Excerpt of Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization
June 1, 2022
One of the defining features of great poetry is an extraordinary sensitivity to the spiritual currents of the age—to disturbances in the fabric of a culture’s moral consciousness. It is, therefore, not surprising that the greatest poet of the English language should manifest an awareness of the nominalist assumptions that had begun to permeate the web of daily life by the end of the sixteenth century.