Mr. James Bowman strikes a blow for historicism, here:
In short, “Shakespeare looks below and behind the poses of honor with which this play is filled. The vices of Rome poison even the traces of nobility left in friendship.” This is a familiar point of view to us, but it would not have been to Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who took the ancient idea of honor very seriously. It is possible, of course, that Shakespeare anticipated a point of view that was not common until three centuries after his death, but I don’t think Mr. Wills is well-advised simply to take that for granted.
Yet taking such things for granted is more or less the stock in trade of the public intellectual. The scholar tells us how people of the past thought; the intellectual takes that thought and attempts to fit it anachronistically into an ideological system very much of the present day.
