![]() It wouldn’t be until six years later, in 1769, that the ‘Shakespeare Jubilee’ was held at Stratford-upon-Avon. Smith’s academic interest in Shakespeare was a rare pursuit, and even a radical one. The timing of the lectures is important, as at the time, Shakespeare was seen as racy, irreligious and somewhat disreputable. In 17, Smith delivered at Glasgow University a series of lectures on Shakespeare and other notable authors. The connections between Smith and Shakespeare don’t end there. In an excellent piece of sleuthing, literary scholars Dennis McCarthy and June Schlueter showed that Shakespeare seems in turn to have borrowed those lines and others from George North’s unpublished 1576 manuscript, A Brief Discourse of Rebellion. That writes them all alike: and so of men. Hath in him closed whereby he does receive Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves, are cleptĭistinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,Īccording to the gift which bounteous nature In act 3 scene 1 of Macbeth, Shakespeare similarly compares the varieties of people and dogs:Īs hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, In an important discussion of the division of labor, for example, Smith compares the types of people to the breeds of dogs: ‘By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a grey-hound, or a grey-hound from a spaniel, or this last from a shepherd’s dog.’ The Wealth of Nations also contains other allusions to Macbeth. Yet no trace of the Bard’s manuscripts, books or letters has ever been found. For four centuries people have searched for it: in mansions, palaces and libraries in riverbeds, sheep pens and partridge coops and in the corridors of the mind. And yet a critical part of the puzzle, Shakespeare’s library, is a mystery. Millions of words of scholarship have been expended on the world’s most famous author and his work. Shakespeare's Library: Unlocking the Greatest Mystery in Literature Smith uses the phrase once in The Wealth of Nations, once in a similar passage in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and once in his essay on the ‘History of Astronomy’. Come, seeling night,Ĭancel and tear to pieces that great bond ![]() It’s from here that Smith found the phrase “invisible hand,” now inextricably tied to markets and capitalism.īe innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, Smith was born precisely a century after the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio, the first authoritative collection of the Bard’s plays, including the occult play Macbeth. He helped pioneer the academic study of English literature he lectured on the arts of writing and rhetoric and he took his most powerful rhetorical device-one that became his catchphrase and the most overused metaphor in economics-from Shakespeare. But during his lifetime, ‘economics’ existed neither as a profession nor a discipline, and he saw himself among other things as a serious literary scholar. Today, we mainly remember Smith for his landmark work of political economy, The Wealth of Nations, and we regard him first as an economist and second as a philosopher. ![]() ![]() He has been embraced with gusto by Republicans and Democrats, Brexiteers and Remainers, central planners and free marketers. Adam Smith, the famed 18th-century economist, comes in for similar treatment, as he’s variously been portrayed as a rabble-rouser, a Marxist, a heretic, a bumbling professor, a Scottish nationalist, a rampant capitalist, a bore, a Tory and a mummy’s boy. Virginia Woolf once noted that all Shakespearean criticism was autobiographical: the Bard’s works are a mirror in which critics see themselves.
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