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221b0b1
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The absurdity of these campaign promises is not an impediment to their effectiveness. On the contrary: Cade keeps producing demonstrable falsehoods about his origins and making wild claims about the great things he will do, and the crowds eagerly swallow them. To be sure, his neighbors know that Cade is a congenital liar.
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shakespeare
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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d70eb93
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In ordinary times, when a public figure is caught in a lie or simply reveals blatant ignorance of the truth, his standing is diminished. But these are not ordinary times. If a dispassionate bystander were to point out all of Cade's grotesque distortions, mistakes, and downright lies, the crowd's anger would light on the skeptic and not on Cade.
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shakespeare
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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ad5f10b
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Although insecurity, overconfidence, and murderous rage are strange bedfellows, they all coexist in the tyrant's soul. He has servants and associates, but in effect he is alone. Institutional restraints have all failed. 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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2cd7ede
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to make their way to the capital, where they aroused wild fears and expectations, particularly among the plebs. A handful of the elite--those more insecure or simply curious--may have attended with something other than contempt to the prophecies from the east, prophecies of a saviour born of obscure parentage who would be brought low, suffer terribly, and yet ultimately triumph.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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cff2f12
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one of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: "Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone."
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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4fb8d88
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It reflects as well something extraordinary about the mental or spiritual world they inhabited, something noted in one of his letters by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: "Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone."
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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5c20960
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On the Nature of Things. Indeed, the wealthy patron with philosophical interests could have wished to meet the author in person. It would have been a small matter to send a few slaves and a litter to carry Lucretius to Herculaneum to join the guests. And therefore it is even remotely possible that, reclining on a couch, Lucretius himself read aloud from the very manuscript whose fragments survive.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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959d59e
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Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. There was no original paradisal time of plenty, as some have dreamed, in which happy, peaceful men and women, living in security and leisure, enjoyed the fruits of nature's abundance. Early humans, lacking fire, agriculture, and other means to soften a brutally hard existence, struggled to eat and to avoid being eaten. There may always..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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42c9364
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Humans have both consoled and tormented themselves with the thought that something awaits them after they have died. Either they will gather flowers for eternity in a paradisal garden where no chill wind ever blows or they will be frog-marched before a harsh judge who will condemn them, for their sins, to unending misery (misery that somewhat mysteriously requires them after dying to have heat-sensitive skin, an aversion to cold, bodily app..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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87841ee
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John Dryden brilliantly captured Lucretius' remarkable vision: . . . when the youthful pair more closely join, When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine; Just in the raging foam of full desire, When both press on, both murmur, both expire, They grip, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart, As each would force their way to th'others heart. In vain; they only cruise about the coast. For bodies cannot pierce, nor be i..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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0f3b2eb
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We have only to look attentively at the world around us to grasp that many of the most intense and poignant experiences of our lives are not exclusive to our species.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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893fb79
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It was Sir Thomas More, from whom Shakespeare borrowed so much of his portrait of Richard III, who put the matter most clearly almost a hundred years earlier: "When I consider any social system that prevails in the modern world," More wrote in Utopia, "I can't, so help me God, see it as anything but a conspiracy of the rich."
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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f09df22
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Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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5727d51
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IN DEPICTING THE aspiring tyrant's strategy, Shakespeare carefully noted among the landed classes of his time the strong current of contempt for the masses and for democracy as a viable political possibility. 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 tast..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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fe4b739
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How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne? Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms that lead a nation to abandon its ideals and even its self-interest. Why would anyone, he asked himself, be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth? Why,..
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Stephen Greenblatt |
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f5e7c48
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although the absurdity of the demagogue's rhetoric was blatantly obvious, the laughter it elicited did not for a minute diminish its menace. Cade and his followers will not slink away because the traditional political elite and the entirety of the educated populace regard him as a jackass.
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shakespeare
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Stephen Greenblatt |