Class News

Stephen Greenblatt ’64 offers a Shakespeare quote for our times

January 15, 2021

Reflecting on the seditious events in the U.S. Capitol in early January 2021, Stephen Greenblatt offered another quote from Shakespeare to explain the scene, just as he did in his book Tyrant in 2019. This, from Henry IV, Part 1:

These things indeed you have articulated,
Proclaimed at market-crosses, read in churches,
To face the garment of rebellion
With some fine color that may please the eye
Of fickle changelings and poor discontents,
Which gape and rub the elbow at the news
Of hurly-burly innovation:
And never yet did insurrection want
Such watercolors to impaint his cause;
Nor moody beggars, starving for a time
Of pell-mell havoc and confusion.

Stephen is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard. His wife, Ramie, is Yale ’89 and teaches at Brandeis.

Drawing on another literary tradition, Stephen B. Smith, the Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale and the former Head of Branford College, wrote about his reflections on Saint Augustine’s City of God:

Saint Augustine’s City of God was written in response to the sack of Rome carried out by Visigoths from the north in 410. Augustine’s official purpose was to defend Christianity from the accusation that it had been complicit in the invasion of the city that had stood as the center of Western civilization for 500 years. The book went on to offer a severely qualified defense of the Roman empire as necessary for the maintenance of order and stability but even this was becoming beyond its reach. Augustine lived at a moment of civilizational collapse and he knew it. More importantly, the question for him was what form the new order would take. We might call this the Augustinian Moment.

The question posed by last week’s events in the Capitol is whether we are living at a similar moment. The siege of the Capitol does not by itself portend an end to the modern constitutional order; we have withstood challenges before. The issue is whether modern democracies have the will to defend themselves. Can democracies husband the resources — moral, intellectual, political — to defend themselves from a concerted enemy or enemies?

Stephen’s new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in an Age of Extremes, will be published by Yale University Press and available in February.