crispin day speech, the band of brethren, and also cardinal wolsey's swan song in henry the eighth, "whenever the dissolution of the union arrives in america will have reason to exclaim, in the words of the poet, farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness." tell us about how implications of shakespeare pervaded the ratification debates. kevin: well, thank you. pretty much all of the members of the constitutional convention knew shakespeare, read shakespeare, had copies in their libraries at home, and it was a kind of shared language. you could make a quotation from shakespeare and everyone would get the reference. and so, this is something that, no matter what side of the debate that you were on, that they shared. they shared a knowledge of shakespeare. now, shakespeare himself did not represent the kind of constitutional republic that we were forming, but i mean, there's lots of little speeches within shakespeare that did express universal ideas that helped to make the founders, make the members of the convention, give them something that they could share. now, one of the things t