philipchevron wrote:WILL AND ME Dominic Dromgoole
an extract from the book I especially like:
"At the very moment when we suffered most acutely from a need for imagination - when we couldn't even muster the primary school insight that everyone east of Berlin was probably pretty much the same as everyone west of Berlin - just at that moment, cultural functionaries of left and right ploughed in to destroy anyone who had any. We are stumbling into the same idiocy now, with two camps of two-dimensional villains, the neo-cons and the jihadists, both shutting down the capacity for imaginative compassion, for themselves and their followers, so they can crush the humans in the middle. It's at just these moments when we most need art, real bold imaginative art, that the oxygen supply for such art is most drastically reduced.
"It was at just such a moment in an entirely different context that Shakespeare appeared and dazzled his audience with the complexity of the human. The tension that stretched the solar plexus of his world tight was the rift straining Europe to breaking point between Catholic and Protestant. Each country was split, each village, each family. Shakespeare's father, as a Stratford alderman, had to enthusiastically toe the authority line and assist in the destruction of Catholic icons; at home he was [it seems likely - Chevron] hiding Catholic documents in the tiling of his roof. Shakespeare's cousins were executed for Catholic conspiracy, and their heads would have adorned poles affixed to London Bridge when he first arrived in town. Which side are you on? Where is your allegiance? What is your history? All these questions would flicker through each brain on meeting any stranger. All of them would be asked out loud by the forces of either side, followed by the statement of today's stupidity, 'If you're not with us, you're against us' It is a horrible reduction of the human capability, an insult to the human potential.
"All the every-action-is-political baloney which we lived through in a minor key [in the 1980s], Shakespeare and his time had to live through as if under a magnifying glass. Small wonder the Stratford man kept his cloak of privacy so tightly wrapped round himself. And great wonder that he reacted to this state with the most wilfully perverse response imaginable. He decimated the stupidity within the distinction between Catholic and Protestant, within any grotesque distinction between people, by presenting in the display case of his work all the infinite variety of human nature. He didn't retreat into taking sides, or into some defeatist despair. He banged out year after year, with the energy of a zealot, art that said here, here is the human, and here is the world, here, here and here. It is infinite, and none of you can shut it into any of your vicious little boxes."
(Pages 119-120)
Whichever "three Shakespeares" the little President took for light reading to Crawford, Texas, it's a fair bet he failed to glean any enlightenment of this order from them.
But I really have read the english The Plague
)
