A Humanist Manifesto of Our Times

Kensington, MD. In a memorable English class I took back in my undergraduate days, my professor once suggested that Shakespeare had profound respect for the humanity of individuals but was suspicious of the morality of mobs. If I recall correctly, she offered this sentiment in response to our reading of Julius Caesar. In the third act of that famous play, a Roman horde brutally murdered a hapless bystander called Cinna the Poet. Cinna, who had the misfortune of sharing the same name with one of the reviled assassins of Julius Caesar, was torn limb from limb—even after the mob recognized that this particular Cinna was not one of the conspirators. When Cinna desperately informed the gang that he was a poet uninvolved in the assassination, one among them shouted, “Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.”