Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
This week on The Learning Curve, guest cohosts Jay Greene and Mark Bauerlein interview renowned U.K. Oxford and ASU Shakespeare scholar Prof. Sir Jonathan Bate, discussing the timeless play Julius Caesar on the Ides of March. Sir Jonathan explains the Roman lessons for American constitutionalism, including warnings against the dangers of dictatorship and civil war. He explores the influence on Elizabethan England and Shakespeare of the classics, including the works of Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch. Sir Jonathan explains the differing rhetorical styles Shakespeare uses in the funeral orations of Marcus Brutus and Mark Antony, as well as Brutus’ noble though ultimately failed effort to preserve the Roman Republic. Sir Jonathan concludes with a reading from his book How the Classics Made Shakespeare, focusing on Cicero’s idea of “the peculiarly heinous nature of civil war.”
Stories of the Week
Guest
Professor Sir Jonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities College of Liberal Arts & College of Global Futures at Arizona State University. He is also Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, where he was Provost from 2011 to 2019. Well known as a biographer, critic, broadcaster, and scholar, he was also Gresham Professor of Rhetoric from 2017 to 2019, delivering six public lectures per year at Gresham College in the City of London. Sir Jonathan is the author of several acclaimed books, including How the Classics Made Shakespeare, (2019); Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare, (2009); The Genius of Shakespeare, (1997); and Shakespeare and Ovid, (1994). He has served on the Board of the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast for the BBC, written for The Guardian, Times, Telegraph, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and TLS, and has held visiting posts at Yale, UCLA, and ASU. In 2006, he was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 80th Birthday Honours for his services to higher education, and in January 2015 he became the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship.
Tweet of the Week
From @WSJopinion: Prison education can serve as a model of how to return to true learning and intellectual exchange, writes Brooke Allen https://t.co/FI7RYSBTmp
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) March 6, 2023
Subscribe to The Learning Curve in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.