This is NOT a market/finance video. It is a humanities seminar — a deep comparative literary discussion of Dante's *Divine Comedy* (Purgatory Cantos 5–14) and Shakespeare's *Macbeth*, featuring Yale Sterling Professor of English David Bromwich as guest. The conversation explores free will, fame, ambition, art and moral redemption through close reading of both texts. There is zero market or investment content.
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This is a Yale Center Beijing humanities workshop on Dante's *Divine Comedy*, not a market or finance video. The transcript captures a full-day seminar (morning and afternoon sessions) covering Purgatory Cantos 5–14, bookended by a guest lecture from Professor David Bromwich on Shakespeare's *Macbeth* and a comparative discussion between Dante and Shakespeare. **Morning session — Shakespeare and Macbeth (Guest: Professor David Bromwich)** Bromwich, introduced as Yale's Sterling Professor of English, opens with a lecture on *Macbeth* focused on the unity of action and character. He traces how Macbeth's ambition is awakened by the witches' prophecy and how both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth attempt to isolate their deed — the murder of Duncan — as a discrete event without consequences. …
Shakespeare's 'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow' speech is not Shakespeare's wisdom about life — it is Macbeth's nihilistic evasion, an exposure of the cost of ambition
Bromwich argues this is a common misreading; the nihilism belongs to Macbeth the character, not to Shakespeare as author
Lady Macbeth is a thoroughgoing female villain yet quite humanized by the end — her guilt surfaces in the sleepwalking scene and her 'what's done cannot be undone'
Bromwich argues both Macbeths share consciousness of their deed but it never rises to conscience that would stop them
Shakespeare treats the witches naturalistically — as something people in Scottish society genuinely believed in, not as a supernatural endorsement
Bromwich notes witch burnings continued in Scotland into the 17th century; the witches reflect folk belief
Are you fundamentally pessimistic? Do humans have absolutely no agency and free will in this world, like in the Greek tragedy tradition where Oedipus is bounded by fate regardless of his character?
The guest argues that Shakespeare is not simply fatalistic; he shows characters acting within beliefs about fate, but he does not make authorial judgments about them. Macbeth is portrayed as a believer who is especially susceptible to the witches' predictions, yet Shakespeare presents such belief as a common human tendency rather than proof that humans have no agency.
Does Shakespeare portray humans as having any real agency or free will, or is everything determined by fate and the gods?
The guest argues that Shakespeare is not simply fatalistic; he shows characters acting within beliefs about fate, but he does not make authorial judgments about them. Macbeth is portrayed as a believer who is especially susceptible to the witches' predictions, yet Shakespeare presents such belief as a common human tendency rather than proof that humans have no agency.
Does Shakespeare believe in God? Is he a Christian? Macbeth's conception of nature seems neither here nor there, and the witches seem to hold all the power.
The guest says Shakespeare takes belief in God seriously as something people in the world take seriously, but he does not present a fixed theology in every play. In Macbeth, the sense of violated nature and the eventual restoration of order suggest a stronger divine order by the end.
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