Brutus: An Honorable Hero?

By |2024-03-14T15:33:19-05:00March 14th, 2024|Categories: Character, Herman Melville, History, Literature, Timeless Essays, Virtue, William Shakespeare|

In his last moments, Brutus voiced a sentiment about the ultimate tragedy of the virtuous life in those evil days, in which the good was punished and the evil rewarded. This does not make virtue worthless for the individual; it just may place him on the losing side. [E]veryone knows that some young bucks among [...]

Liberal Education and Politics: The Case of “The Tempest”

By |2024-01-19T18:06:11-06:00January 19th, 2024|Categories: Benjamin Lockerd, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Politics, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare|

A liberal education is free in the sense that it is free of practical goals. We study our language and our literature or biology and chemistry and psychology just because it is a human instinct to do so, and because it is enjoyable to do so. Everything is Political Just as I began my college [...]

Pitiful Caliban and Gollum

By |2023-12-06T20:05:20-06:00December 6th, 2023|Categories: Dwight Longenecker, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare|

Gollum and Caliban are not humans who transmogrify temporarily into beasts. They are horrific hybrids: half humans (or hobbits) who have been taken over by the bestial nature of the dark side. While they have become monstrous, their horror is mixed with humanity. J.R.R. Tolkien was famously antipathetic towards Shakespeare, and there is no suggestion [...]

Macbeth Revisited: The Decline & Fall of Friedrich Nietzsche

By |2024-03-12T20:54:17-05:00November 29th, 2023|Categories: Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare|

Macbeth loses his head and soul in the unknowing clouds of his own sin-deceived ego. So does Nietzsche. Far from seeing life as a quest for truth, they are left with nothing but their own bitter inquest on life, “signifying nothing”. This is the “deepest consequence” of their rejection of faith and reason. I’ve recently [...]

The Underground Shakespeare

By |2023-11-27T19:03:58-06:00November 27th, 2023|Categories: Books, Culture, Dwight Longenecker, England, History, Literature, Mystery, Senior Contributors, Theater, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare|

Despite their obscurity, “The Rape of Lucrece” and “Venus and Adonis” were Shakespeare’s best-sellers. But why were these poems so wildly popular? Shadowplay, by Clare Asquith, 370 pages,  PublicAffairs, 2018) In Shadowplay—her first book about the secret messages in Shakespeare’s plays—Clare Asquith explains what sparked first her imagination and then her research: In the early [...]

Was Ophelia a Virgin?

By |2023-11-07T20:01:57-06:00November 7th, 2023|Categories: Joseph Pearce, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare|

The inspiration for the writing of essays can come from the most surprising and unusual of places. Recently, I received an email from a woman whose homeschooled daughter had asked her whether Hamlet and Ophelia had slept together. This prompted her to ask me for my thoughts on the matter. My initial thought was that [...]

Poetry & Politics?

By |2023-10-25T05:58:29-05:00October 24th, 2023|Categories: Dante, Featured, Glenn Arbery, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Poetry, Timeless Essays, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

Great poetry can come from deep engagement with the problems of politics, but it is especially moving to see how exile—often the consequence of that engagement—subtly becomes the symbol of the condition of fallen man. Students at Wyoming Catholic College memorize many poems in the four years of the humanities curriculum, but few of the [...]

A Deadly Underestimation: The Dueling Words of Brutus and Antony

By |2023-10-02T17:35:50-05:00October 2nd, 2023|Categories: Great Books, Literature, Rome, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, W. Winston Elliott III, William Shakespeare|

The title of Shakespeare’s tragedy is misleading, in that "Julius Caesar" shows us much more about Antony and the friend who betrays Caesar, Brutus, than it does about the legendary leader of Rome. Brutus: “There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea [...]

Love, Levity, and Midsummer Madness

By |2023-07-22T10:04:43-05:00July 21st, 2023|Categories: Joseph Pearce, Literature, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare|

For all its levity, there is gravitas enough in "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." Its all-too-evident lesson is that those who succumb to the madness of erotic love, spurning chastity, will find themselves “enamored of an ass.” Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. So says G. K. Chesterton. On the other hand, as Chesterton [...]

Romeo and Jesuits

By |2023-07-11T14:49:55-05:00July 11th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Joseph Pearce, Poetry, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare|

The Jesuit poet and martyr Saint Robert Southwell was executed in London on February 20, 1595, shortly before Shakespeare is thought to have written Romeo and Juliet. Since there is abundant evidence to suggest that Shakespeare knew Southwell and that he admired Southwell’s poetry, it is worth examining the evidence for Southwell’s influence on Shakespeare’s [...]

Identity and Its Discontents

By |2023-04-28T12:50:06-05:00April 28th, 2023|Categories: Catholicism, Dante, Glenn Arbery, Senior Contributors, William Shakespeare, Wyoming Catholic College|

Who, in this climate, when identity politics rule the publishing world, would have dared to publish Dante or Shakespeare, both of whom imagined characters who were different from themselves? The realm of Paradise in Dante’s great Commedia is an acquired taste, as my sophomores in Humanities might tell you. Most readers of Dante enjoy the [...]

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