diagnosis
Jiang uses Dante, Virgil, and Shakespeare to expose a limit in that neuroscience model: literary characters can appear as fully distinct consciousnesses rather than simple projections of the author's own experience.
Topic brief
A Jiang Lens evidence brief for this topic, built from source tags, transcript matches, and linked source refs.
Shakespeare
A transcript-matched topic anchored by excerpts such as "If everything is stored in your brain and you can only know what you experience, then how... How does Dante... Conte, no Virgil. Does..."
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Topic Scope And Freshness
A transcript-matched topic anchored by excerpts such as "If everything is stored in your brain and you can only know what you experience, then how... How does Dante... Conte, no Virgil. Does..."
Key Notes
diagnosis
Bromwich says Macbeth is a comparatively rare Shakespeare play with a strong unity of action that is fused to character portraiture.
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diagnosis
He insists that the 'tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' speech is Macbeth's nihilistic evasion after the costs of ambition, not Shakespeare speaking his deepest wisdom directly.
diagnosis
He argues that Lady Macbeth should not be treated as Shakespeare's general view of women, since Shakespeare also writes figures like Cordelia and Desdemona and can be strikingly naturalistic in his sympathy for women.
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diagnosis
Bromwich says Shakespeare knows nihilism, including Machiavellian nihilism, but portrays it as one recurrent human possibility rather than endorsing it as his own final wisdom.
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definition
He distinguishes Shakespeare from Dante by arguing that Shakespeare usually lets judgments arise from characters and dramatic form rather than from an authorial moral commentary outside the action.
model
He still frames Shakespeare secularly: Shakespeare takes religious belief as real for his characters and audiences, but the exact theology shifts from play to play rather than arriving as a fixed doctrinal system.
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other
By invoking Lincoln's admiration for Claudius's prayer, Bromwich extends the discussion from Shakespearean villainy to a broader political psychology in which dangerous ambition can coexist with greatness.
Timestamped Evidence
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"If everything is stored in your brain and you can only know what you experience, then how... How does Dante... Conte, no Virgil. Does..."
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"...own contradictions, with his own worldview, right? And if you read Shakespeare, you also have people like that in Shakespeare. You have Hamlet, you..."
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"...this up in a slightly classroom way and point out that shakespeare is um a an irregular an unwieldy a sort of uh untamed..."
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"...want to point out that in one of the speeches of Shakespeare that people most like to memorize every bit as much as Hamlet's..."
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"She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time when she would have died. She should have died hereafter. There would have..."
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"...taken as a indication of profound wisdom about life as if shakespeare is speaking everything he knows about good and evil love and death..."
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"...hasn't yet had her chance um she's no great indication of shakespeare's attitude towards women in general uh you can look at the character..."
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"...in in interpreting that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow speech uh shakespeare is acquainted with nihilism uh and with the machiavellian version of nihilism..."
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"...writing just the last point it's just a point of information shakespeare didn't know the greek tragedy tragedians and he probably didn't know aristotle..."
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"...back maybe very inadequately or unsatisfactorily with my secular view of Shakespeare which is that he takes seriously the things that people take seriously..."
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"...a curious fact about that speech. When Abraham Lincoln, who knew Shakespeare pretty well, wrote a letter to the author of a book on..."
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"...is, Lincoln says that that that's, that's his favorite speech in Shakespeare. That speech by Claudius. And it's just a passing thing. But it's..."
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Relevant Lectures And Readings
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A source-grounded reading of a long Dante seminar that starts with a student dreaming of a tree across water and ends by redefining Purgatory as democratic hope, free will, dangerous guidance, prayer for the...
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A source-grounded reading of a five-hour hybrid workshop that begins with Macbeth and ends by turning Purgatory, free will, tragedy, envy, and generosity into one model of human transformation.
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A source-grounded reading of Jiang's central claim: late Inferno is where private vice hardens into social design.
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Jiang turns late Inferno and early Purgatorio into a struggle over imagination itself.
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The late cantos become Jiang's sharpest Dante claim so far: faith is not obedience but imagination that helps make truth real, hope is the arrogant wager that exile and persecution can still bear fruit,...
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English becomes empire because Shakespeare turns language into infrastructure.
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Britain becomes empire not because it begins powerful, but because it begins divided, poor, exposed, and forced to change.
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Rome does not hand Octavian power because he is the best general, the most charismatic speaker, or the obvious heir.
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Related Topics
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