Ezra Pound said that Shakespeare used 15th century Italian news for his 16th century plays. His point, such as it may have been was that Shakespeare looked to the European continent from the outside and with the benefit of years.
When I think about literary writing and the ink stained wretches who make it I’m often mindful of the fact that the basic principle of literature is the redemption of the old.
Shakespeare’s fascinations with the Comedia del Arte were not directed by a simple reincorporation of plots. He was, after all, and as Harold Bloom has argued, the first writer to create modern characters. Or to put it another way: Shakespeare understood something more than plot–he saw that human beings are both the agents of stylized and of unconscious symbolism. That’s modernity in a nutshell. Hamlet is a play about the human struggle with natural innocence. Poor Hamlet, his innocence robbed, creates a second innocence which is symbolic and yep, it’s beyond his control. Shakespeare was the first writer to conceive that comedy ends badly when we screw around with symbolism. And that of course is not a reincorporation of plot–it’s the world we must live in and negotiate.
Why do I think of this early in the morning over my first cup of coffee? Because I made the mistake of turning on a contemporary talking heads television show on one of the cable networks and heard some loud men arguing loudly that the recent misbehavior of American security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul–carousing with prostitutes and so forth, is just an old story, boys will be boys, especially when they can easily imagine that tomorrow they might get a bullet in their heads, etc.
But this puerile analysis leaves out the matter of unintentional symbolism. In a Moslem country photographs of Americans dancing lewdly with prostitutes is more than a public relations gaffe, it’s a lost battle. Shakespeare would have understood this. Joe Scarborough needs to read more.
Good writing is in fact the delivery system of civilized values. Watching “Morning Joe” this morning I thought of this paragraph by Pound:
“The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.”
I shall here rest my case.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 