I’m half a year late in writing this, but I wanted to take a moment to appreciate the work of the late Professor Paul Cantor. I never met him in person, never took one of his classes, and obviously I didn’t keep up with him well enough to hear the news in February that he had died. However, I am compelled to express deep appreciation for the impact he has made on my teaching life. This impact all came via his “Shakespeare and Politics” lectures, a series of 57 hour-long lectures, freely available on YouTube, in which Cantor examines Shakespeare through a lens of classical and Renaissance (don’t call it early modern!) politics. It may not sound like the most seismic thing to impact one’s teaching, but I can say with confidence these videos have probably had the most significant impact in the way I teach literature over the past five years.
I discovered the videos in 2019 when I started preparing to teach Julius Caesar to my AP Lang classes. I had tried watching Shakespeare lectures on YouTube before…the quality varies drastically. Majorie Garber’s Harvard lectures, for example, are enriching, sure, but they are hamstrung by the student-led focus to lecture, the audience regularly called upon to make their long-winded and poorly mic-ed comments, which Garber then picks apart, carefully and tediously. Cantor’s lectures, by contrast, are Cantor-led. He has too much to share and it is too carefully prepared to allow for pedantic student comments. I remember his excitement at the beginning of the first video on Julius Caesar: “Ok, let’s now turn to Julius Caesar, and see if I’m right that these plays actually work together…”
I was immediately hooked. I listened to his videos during my daily jogs, during my hour-long commutes to and from work. After baseball season ended that fall, I would listen to them at night as I went to bed. My wife referred to him as “your Shakespeare guy.”
It was thanks to him I gained a much stronger appreciation for, among other things, the history plays, the intellectual achievement of his Roman plays, the uniqueness of Macbeth’s despotism, the endless layers of the Hamlet puzzle. And Coriolanus – Cantor is probably at his most excited when explaining the amazing achievements of that most underrated of Shakespeare’s tragedies, a play I believe is perfect in its leanness and clarity for the high school classroom, and which I’m going to teach for the first time to my English 10 Honors classroom.
His excitement to share his revelations about the intersection of Pluto and Machiavelli is apparent in every video. Inevitably if you look at the comments for one of the lectures, scattered among the glowing appreciation will be some commenter making a negative remark about his propensity for filler words. Which…whatever, dude! The man is passionate – give him a break! Let’s see you talk thoughtfully about Shakespeare for an hour and a half with any semblance of coherence. And humor – Cantor’s observations about the plays often lead to him cracking himself up, as when he emphasized the superhuman size and strength of Coriolanus by recounting a breakfast he once shared with Cleveland Browns lineman, or when he compares the accents of the French in the history plays to the broad accents in Monty Python, or when he observes what a complete milquetoast King Duncan is in Macbeth…
It’s a generous sense of humor you don’t get nearly enough in the college lecture hall, a human appreciation for Shakespeare’s art that’s so, so refreshing when set against the pompous and cringy tributes you usually find in the classroom or floating around the internet…
And unlike a lot of the reader-response driven lectures that abound classrooms both digital and physical, it can’t be emphasized enough how wonderfully researched and fact-filled his lectures are. It is so easy to have classic literature thrust on you and feel brow-beaten into appreciating it, or else. Cantor’s lectures give a better sense of both Shakespeare’s place in their time, and also why they are indeed so timeless. His Romeo and Juliet lectures, for example, begin with a dive into the neo-gnostic Christians of the 13th century and how their fetishization of the metaphysical life (by way of death) subsequently influenced the courtly poetry of the English Renaissance:
The effect of watching all these videos (and watching them again, and again) can be seen in the choices I have made over the past three years. His lectures changed my choices in the plays I teach, scrapping Macbeth for Henry IV Part I, a much more accessible and balanced play for high schoolers. It led to a new love for Julius Caesar, replacing the dull memories from my own high school experience.
And while I would like to think I am always an enthusiastic teacher, his videos enlivened my passion for teaching with a respect for my students’ ability to value the plays without gimmicks, the reassurance that classics, when taught with enthusiasm and knowledge, will be enjoyed by most students. I now have two years years teaching Julius Caesar to my Lang classes with a rhetorical lens, a unit with three rhetorical analysis papers, a class paper, and several reading quizzes. The only time the classes were disappointed is when we had nothing left to read.
While I never got to meet Professor Cantor in person, I did make contact with him once, when I emailed him a few years back to express my appreciation for his efforts. I had no clue if he would respond, or if the email address, which I found on his UVa website, was still in use.
He responded two hours later.
