Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

How to Access the Healing Power of Shakespeare (Patreon)

Published:
2022-05-31 16:11:14
Imported:
2026-06
haven't archived this post yet. have a subscription? use the importer!

Content

Today I would like to share a story with you.

This is a bit different from what we normally do, but the story is quite special. So I would love to read you a little something. 

The story is about a man who found himself laid up in a hospital tent, during the First World War, close to dying.

Shakespeare saved him from tuberculosis, dysentery, malaria, depression, and, suffering from trauma after returning home, even helped cure his crisis of faith.

Video Timestamps:

  • 0:00 the power of serendipity
  • 0:45 the right book at the right time
  • 2:00 recent secondhand book haul
  • 3:00 finding critical kindred spirits
  • 4:00 academic critics of Shakespeare
  • 5:50 sharing a special story with you
  • 6:00 teaching Macbeth to teenagers
  • 7:30 falling in love with Hamlet
  • 8:00 becoming addicted to Shakespeare
  • 9:00 Shakespeare in war and illness
  • 10:20 how Falstaff saved a life
  • 11:45 Shakespeare vs dysentery & malaria
  • 12:15 committing Shakespeare to memory
  • 12:45 Shakespeare as cure for depression
  • 13:20 Falstaff saves a life again
  • 15:00 Shakespeare vs other writers
  • 15:30 suffering trauma & crisis of faith
  • 17:40 Shakespeare & the mystery of the universe
  • 18:42 how Shakespeare helps me heal
  • 19:30 the comfort of character
  • 20:00 multitudes and reflections
  • 20:50 the reassurance of Shakespeare

Thank you for letting me share this story with you.

Have you found literature to have this same lifesaving quality? In times of crisis, do these great books offer a comfort to you? 

Happy reading, everybody!

Files

Previews only

How to Access the Healing Power of Shakespeare

0:00 the power of serendipity 0:45 the right book at the right time 2:00 recent secondhand book haul 3:00 finding critical kindred spirits 4:00 academic critics of Shakespeare 5:50 sharing a special story with you 6:00 teaching Macbeth to teenagers 7:30 falling in love with Hamlet 8:00 becoming addicted to Shakespeare 9:00 Shakespeare in war and illness 10:20 how Falstaff saved a life 11:45 Shakespeare vs dysentery & malaria 12:15 committing Shakespeare to memory 12:45 Shakespeare as cure for depression 13:20 Falstaff saves a life again 15:00 Shakespeare vs other writers 15:30 suffering trauma & crisis of faith 17:40 Shakespeare & the mystery of the universe 18:42 how Shakespeare helps me heal 19:30 the comfort of character 20:00 multitudes and reflections 20:50 the reassurance of Shakespeare

Comments

Michelle Chun LeRoy

Oh Ben, this video is truly one of the loveliest things I’ve watched in a long while. I once had a professor who repeated the mantra “Literature will save your life!” Literature humanizes us. It shows how to be. I’m following your lectures and reading Plato’s Republic (again, yours is such a refreshing presentation compared to the dusty and arid philosophy seminars I took!), I’m curious how Socrates left out empathy as a key component of a ‘good’ society…maybe the capacity for empathy results in one achieving the true ‘Arete’ of being a realized human. I’d like to think this was the goal when I taught literature. There really is something magical and mystical about the power of story. It’s clear that Mr. Pearson tapping into that. What a noble role model for all readers! Maybe it wasn’t mere serendipity that you found his book!

Mark Alexander

Magnificent story! Bloom is great. I place Goddard just above him because of Goddard's sparkling love of Shakespeare that comes through in every paragraph. Harold C. Goddard’s The Meaning of Shakespeare, Volume 1, is magnificent. My God, what a teacher this man must have been! (Head of the English Dept. at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in the 1930s and 40s.) Here are a few passages on poetry from Chapter 1: "Poetry is not something that exists in printed words on the page. It is not even something that exists in nature, in sunshine or in moonlight. Nor on the other hand is it something that exists just in the human heart or mind. It is rather the spark that leaps across when something within is brought close to something without, or something without to something within. The poetry is the spark. Or, if you will, it is what the spark gives birth to, something as different from either its inner or its outer constituent as water is from the oxygen or the hydrogen that electricity combines…" "Imagination is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two–as if the birds, unable to understand the speech of man, and man, unable to understand the songs of birds, yet longing to communicate, were to agree on a tongue made up of sounds they both could comprehend–the voice of running water perhaps or the wind in the trees. Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets…" "Poetry, the elemental speech, is the like the elements. Its primary function is not to convey thought, but to reflect life. It shows man his soul, as a looking glass does his face. There hangs the mirror on the wall, a definite object, the same for all. Yet whoever looks into it sees not the mirror but himself. We all live in the same world, but what different worlds we see in it and make out of it: Caesar’s, Jesus’, Machiavelli’s, Mozart’s–yours and mine…" "To our age anything Delphic is anathema. We want the definite. As certainly as ours is a time of the expert and the technician, we are living under a dynasty of the intellect, and the aim of the intellect is not to wonder and love and grow wise about life, but to control it…" "Art is given us to redeem us. All we are in the habit of asking or expecting of it today is that it should please or teach–whereas it ought to captivate us, carry us out of ourselves, make us over into something more nearly in its own image…" “King Lear is a miracle,” wrote a young woman who had just come under its incomparable spell. “There is nothing in the whole world that is not in this play. It says everything, and if this is the last and final judgment on the world we live in, then it is a miraculous world. This is a miracle play.”

hardcoreliterature
>>91929927

I’m glad you liked it, Mark! The story moved me quite deeply when I came across it. And I’m thrilled to hear that you have a love of Harold Goddard too. Bloom himself was a great admirer, and I believe his ‘Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human’ was partly inspired by Goddard’s ‘The Meaning of Shakespeare’. Both wonderful companions for a read-through of all of the plays. It was Goddard primarily who turned my attention to the benefit of reading Dostoyevsky up against Shakespeare! These quotations are all incredible :)