Shakespeare and the Here and Now

Extract

Like many American scholars I have been interested in the issue between science and the humanities in higher education. I have heard lectures and read books that praised the humanities and made reasoned presentations of the claims of literature and the arts in the dissemination of the best and most effective culture. I have been gratified by such discourses. The inference has been that students of science and technology should be urged and persuaded to devote at least some time to history, philosophy, literature, and the arts, and to this I have no objection; but it has seemed to me that we were taking hold of the matter from exactly the wrong end. It is perhaps important for scientists to know the humanities, but it has seemed to me essential that humanists should know the sciences. I presume my acquaintance with the Renaissance has led me to adopt the view that the truths of science, as well as those of history, philosophy, arts and letters, are within the domain of humanism. I need not mention the names of great Renaissance humanists—Erasmus, Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Rabelais, Montaigne, Ariosto, and Cervantes. We still have, however, a thrill of surprise when we hear Bacon say, “I have taken all knowledge to be my province,” although Bacon is merely expressing the professed doctrine of Renaissance humanism. The truth of the matter is that all Renaissance humanists, with due allowance for the indulgence of special aptitudes, did precisely that.