Much of the moral and political import of Shakespeare’s Henry V is left to the audience’s or reader’s judgment. Is Henry a “pig” or is he the mirror of Christian kings? Is his invasion of France fair or foul? Shakespeare doesn’t show his hand, or not much; and one is tempted to say that Henry’s invasion is, like the day that opens Macbeth, foul and fair. Aaron Hill, an eighteenth century adapter of Shakespeare wanted to make the moral obvious,... Read more
George Barnam notes the careful structure of Act 5 of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “Shakespeare had used this scene structurally to build the tension toward the climactic moment when Volumnia should appeal to her son and prevail. Three appeals are made to Marcius, and Shakespeare’s presentation of them matches in structure the dramatic importance of each. The balance has been carefully made. We do not see Cominius make his plea, but hear the details of it in a scene of some seventy-five... Read more
A reader wrote to respond to my suggestion that high culture is “sacred” and pop culture “profane,” citing the example of sports. Here’s my response: A football game often is a quasi-religious experience, but I’m not sure we use the same language to describe it. If someone slashed da Vinci’s “Last Supper,” it would be described as a “desecration” or “sacrilege”; if someone tears up a Seahawks banner or jersy, it would be provocative but I’m not sure it would... Read more
In their “cultural history” of English drama, Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack summarize the argument of Glynne Wickham concerning the divorce of stage and sacred: “The English stage – so the argument runs – was predominantly a religious one until Elizabethan Protestantism forced a separation between theatre and the central concerns of faith; even then, the drama kept in touch with its sacred roots down to 1642; but after 1660 it went through a further phase of secularization which cut... Read more
As Marsden describes it, the growth of neoclassical literary sensibilities developed in part in reaction to the chaos and disorder of the English civil war – following in this regard the development of late 17th century political theory. Orderliness, definiteness, clarity became virtues, while ambiguity, double entendres, and inconclusiveness became literary vices. “Writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries delighted in enigmas and conundrums; as such verbal games indicate, puzzling, mystifying, even tricking the reader was part of... Read more
Marsden again: “The rise and fall of the adaptations . . . represents a pivotal moment in literary and cultural history, testifying to the new focus on language which would soon infiltrate all aspects of eighteenth-century thought. When concern for Shakespeare as text replaces emphasis on Shakespeare as performance, even the words once deemed ‘barbaric’ become precious. For the later eighteenth century, Shakespeare becomes an author to read, a change of status indicated by the increasingly numerous editions of his... Read more
Foucault argued in his essay on the development of the “author-function” that the modern conception of authorship evolved as authors came to be figured as sacred figures, holders of legal ownership of texts and words, which in turn conveyed “privilege or sanctity” to the text itself. Jean Marsden says that “The adaptations of Shakespeare present a specific history of the period’s most revered writer and his establishment as ‘author.’ This notion was clearly absent in the late seventeenth adn early... Read more
In a study of adaptations of Shakespeare in the 17th and 18th century, Jean Marsden argues that there was an inversion in the approach to Shakespeare sometime in the 18th century. Prior to that time, Shakespeare’s words were changed and modified, while the contexts of his plays remained the same; since the 18th century to today, we feel free to modify the contexts of the plays but consider the words sacrosanct. Marsden says, “Today the idea of changing Shakespeare’s words... Read more
Notes for my lecture at the upcoming Moscow Ministerial Conference. INTRODUCTION I was assigned a lecture on Shakespeare and pop culture, and I’m almost going to do that. Not that Shakespeare and pop culture is an irrelevancy. There are a variety of ways to handle this question, all valuable. We could look at how and why pop culture adapts Shakespeare (e.g., Hamlet in the Lion King or Strange Brew), or review burlesque parodies of Shakespeare (popular in the 19th century,... Read more
1) The relationship between the world (KOSMOS) and desire is complex. Verse 16 indicates that desires and boastfulness make up the contents of the world – the desire of flesh, eyes, and boastfulness of life constitute the “all that is in the world” (PAN TO EN TO KOSMO). More on this point below. The end of verse 16, however, suggests that the world is the source of desires and boasts: The desire of flesh desire of eyes, and boastfulness of... Read more
Leithart
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