do that. It's actually no fear of learning Shakespeare is what it is. Classic. This is what I would recommend. There are a series of books called Bloom's Guides. They're actually published under the auspices of the late Harold Bloom at Yale. But they're really high quality summaries with scholarly articles, with kind of context,

and they're single volume for just about all of the major plays. So the Bloom's guides are particularly good. I will also put in a plug for my good friend Joseph Pierce, who is the series editor for the Ignatius critical editions of literary texts. He has several excellent, excellent volumes of Shakespeare, so I would

recommend you go over to Ignatius Press. They have some great volumes where you've got a very sound introduction plus some very solid but accessible commentary that are very helpful. So that's another great series. Monica asks, which of Shakespeare's plays do you think is the most often misunderstood? Oh, that's a great question. Um, I have to say these days, probably the merchant of Venice. How is it misunderstood? You know, because there's this persistent tendency to make the villain into the hero. Yeah. Make Shylock into a hero. Like a victim. And yes. And, and here's another one, the Tempest. Okay. Um,

I don't know if you're familiar with the Tempest. There's this, um, the Tempest is about a guy named Prospero. He's stuck on an Island and he's in, he's been exiled and taken away from his, you know, he was the subject of some type of political coup and he ends up on this Island and he's got magical powers. He's a, he's a, he's a scholarly person who knows that the hardest of powers of magic. And there is this, this figure named Caliban who lives on the Island. And so Prospero shows up on the Island with his hardest, the powers of magic. And there is this figure named Caliban who lives on the island.

And so Prospero shows up on the island with his daughter Miranda. And this figure Caliban is the child, apparently, something like a witch and a demon. He's not a good person, he's a nasty person. And so, and by his own admission, he has tried to, shall we say, take advantage of Prospero's daughter and by his own admission, he has tried to, shall we say, take advantage of Prospero's daughter and states

his intention to do so. So Prospero kind of, it basically enslaves him. So these days, a lot of the post-colonial critics want to want to, you know, present Caliban as, as, you know, in an, in enslaved indigenous person, which, you know, one could see, you know, I see where you're going with this, but he's clearly a bad guy in the play. I mean, he's, he's intended to be almost something like a more lovable version of an orca maybe in Tolga. So it's, it's, it's this,

it's kind of this type of, so the merchant event is the tempest. I think, um, are just because political programs could be so easily put upon them, you know, and so on. Okay, cool. Uh, all right, let's, let's begin to wrap up. What, what's some kind of final advice you might give to us who want to get into Shakespeare? Um, well, you know, my, my, my advice would be to, to, I I'm glad for these questions is, is to, to start to watch Shakespeare as well as to read him and start to find

productions that just speak to you, that you're entertained by, that, you know, you feel you start to get into, you say, Oh, this is really, you know, you, you, the, the, the setting, the, the, the typecasting, everything just, it kind of draws you into the story and so on. So that's a great way to get, to get to know Shakespeare, um, is to, you know, to watch productions of it and, and just to be open to it and let yourself be entertained. Don't sit there and think I have to extract the meaning. Just,

just let yourself be entertained. When there's a really nasty evil character, you'll feel it. When there's something funny going on, just let yourself be entertained. When there's a really nasty evil character, you'll feel it. When there's something funny going on, you'll definitely feel it. When there's tension and disappointment and betrayal, I mean just really good actors are going to convey this to you even if their language you don't quite understand everything they're saying. And then when you go back to the text, you'll have some models for this. And, um, and when you're reading Shakespeare, you know, linger over a phrase that speaks to you, um, you know,

because Shakespeare has, has, has such power with language. And even if you don't understand it, if something sort of speaks to you linger over it, let it sink into your mind, let the language teach itself to you. Um, and that's so Shakespeare, first of all, I would say is someone who's meant to be enjoyed. He was writing for the plebeian. He was writing for the groundling as what, you know, I mean his, his plays were accessible to illiterate people who didn't have two shillings to rub together all the way to the king and queen. So his,

he was intended to be for everyone so I would say understand that this was never intended to be just sheerly hot sort of high culture rarefied it that is complete ignorance of Shakespeare's own context I mean it's just like TV today it's made for everyone and he was making it for everyone and so and just to know that and to kind of start to enter into it a little bit. And so I would just say sample and know the difference between, you know, there are tragedies, there are comedies, there are histories. And if you find the histories difficult, I would say just by way of encouragement, they're

really about the maintenance and desire to control and hold political power and instability. So they're really, they're really beautiful political drama. And even if you're not a scholar of English history, you start to see this, like for instance, in the first Tetralogy, the usurper knocks off his cousin and immediately becomes very anxious because the first thing you do when you take out your rival and now you're at the top, what's the first thing you start worrying about being taken out? Yeah.

So there's this concern about legitimacy. There's this concern about passing it onto his son and his son feels the need to prove his legitimacy. So, I mean, these, these, these themes, you don't, you don't, I think ultimately Shakespeare is not interested in teaching you history. He's interested in teaching you these very human lessons so his history plays are really about politics and and and just the tensions of human political life and And so I wouldn't be put off or discouraged by the very particular nature

You could read a little summary about the history, but you know, Richard the third is an amazing villain. Prince Hal is a young Prince whose father seized power and feels the need to prove himself. So, I mean, it's all very, very powerful stuff. I don't often like writing, uh, reading books about other authors. Like I don't want to read a book about Plato. I want to read Plato. I don't want to read, I mean, unless it's about their life and cultural context that maybe helps you understand something. But if it pertains to their teachings, or their sort of mirroring what's in the human

person, I'd rather just read Shakespeare. That said, I remember Peter Crave wrote a book back in the day called You Can Understand the Bible. What a very encouraging title. And he went over every one of the 73 books and there was just a brief introduction to each book. Is there something like that with Shakespeare? Or when will you write it? Yes, there are, there are, there are multiple works like this. And let me reference a few. No one would write this today, because the postmodern Academy is so cynical. A guy named Harold Goddard,

G-O-D-D-A-R-D. because the postmodern Academy is so cynical. A guy named Harold Goddard, G O D D A R D. Harold Goddard wrote this magisterial book called the meaning of Shakespeare. And he has these exquisite ref reflections upon each play. And it's really well done. It's, it's, it's, it's dated. It's early 20th century, but I read it often and he's filled with insight. So Goddard's, the meaning of Shakespeare is, is a great text. Pardon me. Another one that tends to deal with a very broad number of Shakespeare's plays

that I like a lot is, um, um, she might be retired at Harvard now, this, pardon me, woman named Marjorie Garber, who's, a lot of her work, I don't have a lot, I mean, I've met her in person, she's a charming person. A lot of her other work I don't have a lot of sympathy with, but she wrote this wonderful book called Shakespeare After All, where she just gives these reflections on each of the plays, and it's very insightful.

So Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All. Her other work I think is very involved in feminism and cultural studies and some other things I'm less interested in, but that's a good book. Northrop Fry, the great Canadian critic, wrote a series of essays on Shakespeare, I think it's called Fry on Shakespeare, which is quite good.

The great Catholic intellectual at Stanford of the 20th century named René Girard wrote a book called The Theatre of Envy, which is a great reflection upon a whole bunch of Shakespeare plays. So there are, I would recommend those books. It's just volumes that are trying to work through a lot of Shakespeare's plays that could offer you some insights, offer you some helpful critical readings to kind of help you get into the text.

This has been really great. I'm going to watch some of these plays that you've mentioned. Yeah. Yeah. From the Royal Shakespeare Company. And I'll let you know if I accidentally end up liking Shakespeare. Well, I, I, I hope he, you know, he's, he's the mirror of nature. He will teach us into, no, but it's, it's been a real delight. Thank you for having me. And it's been, it's a, it's been a wonderful, wonderful pleasure to visit with you about Shakespeare. Yeah. And then you teach this at Franciscan. I do. I do.

I teach Shakespeare in a number of courses. Excellent. He's a, I'll say imparting that, that like some much more illustrious figures than myself. I think if you're in literary studies long enough, you always come to Shakespeare. I could give you some examples of even some of the people I've mentioned that, Harold Bloom at Yale started as a scholar of the Romantic Poets, but wrote on Shakespeare.

Northrop Frye, also a scholar of British Romantic Poetry, wrote widely on Shakespeare. You know, so many figures who are willing to look at broad literary history, René Girard is another one, he was doing French novels, he came to Shakespeare. Marjorie Garber doing cultural studies came to Shakespeare. There's an inevitability that if you're not going to be

the type of literary person who says, I'm only gonna deal with this very limited group of literary texts, that's my specialty, if you're gonna try and deal with the tradition, you have to come to terms with him. And that's what I've done in my own career. And I love Shakespeare and I've spent some years trying to understand him better. And I love to share him with people.

So I'm grateful for the opportunity here. Yeah. Thanks for doing that today. God bless you. Cheers. Amen. Thank you.