Question: I have a brief question about William Shakespeare. I've been going over this 1992 special edition of EIR about Alexander Hamilton's networks and the genealogy behind him. And one person that people forgot about, they left out, is the great epistemologist, physical economist, inventor, statesman, historian William Shakespeare. I've been reading a whole lot of your recent writings, and you keep on referencing Shakespeare.

LaRouche: Case history. Shakespeare was nearly destroyed personally by Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Shakespeare in the last years of his life was not published, was not performed. His enemies did everything possible to destroy his work. In England, in the remainder of that century and during the most of the 18th century, Shakespeare, if performed at all, was performed like (unintelligible), the way they perform him now, where they'll perform something like Julius Caesar in the nude, or something like that. So what happened? A German, who is a great mathematician, Abraham Kaestner, one of the teachers of Gauss, a leading teacher of Gauss, actually-had an influence on many people in the 18th century. He was born in 1719 and lived until 1800. He was the greatest teacher of mathematics in that century. He had two missions in life. He was born in Leipzig, from which Leibniz had come 100 years earlier, and one was to defend the ideas of Leibniz and the other to defend the work of Johann Sebastian Bach, who was also coming under great attack throughout Europe at that period. What he brought in, was the work of Shakespeare.

The reason we have Shakespeare today is because, in the late second half of the 18th century, just about the time the American Revolution was being fought, in Germany Shakespeare was revived. And this revival of Shakespeare by people like Kaestner's influence and by others, including Moses Mendelssohn, led to creating the so-called German classical revival of the late 18th century. So therefore, even though Kaestner was one of the backers of Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution, and though Franklin knew some of this material, the knowledge of the work of Shakespeare did not exist extensively in the English language until late in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

One of the greatest exponents of Shakespeare in the 19th century was President Abraham Lincoln, who would hold these meetings of his so-called cabinet, and he would educate his cabinet members in the middle of war, by teaching them lessons from the dramas of Shakespeare. He's one of the greatest geniuses in American history. Certainly one of the greatest political geniuses in American history, and he taught Shakespeare to the members of his cabinet in the middle of warfare, on how to conduct a great war! But in the time of Alexander Hamilton, Shakespeare was not widely circulated in the United States. It had only begun to be circulated.

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