Explore Publications By Category

Though William Shakespeare may have wished it otherwise, there was no such thing as a free lunch or, in Jack Cade’s terms, a “sallet” in the bard’s garden. Conversations of self-interest and social distribution pervade Henry VI,… more

Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale depicts the consequences of unfounded mistrust and accusation, the healing results of charity and forgiveness, and the overarching notion that the world is governed by a benevolent Providence… more

Shakespeare’s telling of the tale of Antony and Cleopatra is at once a story of erotic love and political transformation. Shakespeare understands erotic love as a disruptive force that compels and, just as often, reacts to change.… more

In Act 4, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio of Vienna, disguised as a friar, succeeds in his aim to convince Mariana, the jilted fiancée of his self-righteous and hypocritical deputy Angelo, to trick… more

Finals week is upon us, and students everywhere are reviewing notes, writing papers, sitting exams, and hoping to remember enough of what they've read to succeed. Pierre Goodrich's copy of Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia opens a… more

Henry V (1599), Shakespeare’s last Elizabethan history play, is framed by two regime changes. It opens at the accession of Henry V, a man reformed who has left behind his wild ways and degenerate companions such as Falstaff. It… more

When I am teaching about the problem of legitimate political authority, I always start with the First Book of Samuel, from the Hebrew Bible. The story is a debate over the nature of law, obligation, and leadership. Israel was at the… more

Written at the end of the sixteenth century, Henry IV, Part I depicts an increasingly commercial, market-driven London, based on transactions, accounting, and imported goods. Harry is not just at ease in this grubby, commercial… more

Disturbed and compelled by the power of storytelling that it exemplifies, The Rape of Lucrece gives its heroine not only physical beauty and chastity but formidable rhetorical skills.

One of Pierre Goodrich's long time hobbies was making reading lists of recommended reading for a well-rounded, well-educated person. He made (at least) one while planning Liberty Fund. He made one for undergraduates at Wabash… more

In London between 1700 and 1750 one in six theatrical performances was a Shakespearean play. In fact, the most popular comic dramatists of the time, Arthur Murphy, declared, “With us islanders, Shakespeare is a kind of established… more

“The best counsellors are the dead.”

So the long-serving Elizabethan and Stuart courtier, Sir Francis Bacon, concluded in his essay “On Counsel” in 1612. Bacon was not the first to use this maxim, often appearing in the Latin as “… more

Much like Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part I, Shakespeare understood that with reward, comes risk and with individual risk and reward, come certain inequities. Shakespeare’s status as a rational, cautious investor distinguished him from… more

In the eighth canto of Dante’s Paradiso, now in the third sphere of Venus, one witnesses a discussion of how Nature, or the embodied Spirit or Will of God, does not actually distinguish between the individuality of people. It sees… more

Our friends at Adam Smith Works thought that visitors to the Reading Room might be particularly interested in joining their upcoming Virtual Reading Group on Edith Wharton's House of Mirth and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral is perhaps one of the best mergings of the Classical and the Christian traditions in dramatic form that I have ever encountered. Though the subject matter is indisputably Christian, the form of… more

In Borges' Library of Babel, the titular library contains every book from all possible universes, thoughts, and dreams, including both coherent and incoherent works. Everything that ever could be written is there, and so is every… more

We have seen that Sandefer’s case for the Rand-Sandefur thesis that Lewis broadly condemns all modern statist regimes is weak. I turn here to the textual case for a different reading of the political message of It Can’t Happen Here.… more

The presidential election of 2016 rekindled interest in Sinclair Lewis’ prophetic 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here. (2014, henceforth ICHH) One hard question about It Can’t Happen Here is, what exactly is the It that Lewis… more

A 2018 article in the American Medical Association’s Journal of Ethics entitled, “Clinicians’ Need for an Ecological Approach to Violence Reduction” presents an illuminating example of moral overreach, apparently inspired by a line… more

How can just vengeance itself receive a just punishment? This is the major question in the seventh canto of Dante’s Paradiso. In this second sphere of heaven, named Mercury, those who sought worldly fame and the active life at the… more

Imagine you wake up alone on a boat, surrounded by a vast expanse of water with no land in sight. You have no memory of how you got there, what land the boat sailed from or where it is going, or even if you are on an ocean or a… more

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.""Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others."--Jonathan Swift