It was a shock to learn last night that my dear friend Paul Cantor had passed away. He was a great Shakespeare scholar and in Shakespeare’s Rome and Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy he showed that Shakespeare had a profound knowledge of the reasons for the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. In the book, he compared Shakespeare’s interpretation of Christianity to Nietzsche’s. I had a long message from him on January 5 about this book, discussing a review of it that I planned to write. He was also a leading authority on popular culture. He was for many years professor of English at the University of Virginia and also taught at Harvard.
Paul attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminar while he was in high school, and he had a lifelong interest in Austrian economics. He gave a series of lectures at the institute on literature and often spoke at our conferences. He lectured without notes, quoting in several languages, with a flowing, eloquent delivery. He pioneered in the application of Austrian economics to literature.
He was also a fan of pro wrestling, and now I will never again be able to go over with him his recollections of matches in Madison Square Garden in the 1960s. “I shall not look upon his like again.”
