Meta-Shakespeare

 I've got a daughter in Classical Conversations doing Challenge III this year. That means we'll be studying Shakespeare. I've got five plays lined up to study with her and am already done with Much Ado About Nothing. I had a conversation with my wife while reading Much Ado and thought it would make an interesting study. There are many instances in Shakespeare's plays when he has a line that appears to be universally true, even out of context for the play; think "All the world's a stage" As You Like It 2.7.139. This line says something that is to be understood as true outside the play as well as inside the play. He is making a reality claim, or a meta-claim, if you will. I am facinated by these lines and asked my wife if the current consensus on Shakespeare was that these were intentional not. She felt they were intentional and I like the idea of that. There are times when the poet / playwright speaks to the crowd in unobscured statements about the nature of reality and personal relationships. 

I'm going to study these moments this year with my daughter reading Much Ado About Nothing, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Henry V, and Hamlet. I will post these Meta-Shakepeare ponderings and what I think they mean as we go. Stick around. 

Crisis of the Republic

Earlier this week I was able to go to one of the sessions of the Classical Conversations Parent Practicum. The speaker, David Lahones, introduced me to some new thoughts and helped crystallize some things I'd been trying to say for years but never been able to put into words as effectively as he did. One idea he mentioned was that of inoculation. We introduce our children to the ideas in great books to help inoculate them against the reality in life. I'll be further examining this for a while.

He also introduced me to a series of essays former presidential candidate Alan Keyes wrote during the 2008 campaign. He read from one of them to help illustrate a point about freedom and education. He said the essays were very difficult to obtain now but had a copy of them in PDF format. He posted them on his own blog, here. I downloaded the file and may, as I read them, post them or excerpts from them to this blog.