Timon: “Lust and liberty Creep in the minds and marrows of our youth, That ‘gainst the stream of virtue they may strive, And drown themselves in riot!” Shakespeare would not have been at all surprised by the recent spate of rioting in America. Civil disorder was often on the mind of every educated Englishman. England under Elizabeth had a clear memory of the War of the Roses, an extended period of civil clashes over a disputed crown, and people were generally terrified of a recurrence. And with good reason – …

‘Lust and liberty creep in the minds and marrow of our youth’: Timon and Today’s Rioting Read More »

It’s riot season in the United States, and with a large portion of our young adults spending their nights in a deadly duet with the police across many of our cities, we thought we’d look at how Shakespeare viewed anarchy, which he sees as linked to the eternal youthful ideal of a perfectly constructed society. Shakespeare visits this idea in quite a few plays, and today we’ll look at one of the Edward VI plays (the second one), where he has an avowed anarchist, Jack Cade, dream of overthrowing the …

‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’: Edward VI, Pt. 2 and the 2020 Riots Read More »