Welcome back to the New Thinkery on David Barr with me as always is my good friend Alex Priyoh. How are you Alex? Doing well and very excited to discuss McBath again and now with somebody who actually knows what they're talking about. Yeah, Greg called our guest the greatest living expositor of Shakespeare, which is high prey.
So how are you Greg? I'm doing very well David. Thanks. Good to see you guys.
Glad to do this again. Yeah, learn more this time and last. An anticipation of Halloween. I don't know.
Is this our Halloween episode? People have asked us to do a Shelley's Frankenstein, but this is just as well. So Greg, since we have the greatest living expositor of Shakespeare on the show, can you introduce our guest? Who's already?
Well, listeners are quite familiar with. The listeners might be here. Not Alex. Okay.
Well, listeners, the folks at home, they might remember that we actually had Professor Jan Blitzen before when we did Coriolanus by Shakespeare and he's back tonight recording an episode on Shakespeare's McBath. Both of his, the editions were using, we used as additional Coriolanus and we're now using his edition of McBath are available from Focus, but it's an imprint of Hackett Publishing Company. It's an proof copy of the McBath and I think it's coming out here shortly. It's not, if it's available, it's only recently available to the folks at home, but Jan Blitzen and Mary, he also has editions of, yeah, please go ahead.
These are an Anthony and Cleopatra, which I've also received and I assume we're planning to do episodes on. I hope so. And a hammer coming out, too, I believe, right? It's in properly.
Awesome. Excellent. Excellent. So how are you, Jan?
Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Hey, thanks for asking me back. Yeah, welcome back.
Yeah. So let's get into it. So what prompted, I mean, how do you, before we jump into the Beth and Alex can kick off the show, how do you decide which of the plays to tackle? You're picking the highlights, of course, but what's the selection process?
Well, they're the ones I've worked on and know best and I think I should go with what I know. That makes sense. That's a good, succinct answer. And you know, with Beth is, I think maybe just for the folks at home to give us, obviously McBath is just a class.
Everybody loves it. It's such a good play. But maybe just a sort of sense of why McBath is such a compelling play in your review. And readers should know that on all of these plays, right, you have monographs that you've written on each individual play.
And your book on the Beth is excellent. And I think you have some pretty, some pretty, I think, interesting views of why this play is still compelling. So maybe just give the people your two cents on why McBath matters or what makes it so consequential of the play. You overestimate the play.
And virtue, virtue, they mean something different by virtue, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly so. Scotland is a country that is split between warriors and holy men.
Beth's belief in a untempered form of, on the other side, Lady Mcoff and Ticke of himself believes in saintly Christian and warrior virtue and the, to protect the innocent and effect said as well extremes of very much say, and everyone is destroyed by their accessibility or from the middle ages. It's more than just a good moral quality. And with that in extreme. Hey, David, you know, our episode today is brought to you by the ancient language and to do where you've been studying, right?
I have indeed. I've been in Georgia, Greek. It's, it's, it's tremendous. The other day I was in Chicago, walking down the street and a bag of lady bumped into me.
And I couldn't believe my eyes. It was Martha Nussbaum on her way to teach a Greek at the University of Chicago. And she screamed something to me and I corrected her. And so that should be a testament to just how much I'm learning.
And the other thing that I can report is Greg, who's our famed translator of Xenophon, who's Greek is excellent. He'll sometimes send me things like he sent me a note the other day that said, David, I'd like to come to your O coast to lie with your so on. And I normally wouldn't know what that means. But now I know that Greg wants to come to my home to, to, to hang out with my animals.
And so I just want to thank the ancient language Institute for helping you crack that code, helping you crack that code and talking to Martha Nussbaum. That's right. Well, fortunately we've got this new ancient language institute and they not only have to only ancient Greek, which clearly has been helping David and his economic and other matters, but they also teach Hebrew as well as Latin. They don't use long vocabulary lists and grammar charts.
Instead they get you speaking and reading on day one. And if you're interested in being a fellow student with David Barr, you can enroll in the fall term up until August 13th. They're offering live online courses for our busy listeners, full schedules, flexible schedules. You heard me.
And if you're not satisfied, unlike David Barr, who's happy as a pig at a trough, if you're not happy like David Barr, they will fully refund your payment after the first class. You decide that ancient language institute is not for you. Where can we find the malics, the ancient language institute? That's a happiness guarantee.
Not even Aristotle has that. That's all I'm talking about. The name on the island. Ancientlanguage.com.
Ancientlanguage.com. Go learn some Greek. Ancientlanguage.com. And now back to the show.
So why don't you summarize the play quickly? Sure. I mean, so it's a play in five acts. It starts with the end of the battle.
There's been an invasion by led by one of the things of Norway on one side. On the other side, another thing with Donwald has adult against the good pious king Duncan. Macbeth really shows up in battle, kills Macdonald by slicing him from the nave to the chops, then he's his jaw and sticking his head on a pike. Duncan is very pleased by this.
I think partly because he doesn't have to do his dirty work. And then Macbeth is honored by being given a second title as a thing. Now he hears from witches that he's going to get the second title before he gets it. And also that he's going to be King of Scotland through a series of events.
He and his wife decide to kill Duncan, which they do. And they also kill his bodyguards and leave the bloody knives with them. Well, they kill the bloody guards after they wake up, but they leave the bloody knives with them. And blame falls on them and perhaps on Duncan's children who flee off to England.
Now Macbeth is raxed by guilt, leading Macbeth less so. But as the play goes on, she gets less resolute and more guilt-ridden, specifically for her role in disposing of the knives and for instigating Macbeth. Well, Macbeth gets more resolute, more prophecies from the witches. And it ends with this really, I think this is the fifth act.
It's really like a blockbuster set of eight or nine scenes, cutting back and forth. You see the prophecies of the witches coming through the very lackular and hard to understand until you see a play out. And Macbeth finally gets killed by Macduff. Malcolm returns from England.
He's invading, bringing the nobility on his side as he comes in, along with an English army. And the result is he returns to power and he sets up a hereditary monarchy and also changes the things that are basically a regime change on the basis of what he's learned in England. But the larger themes right around Macbeth's ambition, the relationship between kingship and tyranny, as Macbeth becomes more and more cool. And I think maybe this is to chicken to yawn at this point.
You were talking about this, I guess, with the understanding of virtue. But in a way, what's in the background of that is the two traditions that are existing in Scotland. Scotland, as you note with the coming of Saint Colombo, I think it's Colombo, or Colombo, sorry, I was thinking of Greg's favorite TV show, Saint Colombo. It turns into a Christian nation.
And so there's this half a millennium of Christian tradition and then this, since time immemorial, as you note, this pagan warrior virtue. And it's a sort of conflict of value systems that people say nowadays, or conflict of almost views of the cosmos of man's place in it that creates the volatile tensions within the place. So maybe a good way to push the conversation forward, Jan, is to talk a little bit about the historical political background of these two traditions and specifically Saint Colombo. To which you point out, I hadn't noticed this, at least three references in the play, right?
Yeah. I'm sure Saint brought Christianity around 650. Sorry. And the play takes place 500 years later.
And Christianity is very strong in Scotland, or kind of otherworldly. The people who are in the play, including Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, believe in Dan Fray that God is listening to that every thought. And in fact, I think you could say, this is what leads him from. So it's been there for 500 years.
It has not done me barbaric Scott. And one of the big changes that will bring when he is victorious in the end is to the Christian Saint Colombo is a country of warriors and holy men. Very bad combination. Yeah, you mentioned this about Macbeth, how his conscience destroys him.
There is that one line where he says, I am in blood weighted so deep that it's easy to go across as to turn around. I'm just getting the line. But basically, to purify myself or just to go, you know, whole hog and try to go through the island blood and try to establish my sort of hereditary tyranny, I guess, all the way. It's indifferent.
And that wouldn't be a sort of issue of his forever tainted, right? His eternal jeweler, as he puts it, he would never be, he would not be forever tainted had he not this sort of zero-sum view of, you know, sinner and going to hell or, you know, pure and going to heaven, right? Yeah, I think that the fact that this is by what is really his conscience. And that's, I think, why he keeps slipping from one enemy to an always a new enemy, even before he's killed the present enemy, he's thinking of the next.
When his conscience bothers him and it bothers him, oh, until he finally tries to kill it, the end. He finds another enemy to kill, kills that enemy. Arouses his conscience, deuces fear, and that fear finds a new enemy. Extern, always externing, is in herself.
Warriors are other directed. And he finally ends up trying to, in order to silence his conscience. One sees how used to slaughter, he won't hear his conscience and he tries to do. Professor Wood, make some see.
Yeah, I wonder why Abraham Lincoln loved this place so much. That's not who he's still. Oh, yeah, I think that's relatively easy to answer. In the same letter where he says it's a wonderful play and he singles it out, he makes a comment about which he was scorned, but it reveals what he was thinking.
Emily is not the one beginning to be or not to be, the one beginning, oh, my offense is rank. That's glorious when he can no longer pray. And that in a way is to kill his tongue, because he says he can't pray. And that's his conscience.
And that's what I think leads to his bloody tyranny. Interesting. And so before we move on, Greg, I know you wanted to say something. What gone, Greg, did you want to?
I wanted to, because I don't see this on the run show, the status of the witches in McBeth, I was hoping you could touch on Jan. Because if you have on the one hand, there's a tension between the pagan and Christian forces are witches of these indeterminate creatures, or where are they in the cosmos of the player? How are we to understand them as supernatural beings, or something else? This can sometimes be a stumbling block of students.
There are all kinds of, it's their group of the early medieval, where between God and man, there are all kinds of supernatural creatures. And America's believe in them. And if you want to represent the Christianity, show it life was like, look for many people. You include the sorts of things that they believed in, and superstitions that went along with it.
Not just local color. It really brings out an important element of, and that goes hand in hand with faith in virtue. God has a hand in everything, and God hears and knows everything, and that has a lot to do with, back to great fear, utilizing his conscience. I know Greg wants to ask the question, but I could just jump in, right?
I'm just joking, Greg. I can see he's like fuming over there. Go ahead. Go ahead.
I was actually freezing up. I can never tell Greg when you're about to say something, or, okay, I was going to try and tee Alex up, actually. Alex and David and I, we usually text one other during the course of the week, as we prepare for the show. And one of the questions that Alex posed to us was whether or not McBeth takes place and it caused most government according to Christian principles.
So does Shakespeare allow for the supernatural in this play? Do they actually have powers? Do you have the same sort of question or thing sort of thing? Did it happen?
Yes, but you could say it in poetry, you can do things like that. There are other examples, played a lot of examples. There's a lot of, and I think they bring out what they saw. Yeah, we'll get to Greg's favorite character, Satan, a little bit later.
We're going to say it. Good. Yeah, that's because I was joking. Because at times the characters want to attribute their visions to, like, my brain is hotter and anxious or something like that, physiological accounts of their visions.
And in the case of Lady McBeth and McBeth, that seems plausible, but when it comes to the witches, they make some very specific predictions that come true. And then there's also, I never really noticed this, but in Acts 4, scene 3, Malcolm and the doctor relate some miracles, but they're Christian. I like your explanation, because it seems like there's both a true Christian presence on the one hand and a true pagan presence. So I'm always struck by the witches referred to Jews as lost femurs.
Sorry, it's like he's good pious Christian Jews, like Christian witches. Well, one of the interesting things about the witches is they're then only so far as Christmassy Eastern and the Christian in the 11th century. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the three humans, which are non-Christians, third is the newborn Christian and Christian character.
Yeah, that's interesting. Could you say a little more of that perversion? Maybe this is getting a little too in the weeds, but it's a strange, just to emphasize why I think this is worth discussing. It's a strange world in which Macbeth takes place.
It's got, right, obviously these two, you know, conceptions of the world operating the characters, but they seem to operate within the world itself. It reminds me a little bit of the Tempest in that way, where there's a sort of magical world on this island and then this other world and it kind of extends out and it's very hard to know exactly what's happening. But what is this pagan element that's got this Christian twist on it, or this pagan perversion of Christianity that was represented by the witches? Well, I'm not a pagan.
So I'm not a pagan in a Christian, but on the whole, they're more Christian than anything else. They're not, it's a mistake of calling Christian because they're really not their perversion of the cosmos. There are beings in between man and God. There's the belief in prophecy with characters and for Christianity.
And so they sit in there. Do you, what do you have any thoughts about what Shakespeare might have been up to with respect to the effect that Macbeth would have had on his audience? Do you think he was using the play as a stocking horse for anything to push certain themes to get the audience to confront something in particular? Or does this just happen to be an interesting tale simply that always has application?
No matter what time in place? Yeah, I would let him. James had just become king because I understand it. There was a lot of interest and there were a lot of people writing about it.
Not surprising. To me, it's surprising. Comes out the play comes out the way it does. Banquo is said to be the progenitor of the Stuart line and James is one of the figures in the, if I were James, I would not be proud of my progenitor.
Banquo is not a hero. He commits every scene sin of omission and really sets things up so that Macbeth or at least he'll benefit from it. Strange. If he's trying to compliment James as a lot of critics say, I think James would have to be awfully slow.
Professor Blitz, switching gears just a little bit. I mean, I think folks who have read Macbeth or even people who only have a passing familiarity with it, one of the things they'll focus on is relationship between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. But that's not the only familiar relationship that courses through this play. So that seems to be a fairly prominent theme.
So there's cousins, there's fathers and sons, there's fathers and sons who get murdered. There are all kinds of metaphors that invoke the family. And I'm wondering, as we put this together and talk about the show, we talked about the possibility that this familial life or maybe life in general is contrasted with her too. So I was just wondering if you want to speak a little bit about any of the things that I just just raised in that little two countries.
One is not yet really word law is never mentioned in the play. It's not mentioned in Shakespeare play is the template. Is that right? Only two plays?
Yeah. I believe that's true. And the reason it's not mentioned in Scotland is countries held together by family ties, by private oaths, by ties of only ties, even the witches or sisters. Everyone is related to everyone else.
Can I just say, yeah, go ahead. Just a small point, I think as folks are trying to sort of think this out, it's interesting because where the Scots mostly immigrated to the United States is sort of Appalachia and you see a similar half-field employees, right? There's a similar sort of family-viewed kind of element to, I live for years in Appalachia. And you wear the family element too.
Which is not to be personal. But yeah, so the point, I mean, I see this, you sort of see this in American history as well, but I don't mean to take it too far, I feel that just to kind of get folks at home a little bit, I get what it's like, right? It's sort of rural, it's rustic, the environment is not very hospitable, and you have these kind of families, what dominance. Yeah, very good.
Sorry to interrupt. Children is crucial to the play. And from the men becoming kings, whether it's through election cat, well, I'm sorry, Duncan, Macbeth, Bankel all want to establish dynamistic seeds. Well, having, and you know, the old cliche, close reading of the play, how many children have made Macbeth properly asked, that's what is the number?
It's not what is the number. Why is it both necessary and impossible? And Macbeth in the end, tools in order to generate sons, power even to generate, thinks of his murders of just children as the first. Oh, he wouldn't have kids.
Yeah, sorry, I'm sorry. As far as we know he did not. Oh, okay, I must be remembering and correct. I thought there was some illusion that leading Macbeth makes too.
Yeah, yeah, she says she, she says she, if to lie, anyone would break his manly, my point, children and they can't have children. Yeah, yeah, okay. And so her saying that is acknowledgement of the power of and soon after she says that, Beth says, fourth men children only, and daunted medals should compose nothing but males. She turns herself into a male.
Men can't, she must and can't, but Macbeth must and can't, as long as we emphasize the manly to the complete exclusion of female, generation is not possible. On that is that Macbeth wants to master fortune, master the future. All of his crimes are to get rid of the uncertainty of the future, but you can't have generation. It's on maybe this can tie this back to the earlier stuff about his conscience.
In Act three, scene one, Macbeth has, is there's about to be, he says everybody go your way, we're going to hang out and he sends a servant to bring in these murderers and as the servants gone, he talks a bit about his reason. He said just a read a couple of lines. It's also a shame to do a podcast on Shakespeare and not read a little bit of the text by says, upon my head, they placed a fruitless crown, the witches and put a bear in scepter in my gripe, thence to be wrenched with an unlinial hand, no son of mine succeeding. That's four times in four lines that he mentions, no child.
And he says, if he though for Banquos issue, how by files my mind, I think file there's a play on categorized into a file. Yeah, for them, the gracious Duncan have I murdered put rankers in the vessel of my peace. There's the conscience, right? Only for them and my eternal jewel given to the common enemy of man to make them kings the seat of Banquo kings.
So there's a lot going on there, right? He's concerned with his lineage, he's concerned with his eternal soul and the devil, as well as his conscience, all operating there. So maybe that's a good chunk of text to to focalize what we've done. And solve that problem of having a son.
He'll kill. Yeah, so he thinks that will trade you a son. Is it something like murdering will make him somehow virile or something? Yeah, yeah, but it's more than that.
It's a important point. In there, if you have virtue, you will succeed. The second point will not fail. Lady Macgeth says, and Macbeth is much weirder than the witches.
He thinks that his murdering can generate his happiness. It's really strange that the childless Macbeth kills in order to generate, but to have sons to succeed him on the phone. Yeah, so I think I'm getting a sense of what you mean by this extraordinary reliance on virtue and its relationship to generation or to like another thing. I noted this to my students while I was teaching with Beth last week, but there is this theme of milk that runs throughout its mentioned a few times, but you have this wonderful new and this is take us as an example for the listeners of why you should get this edition of the sort of meticulousness with which Jan has gone through this.
But you point out that Lady Macbeth initially wants, says she'll give the guards, Duncan's guards wine to knock them out. But she ends up giving them positive and I'm just like, Oh, that's not medieval drink. But then you have this helpful note that points out this is a beverage made with milk, right? Milk curds.
A curdled milk. Yeah. Instead of milk of human kindness, it's milk of curdled unkindness. Yeah, it's a very nice touch.
Absolutely. And this is after she said, turn my milk into gall in a way. That's I guess. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very good.
So yeah, so maybe just going on this, you have a in your introduction section where you talk about the sovereignty of virtue. Maybe we've discussed that enough, but maybe there's something you want to add on that topic. Yeah. So so then let's let's get to the overall.
We talked on this already a bit about the Scottish throne and the succession problems. But let's talk about the regime and how it changes and what the greater impact or import of that is for the player. Only indication of what the short scene of the last thing to the play and Malcolm. By the way, it's interesting.
He claims himself king. He uses the royal we go around him, have to and he he changes the dunk in naval. He's very careful. The famed the office of fame, office between fame and it's not really a different office.
It's the designated successor have been elected from royal planes, the great irony when it greets back by worthy as cousin. The crown becomes inherited. The election is dropped. Malcolm introduces the title of between your fame and you the king will and you want to be rewarded and get more than what Duncan cooked up as a daros.
The you get and Malcolm as far as I can tell is really the opposite of the he owes his life several times over to very much and he I think that teaches him he knows we depend on. He does a wonderful moment where he tests McDuff that's seen between him and McDuff and then Ross comes in is a full 10% of the play. If you take out the testing scene and then Ross's obfuscation of what happens to the McDuff's family that whole thing, it would be very short as far as but it seems important to Shakespeare to show that Malcolm has a kind of he's not like his father who's a little too trusting at times. He says this thing after McDonald's to death, he's not McDonald's the fan of coddlers but to death.
He says well you can never tell if somebody is and then he walks to him and calls him worthy as a cousin and you're like well this guy's going to kill you. You have no idea. You just you just overly trusted a thing and look at what's happening. So it seems like Malcolm's learned from that.
You don't announce that if you're a king, you don't announce that to an audience. That's not the way to avoid trouble. Yeah, no absolutely. And so one of the I usually teach this just on the heels of doing the prints and I kind of tell my students to have chapters 17 and 18 in mind especially when it comes to excessive cruelty, excessive mercy and then Malcolm who seems to be able to appear good and not good as necessity dictates as fortune changes.
Whereas Macbeth he has a moment when he hears the witches prophesying and then he becomes the end of Carter. He's like oh well fortune made me think maybe it'll make me king. Once he hears the stuff about Prince of Cumberland, he says I have to do this. Right?
And so he shifts from fortune to virtue it seems like. So do you think this is just a kind of theory of mine? But for the politics and a lot of these ideas, do you think Shakespeare had Machiavelli in mind? It just seems like so many themes from Machiavelli Christian versus pagan virtue, fortune versus virtue.
I mean just seems like there's a lot going on. And some of the sneaky things that happened in the plot with Ross and Satan seem like little twist that Machiavelli would appreciate little subtleties. I mean well I think that's it doesn't lead to anything. I think with Macbeth what's very important is that right from the start even when he thinks fortune would give him he thinks he's got to murder for it and leading Macbeth thinks he has to murder for it.
It's not worth anything if you don't kill for it. And that's certainly her view because the one thing she trusts is but one thing she admires is manly virtue which he understands is warrior virtue and that means as she says many many times over in various ways got to get your hands wet got to take action if you if fortune were to give you the throne it would be worthless. If something only because you earned it that's really one of the very strange things even she can't live up to that but it's very important for her murder becomes a moral impiven her view of and small sorry no just one small follow up there I mean is it tied therefore to a kind of sacrifice on her part or his part? Not clear yeah sure so yeah well that is something they have to work for they earn it that virtue sort of has to be accompanied by some kind of sacrifice so I'm just maybe I'm just wondering if there's not a theological tension regarding virtue that's manifest in this political way that's sort of the gods reward those who are willing to put in the work or willing to do the duty to something like that or if that's not a warrior I'm just wondering if they're sort of no I think I think it's uh to understand everything about Macbeth in when his conscience strikes she says you're not a man on this but you mentioned earlier the marriage the marriage between them is extremely interesting and it's very interesting in just these ways Macbeth immediately assumes when he hears me profit that and he writes his letter his wife there's everything to get her excited he provokes her as well as he can when he gets home he walks in the door and it's almost comical he is utterly deadpan in fact hi honey I'm home what's for dinner she like any married couple don't say the key word they leave the contact implicit each knows what the other is thinking what the other is saying and each knows what to say to get the other to do what here she wants you know it's his marvelous what we nowadays call passive each manipulates the other and he does it so she works all right folks today's episode is also brought you by ISI then you probably listen to the new thing because you love thinking deeply about important texts authors and ideas perhaps you're a professor at a university if so I think you need to check out the inter-collegiate studies institute or ISI David what is the ISI thanks for asking me on is I spoke to provide ideas and community for thoughtful conservative faculty like our listeners ISI faculty members are given free print subscription to ISI's quarterly journal the excellent modern age opportunities to attend exclusive faculty only weekend seminars and opportunities to lecture and teach at ISI events that's not even to mention that faculty members are routinely featured on ISI's podcasts which is called conservative conversations with ISI and another podcast called Counter University classroom if you are a conservative college professor head on over to the ISI today that's ISI.org slash new thinkery sign up and become a member today and now back to the show yeah I remind you the scene where Macbeth comes in and she takes the daggers remind me when you know I'm I'm tired from cooking I just tell my wife to do the dishes or something because I can't I can't be bothered to and she just gets it she gets it I'm tired you know luckily it's not so so much it occurs um so should we should we wrap up our discussion of about this or anything you wanted to cover your that we didn't I think you've done a great job of laying out the core issues of the play I mean this is really fascinating you know I never thought before looking at your introduction period you speak now about just how much Macbeth relies on virtue and how much she takes that reliance to its logical and ultimately absurd or illogical extremes right especially the stuff you were saying about having children yeah just to say I quite I find you're interpreting it's also worth mentioning that Celtic Scotland has a lot of people who don't opportunists and so it's it's not that everyone trusts in it but the main characters do and it leads to the death of all of them that's it's an interesting note that the play ends on when Malcolm gives his speech which the first time I read it so many years ago just struck me as a sort of I don't know a kind of a little too warm of the ending but he he has a subtle threat about what's the phrase he uses the the cruel ministers of this dead butcher and his fiend like queen and I took that maybe you could talk about this a bit but the cool ministers line I took to be maybe a reference to Ross who seems to just kind of go along with whoever's in power until everything is falling apart yeah it's hard to know but he suggests there's going to be a reckoning right the people who help Macbeth are going to get their comments right yeah it's very hard to know what that really but at least yeah but yeah he he he says that we'll do certain things now and other things later and he puts on dealing with Donald Baine who would be a problem yeah it's it's not clear and it is clear that a lot of cleaning up to do well yeah this has been very helpful I hope the folks at home have enjoyed this I hope that the folks at home will rush right out to Amazon or to hack it and purchase the new edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth that you edited and put very very helpful notes into and also written this introduction which we tried to provide a kind of brief overview of so we spoke to get a little bit of an idea of what your interpretation is and maybe at this point we could do some well we've already had you on before so it seems like maybe lighting around questions would be redundant for folks at home because obviously everyone listens to all of our too and so I just thought maybe we could ask some different questions some new questions so what's up with the guys we just have a few questions so um it's a little bit outside of the panel for us but what qualities and virtues do you appreciate in friends colleagues and students good character interesting minds good character interesting minds I can't do that yeah that was lightning so what qualities are you so that's another question what advice would you give to your younger self or what advice what advice did you give to your younger self and did that advice serve you well follow your interests but yes very nice so what as you look back on your life and what are some of the best what are some of the highlights just doing what you love anything in particular how do you mean the question well um just sort of the last thing you said sort of sounded like you you're looking back over your life and have a great deal of satisfaction with the life that you've led so just wondering if there are any particular things that lead you to that level satisfaction right did you get anything I liked that was very good that does sound good uh having as colleagues for a total of five years Eva Bran oh Kathy Zuckert and Mary Nichols right money to bring them in and uh my writing it's been very very satisfying yeah instead of saying for us to for a course we're near great additions I should actually point out uh Greg mentioned your your new obviously a new addition up like that I tried to just provide one or two notes that I thought were interesting but at times the notes are so thorough and so engaging that you know and they sometimes are longer than the text on the page like you really get a lot out of it um it's usually you know the notes in an addition are just like explaining obscure reference what does this word mean in today's English these really take you into the know if there's a lot of that obviously you cover all that ground but you also you just look to the bottom of the page and all this thing like oh here's a sort of interpretation or a couple of thoughts to keep in mind and cross-reference is that if you follow them out it's it's like reading an interpretation and if you yes you really want to read an interpretation you also have a monograph on it um which is really uh also worth picking up so what's the title of that monograph you're on for the folks at home?
The Insufficiency of Virtue yeah great I have one last question for you uh I've heard tell that when you were in college now you were a civil rights worker in the still segregated South can you maybe tell the folks at home about a memorable moment from that experience Marty and Jackie Robinson's house in honor of Martin Luther King get out of here I'm coming to the truth that is that's number of things you met them both that right how was it? Tell us about it that's insane uh most of the guests was it was an NAACP and uh most of them were donors and probably didn't forgotten my time right at the NAACP and a lot of time more than Mrs. Robinson was happy with in Robinson uh she'd never be in there yeah did you have a favorite ball team grown up by chance? Did I?
Did you have a favorite baseball team grown up? Oh yeah uh when I was a kid with the Yankees not the Dodgers yeah and uh I think that the worst curse you can may you be of all the memorial they've had a rough building for sure yeah but a beautiful park those people have beautiful place to watch baseball well thank you that's uh yes thank you I mean uh I don't want to ask whether you have any Jackie Robinson's uh trophy's uh pilfred in your house but uh we'll leave that to lord I have a photograph well thank you for joining us this has been eye opening and um yeah I mean just as always it's always a pleasure to discuss Shakespeare with you and thanks very much I enjoy it yeah sorry I thanks everybody for joining us on the new thinkery and uh remember to like subscribe rate review us and donate donate of course donate and we'll see you all next week bye bye