Posts Tagged ‘Shakespeare’
“I am not Cinna the conspirator”*…
As Philip Goldfarb Styrt explains, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar offers a telling parable about the administration of justice—and rife mishandling thereof—in our day…
American politics has a long history of referencing William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, from Abigail Adams, who identified with Portia, the wife of Brutus, as Betsy Erkkila has noted, to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which “both was and was not reenacting” the play, in Cary M. Mazer’s words. These references are likely due to the intersection of American identification with Roman republicanism, which the play dramatizes, and the long history of American interest in Shakespeare specifically. More recently, a great deal of ink was spilled during Donald Trump’s first term comparing the president to Caesar. But while an excellent hook for contemporary stagings of the play, this kind of parallel has limitations. King George III and Abraham Lincoln weren’t Caesar, and neither is Donald Trump, even if a lead actor sports a distinctive red tie. This history does, however, raise the question of what Shakespeare’s play might have to tell us about our current historical moment.
One overlooked area of governance that has become increasingly important in the early days of the current administration is due process: what procedures does the government have to go through and what kinds of hearings must be held, particularly in immigration cases, in order to arrest someone? To remove or deport someone from the country? From the Mahmoud Khalil case at Columbia University to the Rümeysa Öztürk case at Tufts, the Secretary of State has been personally marking individual visas and green cards for revocation; in addition, in cases like the one that centers on the removal of alleged gang members to El Salvador, whole categories of people are being removed without a hearing or a trial and with at least some allegations that the individuals removed aren’t even part of the targeted class.
Julius Caesar treats these issues directly. The play focuses on the assassination of the title character by a conspiracy headed by Brutus and Cassius and the defeat of the conspirators in battle by Caesar’s successors, the triumvirate of Marc Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus. Along the way, the play presents punishment as a major theme: First, the punishment of Caesar for the perceived sin of royal ambition, and second, the punishment of the conspirators for his murder. Because of this, a close look at the play and the scholarship surrounding it can help make clear the stakes of due process. While the term itself wouldn’t have been used in Shakespeare’s time, his era was one in which the procedures of law we now call due process were being formalized, and his plays show a consistent interest in whether that proper procedure is being followed.
A pair of crucial scenes related to this issue immediately follow the play’s most famous parts (Caesar’s assassination and the speeches delivered by Brutus and Antony over his body, in Act 3, Scenes 1 and 2, respectively) and may be sometimes overlooked. But when considered together, they give insight into why arbitrary executive action without due process is dangerous, whether it technically operates within the law or not.
The first of these two scenes—in Act 3, scene 3—features mob violence. Incited by Marc Antony to seek revenge, the citizens seek out conspirators to murder, and they mistake the poet Cinna for a conspirator of the same name. They tear him to pieces. Though this act is hardly the same as an official arrest, which might seem to distance it from discussions of due process, this moment isn’t just about the mob, as Martin Mueller points out; it’s about how power acts, whether through masses or through government. It’s a case of enacting punishment in a case of mistaken identity, particularly one where despite that mistake having been corrected in real time, the damage is done. “I am not Cinna the conspirator,” are the victim’s last words, but the play gives neither time nor opportunity for his insistence to convince anyone to keep him alive. Due process would allow for potential Cinnas to demonstrate innocence and remove themselves from the unwarranted threat; without it, everyone is imperiled.
There’s another element of the current concern regarding due process that relates to the fate of poor Cinna. His death isn’t merely the result of mistaken identity; as Jeffrey J. Yu writes, after he tries to identify himself the mob changes its tune, declaring that they’ll kill him for being a bad poet instead. Absent due process, there’s no pause to decide whether this person should be condemned or if the reason given for condemnation is legitimate. This episode serves as a reminder that due process doesn’t merely protect people from mistaken identification; it also requires those who would mete out punishment to specify, up front, the reason for it.
The Trump administration’s refusal to give key information to multiple judges in the removal cases recalls this danger. By refusing to specify details of the case, the government keeps the possibility alive of changing their reasoning or their claims to have the same effect for different reasons—just as the mob changes its reasoning for killing Cinna. This belies the question of whether those who are looking to deliver punishment are acting in good faith, a concern that became part of the appeals court decision in the El Salvador case and has subsequently been raised in other courtrooms as well. Just as Shakespeare’s mob finds new justifications for why Cinna the Poet should die, the government keeps open the possibility of producing a different reason for removing the people it currently claims are alien enemies—a process they have already begun with individual visa revocations. Due process requires a commitment to the reasons punishment is sought and thus allows those reasons to be addressed and countered.
As Nicholas Royle argues, the scene of Cinna’s death can easily be treated as a version of Julius Caesar in miniature. The play as a whole is about categorical error: killing someone because you think they are one thing only to find out you were wrong. This, in turn, centers the idea of due process, because only through it can deliberative decisions about identity, guilt, and punishment be properly engaged. The lynching of (the wrong) Cinna is the madness of a mob; the murder of (the right) Caesar is a conspiracy of nobles; the removal of hundreds of (alleged) Venezuelan gang members is the action of ICE. Each is a distinct entity, but they hold in common a lack of judicial process to determine what is to be done and to whom.
If the death of Cinna is a microcosm of the play, the other moment that reinforces the importance of due process in Julius Caesar is even more compressed, lasting a mere eight lines at the start of the fourth act. That’s all the time it takes for Marc Antony, Octavius (the future Augustus Caesar), and Lepidus to choose the Romans who will die by proscription in order to keep their triumvirate in power while they war against Caesar’s assassins. This is an arbitrary and impersonal form of execution: the triumvirs check off the names of those they want dead: “these many, then, shall die; their names are pricked.” As Robert Kalmey observes, this moment encapsulates what Roman historians thought of as the worst of all of Octavius’s crimes against the state before becoming emperor. This “tyrannical ruthlessness and cruelty,” in Robert Miola’s words, reveals that the triumvirate will be no better than Caesar’s assassins or the mob; they too will kill at whim to stay in power.
There’s something disturbing about these proscriptions, which is why both Kalmey and Miola identify them as critical. The triumvirate make a cold-blooded choice to kill many Romans; it has neither targeted motivation, as did the assassination of Caesar, nor does it possess the emotional if not legal justification embraced by the inflamed mob in its misdeeds. This isn’t to justify those prior murders. Rather, it’s to point out that the proscriptions somehow exceed even them in horror because of how they’re administered. There’s no due process here, either; the three triumvirs don’t get their hands dirty, their decisions can’t be appealed, and there’s no public process by which those to be killed will be identified before the decision is final.
In this there’s a distinct echo of the process currently in use for determining which visas (permanent or temporary) will be revoked under the current administration. The decision lies solely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has the power to determine if a particular immigrant poses a threat to national security; if he makes that determination, then the immigrant in question can be picked up off the street without hearing or appeal. Thus far, there’s no venue for disputing such a determination nor is there a published list of those whose visas have been revoked, even though Rubio claims to have revoked as many as 300 (coincidentally, as Kalmey details, the number of senators proscribed by the triumvirate).
Of course, deportation or removal from the United States isn’t the same as death; Rubio’s unilateral visa revocation isn’t the same as the proscription. But the lack of transparency and due process are similar, and there are few to no guarantees of the safety of people whom ICE agents remove, often without identifying themselves, and move around without notifying the family or lawyers of the detained. In fact, the government has argued in court that it has no responsibility to return those who might be removed incorrectly or by accident.
In Julius Caesar Shakespeare demonstrates the extreme consequences of a lack of due process. Not every such deprivation becomes a literal matter of life and death as in the play, but making use of such scenarios enables Shakespeare to highlight more effectively the danger of arbitrary action. Whether we imagine ourselves, like Cinna the Poet, hunted for a crime of which we are innocent or, like the Roman dignitaries proscribed by the triumvirs, marked out for condemnation, the drama asserts that some kind of due process is a necessity for a free state. If, as Lloyd Matthews has argued, America’s founding ideals of liberty are intimately linked to Julius Caesar, that connection should remind us that such liberty requires due process to function properly…
“The Lessons of Due Process in Julius Caesar,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
Pair with: “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (“A Harvard Law class uses the Bard’s plays to explore legal themes and concepts past and present”)
* Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 3
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As we recognize rights, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that the Mercury Theater broadcast the Halloween episode of their weekly series on the WABC Radio Network, Orson Welles’ adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. The first two-thirds of the show (which was uninterrupted by ads) was composed of simulated news bulletins… which suggested to many listeners (a huge number of whom joined in progress, after tuning over from the Edgar Bergen show on NBC) that a real Martian invasion was underway.
While headlines like the one below suggest that there was widespread panic, research reveals that the fright was more subdued. Still there was an out-cry against the “phony-news” format… and Welles was launched into the notoriety that would characterize his career ever after.
“What nourishes me, destroys me”*…
On the occasion of the publication of Stephen Greenblatt‘s new book, Dark Renaissance, Nina Pasquini profiles its subject, the remarkable Christopher Marlowe…
He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder. This was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary and rival of William Shakespeare—and perhaps the Bard’s key creative influence.
At 14, young Marlowe—the son of a poor Canterbury cobbler—won a scholarship to the prestigious King’s School, becoming the first in his family to receive a formal education. He excelled, went on to the University of Cambridge, and there studied the great works of antiquity, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Where his classmates saw musty mandatory reading, Marlowe found something else: worlds of ecstatic violence and erotic excess, of vengeful outcasts and capricious gods, worlds that upended the Christian moral order in which he was raised.
After graduation, Marlowe faced an uncertain future—unlike his wealthy classmates, his education didn’t secure for him a place in society. So, he decided to take a risk, moving to London to try his hand at an unstable, disreputable profession: writing for the stage.
When Marlowe was born in 1564, says Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, England was still stuck in the Middle Ages, even as the Renaissance bloomed on the continent. Public entertainment revolved around bearbaiting and hangings; poetry was weighed down by moralizing and clumsy rhymes; brutal censorship stifled any art that challenged the crown’s authority.
By the time Marlowe died in 1593, at just 29 years old, England was in the midst of a cultural and intellectual flourishing. Greenblatt credits Marlowe with sparking this transformation. In a new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, Greenblatt—one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars—argues that Marlowe didn’t merely precede Shakespeare, he made Shakespeare’s career possible.
“It was Marlowe who cracked something open,” Greenblatt says, “and enabled Shakespeare to walk through—how should we say?—over his dead body.”
Marlowe’s story, Greenblatt adds, is also relevant to many of academia’s current preoccupations. He was a “first-gen” student who glimpsed radical possibilities in the supposedly conservative texts of “great books courses.” He faced a “vocational crisis” familiar to many humanities students today—and pursued his passion despite the risk.
That career began with Marlowe’s debut play, Tamburlaine the Great, written in 1587 or 1588. “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater,” Greenblatt writes, “is pre- and post-Tamburlaine.”
Part of the play’s shock value lay in its plot. Loosely based on the rise of the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror Timur (also known as Tamerlane), Tamburlaine the Great tells the story of a Scythian shepherd who ascends from obscurity to become a dominating tyrant. The violence is unrelenting, and the ambition unchecked: Tamburlaine faces no moral comeuppance for his pride. This rags-to-riches arc may have mirrored Marlowe’s own desires, Greenblatt writes—and defined many of the other outsider characters Marlowe would go on to write.
But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says. Marlowe’s characters spoke in unrhymed iambic pentameter—“elegant, musical, and forward-thrusting,” Greenblatt writes—which gave English drama a new expressive register.
Before Tamburlaine, English playwrights were trapped in stiff structures such as Poulter’s measures—couplets in which 12-syllable iambic lines rhyme with 14-syllable iambic lines. Blank verse enabled Marlowe’s characters to sound like they were “actually speaking English,” Greenblatt says, dramatized by some structure, but still alive. Shakespeare would come to rely heavily on blank verse in his own work.
A few years later came Doctor Faustus, first performed in 1594. It was Marlowe’s most famous play and the first dramatization of the Faust legend, in which a scholar makes a deal with the devil, trading his soul for magical powers. This work, Greenblatt argues, marked the first time “a powerful, complex inner life” was represented on the stage.
Before Marlowe, English theater externalized psychology through allegory: morality plays populated by characters such as Pride and Shame. In Doctor Faustus, by contrast, Marlowe relies on soliloquy and dialogue about the characters’ internal states. “It was from Doctor Faustus that the author of Hamlet and Macbeth learned how it could be done,” Greenblatt writes.
Marlowe’s life ended as dramatically as one of his plays: he was stabbed to death in a tavern in Deptford. Officials claimed the death resulted from a quarrel over a dinner bill—but Greenblatt points to a more complicated story. While still a student at university, Greenblatt writes, Marlowe was likely recruited as a spy for Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, possibly to monitor Catholic dissidents or plots against the crown.
But over the years, Marlowe drew scrutiny for his radical ideas and was accused at times of atheism—a grave offense in Elizabethan England. Greenblatt believes that Marlowe was killed for his beliefs, possibly on orders carried out by an “overly zealous servant” of Queen Elizabeth herself.
To Greenblatt, Marlowe’s life serves as a reminder of how repressive Elizabethan England was: “It was basically wise to keep your head down, unless you wanted your head to be chopped off.” Marlowe didn’t and paid the price. Shakespeare was watching, Greenblatt argues, and learned he had to be more careful. But Shakespeare’s blend of conservatism and radicalism was only possible because Marlowe had first ventured too far. Shakespeare relied, Greenblatt writes, on Marlowe’s legacy of “reckless courage and genius.”
And Greenblatt believes Shakespeare was aware of his debt. Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance ends with a line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a reference to Marlowe’s mysterious death in that small tavern room in Deptford: “When a man’s verses cannot be understood…it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”…
Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard: “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” from @harvardmagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Why One of Shakespeare’s Rivals Is Still Making Trouble.”
* translation of the phrase– “Quod me alit, me extinguit”– found on the portrait of Marlowe above (at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
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As we ponder profundity, we might spare a thought for a more modern playwright, August Wilson; he died on this date in 2005. Often referred to as “theater’s poet of Black America,” Wilson is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. (Plays in the series include Fences and The Piano Lesson, each of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.) In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
“Bell, book, and candle shall not drive me back, / When gold and silver becks me to come on”*…
via Wikimedia Commons
During the reign of Elizabeth I, Shakespeare’s theater company was under the patronage– and protection– of Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain (a series of nobel appointees over the years of her reign). In 1594, one of those Chamberiains– Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon— oversaw the formation of that troupe, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. But with Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Shakespeare and his colleagues switched their allegiance to her successor, James (or more formally, James VI and I).
Emily Zarevich suggests that one of the impacts of that change was the creation of one of theater’s most memorable trios, arguing that the ever-pragmatic Shakespeare added witches to the Scottish play to please his new patron…
If you’ve ever worked as a freelance creator, you might understand the importance of constructing your material to meet your client’s tastes. It was no different in the early seventeenth century.
[In 1603] James VI of Scotland traveled to England to claim the throne as James I of England, following the childless Elizabeth I’s death. James brought with him a wife, three children, a court of Scots, and a lot of eccentricities. One of those eccentricities was James’s obsessive fixation on witches. Star playwright William Shakespeare saw a golden opportunity to get into the king’s good graces and wrote a play with witches as a main plot driver.
The dark, starkly political story of the tragedy Macbeth wouldn’t go anywhere without the three spooky witches, as Shakespeare scholar George Walton Williams outlines. The witches predict Macbeth’s ascension to the Scottish throne and launch him on a campaign of treachery and bloodshed, though they don’t help him perform his evil deeds. This was Shakespeare’s unique take on witches, who were usually cast in literature as more active villains. From Shakespeare’s perspective, an individual’s own decisions determine their destiny, not necessarily the interference of black magic.
Williams draws on the research of other drama critics to expand on this, proposing that “we must listen to the prophecy: the witches prophesied that Macbeth should be king hereafter. There is nothing here that indicates, as the late Professor Harbage has well said, that in order to be king hereafter Macbeth must be murderer first.”
Shakespeare presented Macbeth to a superstitious king who feared magic and tended to blame witches for many of the ills that fell upon both his home and adopted country. Macbeth, also an unstable Scottish king, blames the witches for the ills caused by his own murderous decisions. According to historian Howell V. Calhoun, James I spent his own literary career defaming witches and accusing them of supposed crimes.
“James had firsthand experience with the malign activity of witches, and he left a careful record of it in his pamphlet Newes From Scotland declaring the damnable life and death of Doctor Fian, a notable Sorcerer, which appeared in 1591,” Calhoun documents. “The whole affair hinged about the evil activities of Dr. Fian (alias John Cunningham), Agnis Sampson, and the North Berwick witches, in their attempt to destroy the ship on which James was returning from Denmark with his bride [Anne of Denmark].” James’s collection of “evidence” led to the violent persecution of accused party.
And then there was James I’s three-book treatise Daemonologie, his magnum opus. As Calhoun summarizes, the first part “takes up the subject of magic and necromancy, the second treats of witchcraft and sorcery, and the third discourses of all kinds of spirits and specters. The king’s intention in this work was to prove two things, “the one, that such diuelish artes haue bene and are,” and the other, “what exact trial and seuere punishment they merite.”
Though Shakespeare certainly appealed to James’s interests with the Scottish play, the two men held divergent views on what witches did and not do. If James I of England had written Macbeth, the three witches would have met a rather grisly end. Shakespeare, however, leaves their fates unknown…
“Double, double toil and trouble,” indeed…
Whence the witches: “King James I and the Macbeth Witches,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.
* Shakespeare, King John
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As we watch the fire burn, and cauldron bubble, we might recall that it was on this date in 1601, not long after the ascension of James, that William’s father, John Shakespeare, was buried at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. His son joined his father there 15 years later.
“Our research universities are the best in the world. But a leadership position is easy to lose and difficult to regain.”…
Revisiting a key topic that we’ve touched before…
The modern U.S. research universities arose in the late 19th century. Their work has laid the foundation for major advances in health and medicine, technology, communications, agriculture/food, economics, energy, and national security at the same time that they have educated students to be scientific, technical, commerical, and cultural leaders and innovators.
Today, as a product of what historians have called a “virtuous circle of incentives and resources,” American academic research institutions are top of the pops… and not at all coincidentally, so is the U.S economy:
… But that dominance is under attack, both by the Trump Administration and by state governments around the country actively undermining the work of their state universities.
It’s worth remembering that, into the early twentieth century, German Universities– the original models for the American approach— dominated the list.
As the U.S. increasingly models the behavior of German authorities in the 1930s, the vital contributions of research univerisities are at risk.
When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, the leaders of America’s most august universities didn’t all comport themselves as one might have wished. We can only hope that this time– as the threat is aimed directly at them– they will respond more strongly and directly.
Meantime, we can all add our voices to the defense of academic freedom and support for vital research.
* Research Universities and the Future of America, a report from The National Research Council, 2012 (Page 68)
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As we cease self-sabotage, we might spare a thought for a professorial paragon of the virtues of the institutions in question (in his case, on the cultural as opposed to the scientific/technical front), George Lyman Kittredge, a professor at Harvard; he died on this date in 1941. Kittredge’s edition of Shakespeare’s work was the scholarly standard in the early 20th century; he promoted the study of folklore and folk songs (encouraging students like John A. Lomax, and thus Lomax’s son, Alan); and he was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press.
“February is the uncertain month, neither black nor white, but all shades between by turns. Nothing is sure.”*…
Yeah, but why is it shorter than all of the other months? Timothy Taylor has the story…
I understand why the calendar adds an extra day to February every four years. The revolution of the earth around the sun is approximately 365 and one-quarter days. Every four years, that adds up to one additional day, plus some extra minutes. The modest rounding error in this calculation is offset by steps like dropping the extra day of leap year for years ending in “00.”
But my question is why February has only 28 days in other years. After all, January has 31 days and March has 31 days. If those two months each donated a day to February, then all three months could be 30 days long, three years out of four, and February could be 31 days in leap years. Every other month is either 30 or 31 days. Why does February only get 28 days?…
… The answer to such questions leads to a digression back into the history of calendars. In this case, Jonathan Hogeback writing at the Britannica website tells me, it seems to settle on the Roman king Numa Pompilius back around 700 BCE, before the start of the Roman Empire. The ancient Roman calendar of that time had a flaw: it didn’t have nearly enough days. As Hogeback writes:
The Gregorian calendar’s oldest ancestor, the first Roman calendar, had a glaring difference in structure from its later variants: it consisted of 10 months rather than 12. In order to fully sync the calendar with the lunar year, the Roman king Numa Pompilius added January and February to the original 10 months. The previous calendar had had 6 months of 30 days and 4 months of 31, for a total of 304 days. However, Numa wanted to avoid having even numbers in his calendar, as Roman superstition at the time held that even numbers were unlucky. He subtracted a day from each of the 30-day months to make them 29. The lunar year consists of 355 days (354.367 to be exact, but calling it 354 would have made the whole year unlucky!), which meant that he now had 56 days left to work with. In the end, at least 1 month out of the 12 needed to contain an even number of days. This is because of simple mathematical fact: the sum of any even amount (12 months) of odd numbers will always equal an even number—and he wanted the total to be odd. So Numa chose February, a month that would be host to Roman rituals honoring the dead, as the unlucky month to consist of 28 days.
This discussion does explain why February would be singled out, since it was the month of rituals honoring the dead. In Numa’s calendar, the 355-day year would be made up of 11 months that had the lucky odd numbers of 29 or 31 days, plus unlucky February.
The discussion also explains why months that start with the prefix “Oct-” or eight, “Nov” or nine, and “Dec-” or ten, are actually months 10, 11, and 12 in the calendar. Those names were originally part of a 10-month calendar year.
But questions remains unanswered: Why did the Romans of that time view odd numbers as lucky, compared with unlucky even numbers? I suppose that explaining any superstition is hard, but I’ve never seen a great explanation. A Dartmouth course on “Geometry in Art and Architecture” describes Pythagorean feelings about odd and even numbers. For those of you keeping score at home, Pythagoras lived about two centuries after Numa Pompilius. The Dartmouth course material summarizes aspects of “Pythagorean Number Symbolism”:
Odd numbers were considered masculine; even numbers feminine because they are weaker than the odd. When divided they have, unlike the odd, nothing in the center. Further, the odds are the master, because odd + even always give odd. And two evens can never produce an odd, while two odds produce an even. Since the birth of a son was considered more fortunate than birth of a daughter, odd numbers became associated with good luck…
[Taylor recounts the recurrence of this theme, from Virgil to Shakespeare…]
… While I acknowledge this history of a belief in odd numbers, as a person born on an even day of an even month in an even year, I’m not predisposed to accept it. But it’s interesting that modern photographers have a guideline for composing photographs called the “rule of odds.” Rick Ohnsman at the Digital Photography School, for example, describes it this way:
This is where the rule of odds comes into play, a deceptively simple yet powerful tool in your photographic arsenal. It’s all about arranging your subjects in odd numbers to craft compositions that are naturally more pleasing to the eye. Unlike more static guidelines, the rule of odds offers a blend of structure and organic flow, making your images both aesthetically pleasing and impressively compelling.
The revised calendar of Numa Pompilius couldn’t last. With only 355 days, it didn’t reflect the actual period of the earth revolving around the sun, and thus led to further revisions which are a story in themselves.
But when you think about it, the question of February having 28 days all goes back to Numa Pompilius and the superstitions about odd numbers. The modern calendar has 365 days in a typical year. You might think that the obvious way to divide this up would be to start off with 12 months of 30 days, and then add five days. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians had a calendar of this type, with five “epagomenal” or “outside the calendar days added each year.
The preference over the last two millennia, at least since the time of Julius Caesar, is to have 12 months, with a few of them being a day longer. But even so, why not in a typical year have five months of 31 days, and the rest with 30? The “problem,” I think, is that most months would then have unlucky totals of an even number of days. By holding February to 28 days rather than 30, you can redistribute two days from February and have 31 days in January and March. Thus, you can have only four months with an even total of 30 days every year (“Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November …”), and seven months always with the luckier odd total of 31 days. In leap years, when February has 29 days, then eight months have an odd number of days. I think this makes February 29 a lucky day?…
“Why Does February (Usually) Have 28 Days?” from @TimothyTTaylor.
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As we muse on the marking of months, we might recall that it was on this date in 1692 that a doctor in Salem, Massachusetts (generally believed to have been William Griggs), was unable to find a physical explanation for the ailments (fits, pins-and-needles) of three young girls. As other young women in Salem began to evince the same symptoms, the local preacher declared them “bewitched”… and the stage was set for The Salem Witch Trials.
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