Shakespeare is a Mountain Range

Why climb mountains? To make your body into a sheath of steel. Words are the musculature of the soul.

“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus, and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs and peep about

To find ourselves dishonorable graves…

“Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed

That he is grown so great?… “

From “Julius Caesar” by William Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 2

Cassius tempts Marcus Brutus to make a new revolution to prevent Julius Caesar from crowning himself King of Rome and thus destroying the Roman Republic. But Brutus only ends by installing the very tyranny he feared.

Intending to preserve a Republic, a revolution unwittingly installs a tyrant who avoids the title but enjoys the reality of absolute rule. Doesn’t that mirror the hazards of our nominally democratic republics in 2026?

William Shakespeare! You keep on being as alive and immediate as any headline of today. That’s my man!!

In Shakespeare’s play, as it was in real history in 44 BC, Marcus Brutus leads a conspiracy of Senators which kills Julius Caesar. But that act of murder only brings mob chaos, igniting the civil war in which Augustus Caesar becomes triumphant as the first Emperor of Rome.

In real history, to avoid being called by the offensive title “King”, Augustus called himself “First Citizen”, in Latin, “Princeps Civitatis”. So Augustus became known to the intellectuals of Shakespearean England as the first “Prince”, the title by which the petty tyrants of Italy were called.

The title of “Prince” became familiar to Shakespearean London because of a French translation of Niccolo Machiavelli’s book, “The Prince” which made Niccolo’s family name a byword for treachery and tyranny. I think the literati would also have been familiar with Machiavelli’s “Discourses on the History of Titus Livius”.

Therein Niccolo deeply explored the implications of the politics of the Roman Republic. I have a condensation of this book. In it I found what I am tempted to see as the theme of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and even the larger theme of his “history plays” from Richard the Second to Henry the Fourth and Richard the Third. It’s the theme of Macbeth as well. Violent revolution will bring not stability but only a new Civil War which will only be stopped by a new absolutism.

In Shakespeare’s day farmers were still turning up with their plowshares the bones of those who had rotted on the fields of battle during the bloody revolutions called the Wars of the Roses which lasted for decades until Henry Tudor killed Richard the Third in the late 1400s. Shakespeare’s history plays are obsessed with the fear that the civil wars might come again.

In Machiavelli’s Discourses, in his chapter on “Conspiracy” Machiavelli wrote that when a Republic becomes corrupted by the few and rich, people are tempted to overthrow the system by a violent revolution which intends to reform society. But, as Shakespeare so iconically said, “there’s the rub”. Because, said Niccolo:

“Whereas reforming society presupposes a good man, overthrowing society by violence presupposes a bad man. Thus it recurs in history that once the bad man has overthrown society by violence it seldom or never comes into his head to reform it.”

Did Shakespeare read Machiavelli? “Julius Caesar” perfectly embodies what Machiavelli said. In any case I read Machiavelli but only after I had cut my teeth on Shakespeare.

I read Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” when I was 13. It was my fourth Shakespeare play. I had spent the previous two years reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth, then Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. I had begun that course of reading as a personal challenge. I have never, in all my years since then, experienced such a deep education as I experienced then by doing the hard but invigorating work of learning that mighty language and blending my young mind with one of the greatest minds of the second Christian millennium.

Anybody who can read English can find in any library copies of Shakespeare’s plays with all the glossaries and footnotes needed to learn to understand the antique wording. Start with Macbeth. It’s like learning to climb mountains, the point is that the work makes you strong as steel.

Are you a high school graduate tempted to go to some university, get into hundreds of thousands in debt trying to become some professional? You’ll never get the kind of intellectual muscle-building that you will get from reading Shakespeare on your own. University “professional training” breaks you down.

By reading Shakespeare on your own instead, you’ll keep your money and your mind. You’ll learn to think for yourself. Your thinking will become steely sharp and agile. Because you have been climbing the mountain range of language.

It’s not really about words. It’s about mind, the bedrock of every language. Shakespeare thinks in images. This is the ancestral bedrock of human thinking. That’s why Shakespeare has endured in translation into hundreds of languages for 400 years.

But the English language was richer than many others because by 400 years ago it was already a blend of Old English, French and Latin influences. There are a dozen English words to mean any one thing, each one expressing a subtly different nuance of meaning. Shakespeare had an instrument that no French or Italian or German quite had.

The English language, like it or not, is the lingua franca of this global civilization. Learn to speak and compose and read it on a sophisticated level and you will move smoothly among the global shakers of our time. You’ll be able to converse with Prime Ministers and Presidents. You’ll be able to compose like a master. And what’s even better, you’ll have your independent mind.

Those who study the Chinese classics today experience the same kind of education in their own native language and spirituality and history. Such classical education builds sophisticated flexible and steely-strong, self-confident and independent minds. And they build mighty nations.

I have also been a student of American history all my adult life. The founders of the United States, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and Adams, read Shakespeare as well as the King James Bible, and studied Roman history. That was the highest standard of middle class education then. Alexis de Tocqueville, touring America in 1832, noted that there was seldom to be found an American home so poor that it did not contain two books by which literacy was learned: the King James Bible and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

The American Founders called their new government a Republic because they were overthrowing a king. Now today I am tempted to wonder if the Americans, who find the word “King” so repugnant, have found themselves inhabiting a “republic” in name only. And now they do not know how a republic is to be restored.

It has not been many decades since Americans have been calling their world hegemony an empire. When I was a kid such an idea was never heard of. Americans, and we Canadians who thought ourselves virtually the same nation, we took our republican democracy for granted.

Those days are almost unimaginable today.