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1b66557
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he "obliterated by the praiseworthy use he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days."
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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0ecafba
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The patricians urge [Coriolanus] to set aside his most deeply held convictions for the purpose of getting elected. They want him to lie and to pander and to play the demagogue. Once he is securely in office, there will be plenty of time for him to resume his actual stance and to roll back the concessions that have been made to the poor. It is the most familiar of political games: the plutocrat, born into every privilege and inwardly contemp..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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03d990c
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Shakespeare believed that . . . tyrants and their minions would ultimately fail, brought down by their own viciousness and by a popular spirit of humanity that could be suppressed but never completely extinguished. The best chance for the recovery of collective decency lay, he thought, in the political action of ordinary citizens. He never lost sight of . . . the hungry citizen who demanded economic justice. 'What is the city but the people..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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df0e506
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the printers who set the books in type still depended on accurate, readable, handwritten transcriptions, often of manuscripts that were illegible to all but a few.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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e73e57a
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He [Cade] promises to make England great again. How will he do that? He shows the crowd at once: he attacks education.
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politics
shakespeare
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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d6c4d10
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Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation. The unscrupulous leader has no actual interest in bettering the lot of the poor. Surrounded from birth with great wealth, his tastes run to extravagant luxuries, and he finds nothing remotely appealing the lives of underclasses... But he sees that they can be made to further his ambition.
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politics
shakespeare
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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759b292
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Even in systems that have multiple moderating institutions, the chief executive almost always has considerable power. But what happens when that executive is not mentally fit to hold office? What if he begins to make decisions that threaten the well-being and security of the realm?
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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cf99f49
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It is extremely dangerous to have a state run by someone who governs by impulse.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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9ac4849
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Working with knives, brushes, and rags, monks often carefully washed away the old writings--Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius--and wrote in their place the texts that they were instructed by their superiors to copy.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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8dc137e
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monks were strictly forbidden to change what they thought were mistakes in the texts they were copying.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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1825384
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Human beings, Lucretius thought, must not drink in the poisonous belief that their souls are only part of the world temporarily and they are heading somewhere else. That belief will only spawn in them a destructive relation to the environment in which they live the only lives they have.
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philosophy
science
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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519f53f
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It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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55fd5a2
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The internal and external censors that keep most ordinary mortals, let alone rulers of nations, from sending irrational messages in the middle of the night or acting on every crazed impulse are absent.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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d78d6cb
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you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence--atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else--your life will change. You will no longer fear Jove's wrath, whenever you hear a peal of thunder..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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47bb9db
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No. Honour hath not skill in surgery, then? No.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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f3a5253
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The parchment is hairy
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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0e0f4aa
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Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just. (3.4.34-37)
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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7b73007
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to entertain the thought that the sun is only one star in an infinite universe; to live an ethical life without reference to postmortem rewards and punishments; to contemplate without trembling the death of the soul. In short, it became possible--never easy, but possible--in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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851f33d
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There is no single explanation for the emergence of the Renaissance and the release of the forces that have shaped our own world.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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8220204
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any question, however innocuous, could raise the prospect of a discussion, a discussion that would imply that religious doctrines were open to inquiry and argument.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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048fe8d
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To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as "It is not as you say," there is a heavy penalty: "an imposition of silence or fifty blows." The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks--the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip--were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philos..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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62905f0
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in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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1b11f38
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In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absence..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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76355e7
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monasteries were extremely difficult to reach--their founders had built them in deliberately remote places, in order to withdraw from the temptations, distractions, and dangers of the world.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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81c98c3
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Books were scarce and valuable. They conferred prestige on the monastery that possessed them, and the monks were not inclined to let them out of their sight,
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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41c24e8
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not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by educated slaves.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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b663a15
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The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by educated slaves.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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0216ce0
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Those who wrote unusually well--in fine, clear handwriting that the other monks could easily read and with painstaking accuracy in the transcription--came to be valued. In the "wergild" codes that in Germanic lands and in Ireland specified the payment of reparations for murder--200 shillings for killing a churl, 300 for a low-ranking cleric, 400 if the cleric was saying mass when he was attacked, and so forth--the loss of a scribe by violen..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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920be10
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The high price, at a time when life was cheap, suggests both how important and how difficult it was for monasteries to obtain the books that they needed in order to enforce the reading rule.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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a85ebee
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paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books was made from the skins of animals--
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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6e81347
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Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all. What had begun as an active campaign to forget--a pious attack on pagan ideas--had evolved into actual forgetting. The ancient poems, philosophical treatises, and political speeches, at one time so threatening and so alluring, were no longer in anyone's mind, let alone on anyone's lips.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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e725775
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In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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6e9b052
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Shakespeare grappled again and again with a deeply unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?
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new-historicism
politics
shakespeare
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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9ade891
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As with modern totalitarian regimes, people developed techniques for speaking in code, addressing at one or more removes what most mattered to them. But it was not only caution that motivated Shakespeare's penchant for displacement. He seems to have grasped that he thought more clearly about the issues that preoccupied his world when he confronted them not directly but from an oblique angle. His plays suggest that he could best acknowledge ..
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politics
shakespeare
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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1fcf831
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A succession of murders clears the field of most of the significant impediments, actual or potential, to Richard's seizing power. But it is striking that Shakespeare does not envisage the tyrant's climactic accession to the throne as the direct result of violence. To solicit a popular mandate, Richard conducts a political campaign, complete with a fraudulent display of religious piety, the slandering of opponents, and a grossly exaggerated ..
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politics
shakespeare
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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286fa32
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Unlike many other animals, who are endowed at birth with what they need to survive, human infants are almost completely vulnerable:
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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f11f933
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APART FROM THE charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy,
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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8daa013
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Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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5e7ffeb
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The indefatigable scholar Didymus of Alexandria earned the nickname Bronze-Ass (literally, "Brazen-Bowelled") for having what it took to write more than 3,500 books; apart from a few fragments, all have vanished."
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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fd6fc21
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I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention. But it is nonetheless possible to have a powerful experience of a work of art even in a modest translation, let alone a brilliant one. That is, after all, how most of the literate world has encountered Genesis or the Iliad or Hamlet, and, though it is certainly preferab..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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1defe5b
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ITALIANS HAD BEEN book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy's monumental History of Rome and finding forgotten masterpieces by Cicero, Propertius, and others. Petrarch's achievement had inspired others to seek out lost classics that had been lying unread, often for centuries.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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d48933d
|
for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards at least, were not high.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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db83492
|
all monks were expected to know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords, that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of incalculable importance.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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c82ddc6
|
and in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: "The parchment is hairy"19 ... "Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text" ... "Thank God, it will soon be dark." --
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Stephen Greenblatt |