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Abraham Lincoln spent less than 1 year of his life going to school. Nevertheless, he became a lawyer, a surveyor, and one of the greatest statesmen in American history. He also carried on correspondence with one of the country's leading Shakespearean actors about the relative merits of different plays and speeches in Shakespeare's dramatic oeuvre. In no speech is the self-educated Lincoln's close attention to the Bard more in evidence than in his political comeback speech, the Peoria Address denouncing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. What do the veiled Shakespearean references in that speech reveal about Lincoln and the crisis that slavery posed to free government?

Abraham Lincoln's Peoria Speech: https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

Ted J. Richards's Lincoln and Shakespeare at Peoria: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10457097.2021.1983355?journalCode=vpps20

Lewis E. Lehrman's Lincoln at Peoria: https://amzn.to/3WXKW6p

Lord Charnwood's Abraham Lincoln: A Biography: https://amzn.to/3wXmTdw

Folger Shakespeare Library's Hamlet: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780743477123

Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69379/an-essay-on-criticism

Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780226391182

Harry Jaffa's A New Birth of Freedom: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781538114322

John Channing Briggs's Lincoln's Speeches Reconsidered: https://amzn.to/3xnDyqV

Diana Schaub's His Greatest Speeches: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781250763457

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