Would Bacon’s Hamlet be Hamlet?

so it’s impossible to say much meaningful about any work of art of whose authenticity you are not certain?

i really don’t think that claim can be taken seriously. as it stands, it strikes me as so manifestly false that we should just write it off as one of those hyperbolic turns of phrase that come hastily to one’s prose when writing on a deadline.

At one level, it ought not to make any difference.

Actually, I’d stop there. Of course there would be (moderately) interesting literary-historical issues in consequence, but none of any real (ie, aesthetic) importance. As some sensible person once said: “Shakespeare is whoever (singular or plural) wrote the plays.”

Not that Shakespeare is such hot stuff, anyway. As Shaw observed in “Better than Shakespeare”:

“… Search [in Shakespeare] for statesmanship, or even citizenship, or any sense of the commonwealth, material or spiritual, and you will not find the making of a decent vestryman or curate in the whole horde. As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse.

“All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back on his life and say: ‘Tho’ with great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get them.’ The heart vibrates like a bell to such utterances as this; to turn from it to ‘Out, out, brief candle,’ and ‘The rest is silence,’ and ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded by a sleep’ is turn from life, strength, resolution, morning air and eternal youth, to the terrors of a drunken nightmare.”

“the question of who wrote what seems to be of secondary interest compared to the work itself”

Authorship is also primary when it comes to minor works of great authors or juvenilia. I think the realm in which authorship matters is quite broad.

Folks should read Dorment’s article, though. The quoted statement comes after a couple sections which problematize the question of what it meant for Warhol to make a Warhol, if you see what I mean. Dorment recognizes a tension between Warhol’s methods and the idea of authenticity, which is perhaps what accounts for the undue force of the quoted assertion.

Additionally, the quoted lines are followed by the more-plausible “The separation of the real from the fake is the cornerstone on which our understanding of any artist’s work is based.”

Surely the larger question is what you’re reading the work *for.* If you’re trying to figure out the larger conversation that a work was part of, then who made it and when matter. Brian’s Borges reference is apt.

Bacon or De Vere are not very interesting or illuminating of this question.

What if Shakespeare’s plays had been written by an late 20th century academic in the Upper Midwest? Would we consider that unauthentic art, or would we revere the plays as much? Is it Virginia Woolf’s personal character or problems what make her work “real” or her reflection of her period and surroundings.

IOW, I would say that contingency and context is the source or the kind of authenticity we really care about. A truly great be-bop sax solo, known to be performed in 1947, may or not be by Charlie Parker, but gains much of its interest by being performed in 1947 rather than 1974.

And I say a contemporaneous student copy of a Rembrandt, if completely indistinguishable from an “actual” Rembrandt, is pretty damn valuable. That the market so vehemently disagrees is based on a misunderstanding of art.

# 10. Yes the examples chosen are always so trivial. Say, for example, we discovered that the novels of Philip Roth had in fact been written by Jeffrey Archer? Would that make a difference to how we read them?

Or, to take another example, that Cy Twombly’s paintings had in fact been dribbled on canvas by an ape?

I’m not being facetious here: the question is real: would we look differently at the works in these cases?

12:Well, Warhol did I think deliberately raise a/the question in several media (what does in mean to make a movie). If a silkscreen had been made by one of his entourage, signed by Warhol without Warhol ever lifting a finger or even coming up with the idea, but indistinguishable from “authentic” Warhol , why is that silkscreen essentially worthless?

And Warhol’s work was, again, deliberately different from that of the Old Master studios. We can usually discern the authentic Rembrandts or van Der Weydens in the work, but not the silkscreens.

As a Classicist, I’ll join in the chorus saying that that statement, as regards literature, is totally, utterly, absurdly false. There isn’t even full agreement on what it means to say that the Iliad is “really by Homer,” but people do manage to say interesting things about it anyway. The authenticity of Seneca’s tragedies used to be routinely questioned; but those tragedies were probably more influential then than they are now (when pretty much everybody agrees that they’re authentic, aside from the “Octavia”). Questions of authenticity come up all the time in Classics, one the level of works or of passages or of individual lines; if they paralyzed all other thought, we’d never get anything done. Similarly, in studies of ancient visual arts (which I don’t know much about, but I never let that stop me), assigning works to particular artists is very often impossible (especially if you want an actual name, rather than just a grouping of works), nearly always arguable, and much of the time not very important.

On the other hand, I wonder if Dorment is right with limited reference to the kind of work actually done, these days, by critics of modern art. There are some kinds of criticism to which authenticity is important: maybe he’s really just saying that all current criticism of modern art is of that kind. (If he is saying that, is he right?)

Separately: for the question that heads this post, and the stuff at the bottom about what if Bacon wrote some of the plays, this sounds a lot like the kind of question Kripke works with in “Naming and Necessity”: I can easily imagine a sentence in there going something like “Of course, Hamlet might not be by Shakespeare. But given that it is by Shakespeare, if it weren’t by Shakespeare, it wouldn’t be Hamlet (though it might be called Hamlet.)” (I don’t think this sentence is true, as far as it goes. But I might hesitate over something like, “Given that Titus Andronicus is by the author of Hamlet, if it weren’t by the author of Hamlet, it wouldn’t be Titus Andronicus.” Would a play that we don’t think is great be essentially altered if it didn’t share an author with other great plays? Even if it was still word-for-word identical with the play as we have it? Maybe. Certainly, if we discovered that TA wasn’t authentic, it would become much less interesting. Right?)

Keith: but you’re assuming that individual works are themselves indivisible, as far as authenticity goes. I assure you, that’s not always the case. What if you’re “studying the aesthetics” of a particular poem, and a few lines are in doubt? (If you study a long ancient poem, this will almost certainly be the case.) Do you analyze the poem including the lines, excluding them, or treating them as having some special status as “sort of part of the poem”? Going back to Shakespeare, there are some disputed passages in Macbeth (all that stuff about Hecate). So can we analyze Macbeth without taking a position on their authenticity?

Bob mcmanus @10:
What if Shakespeare’s plays had been written by an late 20th century academic in the Upper Midwest?

Do you mean this in the Borgesian sense? That the plays are word for word what we know them, just with a 20th century copyright date? (which would effectively make them historical fiction, which might color the way we view the work). Or that “Hamlet” the story was never written until then, and chiefly concerns an unmedicated college professor of a certain age, contemplating adultery with a grad student named Ophelia Jones? That would be a difference.

Hidari@12 asks an interesting question: what if Shakespeare’s plays turned out to have been written by someone else with a different oeuvre to compare it to? What if it turned out that they were really authored by, say, Stephanie Myers or Robert Ludlum?

Not that Shakespeare is such hot stuff, anyway.

Yeah, right – let’s read Bunyan instead, lol.

Keith: but I think you have to deal with commentaries, even when you deal with them, somewhat differently than you do with the text itself. Which means you have to decide which of those categories a given chunk of text falls into. Or you might have to decide which of two lines (or words, or letters) fits better at a particular point in a work. It’s easy to say “one of them goes to an appendix,” but in each case, the decision has to made, “which one?” I don’t think questions of authenticity can be entirely bracketed away from aesthetic criticism. (And I say this as someone who really, really wishes they could, because it would make my work a lot easier.)

Looking at the whole of Dorment’s article, though he does convince that the Warhol Foundation is acting pretty sketchy, he also makes it sound like they’re basically in an impossible position. Their job seems to be to verify the authenticity of works by an artist who worked very hard to blur the difference between works that were and weren’t “his.” It’s like being on a board assigned with officially registering the “nice” and “naughty”[1] characters in Shakespeare.

[1] I originally wrote “good” and “bad”, but this is more seasonal. And indeed, Santa also has a difficult job.

I think Kevin Bacon is a bit too old to play Hamlet.

I could see him as Polonius or Claudius, though.

There are some good passages in the history plays, and at least one great character, but if that was all Shakespeare had written, he would probably be remembered as a Tudor propagandist of mostly historical interest, and the plays treated accordingly.

Way too dismissive of these plays, IMO.

geo, novakant, please don’t feed the trolls. The last thing this ‘Shaw’ fellow needs is encouragement.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you step in dog shit, do you need to know the author to guess its worth?

Our dog ate a box of Crayola crayons, and shat rainbows all over the yard.

It seems like authenticity questions are really important in some cases, interesting but not hugely important in others, and just irrelevant in still others. I guess I don’t quite see the appeal in going from obviously distinctive cases to such a huge generalization.

There is a pony in here, I think.

The first Thursday of the month in my town is Art Walk, the galleries are open late and serving wine. It’s not exactly like visiting a major art museum and recognizing here a Corot and there Caravaggio; contemporary commercial artists, at least in my town, tend to be somewhat derivative. While they typically have a recognizable style, whether in terms of subject or technique or something intermediate, they’re familiar. They lack the shock the pioneers provoked.

It’s kind of nice to have painters revisiting the places that Picasso and Braque or Miro and Kandinsky first discovered. It’s good stuff. I’m proud that my grandmother and my sister produced Beardsleyesque ink drawings, and we exhibit them, but we acknowledge their source.

There’s a dark side. On my first grand tour of Europe, in the Uffizi Gallery, a horde of Japanese clustered around a Michelangelo drawing and blew past Tiziano’s Urbino Venus in the next room; an American, viewing Raffaello’s frescoes in the Vatican apartments, asked “Is this Michelangelo? Because that’s all I want to see.” Meaning what – is this on the test? I can’t judge for myself? If it’s not a work by an artist with a triple-A rating, it’s evidently negligible.

I find myself getting tired of Brahms. His perfectionism, I’ll contend, was the enemy of his art, because his so carefully finished pieces are all of a type, unlike those of his demented mentor Schumann, of whose music I can never get enough.

Does anyone even bother to try to fake music from folks like them? And if so, why not? An original manuscript of Mozart’s variations on “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” would be pretty damned valuable; how much more would his noodlings on “Happy Birthday” fetch?

(To forestall the obvious question: I have heard Gabriela Montero playing variations on both tunes. She’s wonderful.)

I think magistra is on to something here, especially as far as the visual arts are concerned, but we similarly tend to regard a writers work in the context of his whole life and thought, which makes perfect sense since it is more often than not both the source and subject matter of their work, while doing trying to divorce the two would seem rather artificial in many cases.

In fact, it is interesting to observe how this approach has been carried over into fields where it is much harder and often not that useful to apply. E.g. even in trying to evaluate an art form like film, which due to the nature of the production process is very much a collaborative art, our intuition and desire to assigning clear authorship leads many critics, especially academics, to focus more or less exclusively on the director and disregard the contributions of the script writer, DoP, editor, production designer etc.

oh, sure. i thought of ‘the counterfeiters’, too.

but i’ve never been certain that it’s by kenner, so it was impossible for me to say much meaningful about it.

Shaw’s criticism of Shakespeare, quoted above, is a comment on his supposed conceptual/ideological weaknesses and ignores his style completely

Not quite. When Shaw says, “As to faith, hope, courage, conviction, or any of the true heroic qualities, you find nothing but death made sensational, despair made stage-sublime, sex made romantic, and barrenness covered up by sentimentality and the mechanical lilt of blank verse,” he’s pointing to something more than “conceptual/ideological weaknesses.” He’s saying that Shakespeare was shallow and conventional in feeling as well as “ideology,” that his imagination was petty and pedestrian, his characters were cut-outs. Lawrence said the same thing in “When I Read Shakespeare”:

“How boring, how small Shakespeare’s people are!
Yet the language so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar.”

That we idolize Shakespeare is a judgment on us.

“Time that is intolerant/Of the brave and innocent/And indifferent in a week/to a beautiful physique/Worships language and forgives/Everyone by whom it lives.”

Auden was right. Lawrence was wrong. Literature is performance. Ideas are decoration.

(The Lafferty story is called “Been A Long, Long time.”)

geo: Well, I’m happy to try and take their judgments seriously, but I find I don’t get very far. Of course, I haven’t read what they say on Shakespeare beyond what’s quoted here, but all I can say about that is “wow, that’s not anywhere close to what I see in Shakespeare.” Now maybe they could convince me at greater length, with some more specific comments, but just “pointing out” that Shakespeare’s “sense of motivation and personality [was] cramped” sounds to me like “pointing out” that the sky is green. The thing about pointing is that the other person has to be able to see what you’re pointing at.

And giants of modern literature sometimes have crazy ideas, or interesting ideas with absurd specific applications. As long as we’re on the Shakespeare-haters, Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” has a lot of fascinating stuff to say, but to accept it in toto would involve expelling from the canon basically all Western art since the rise of Christianity except for folk songs and the writings of St. Francis (and, I suppose, Tolstoy, though he’s not obnoxious enough to say so). Shakespeare, Beethoven (except some of the early stuff, before he went deaf), Wagner most of all — they’re not just bad, they did not actually create any art. This is a crazy thing to say, and I don’t think I’m disrespecting Tolstoy by pointing that out.

There’s also the problem of using loaded terms. You say a sense of motivation was “cramped,” I say it was “focused.” You say “impoverished,” I say “to-mah-to,” etc. At some level, we’re just talking about what kind of art we like. (And I note that Racine, e.g., would probably say that Shakespeare didn’t hold his imagination in narrow enough limits. But even Racine still managed to write some pretty darned good plays.)

Aulus Gellius: “The thing about pointing is that the other person has to be able to see what you’re pointing at.”
A great description.

All right, Aulus, if you really think the sky is blue rather than green, I suppose nothing I can say will persuade you otherwise. Plenty of people agree with you, after all.

Sorry, Aulus, I wrote that last before I saw your subsequent comments, which at least make an effort. What Shaw and Lawrence are getting at is that Shakespeare’s characters have no sense of a purpose larger than themselves, their political or romantic ambitions, their dynastic allegiances, and other trivial matters. Bunyan’s, by contrast, live by and for something truly great, a conception of stark moral and intellectual grandeur. That’s what Shaw means by saying that Shakespeare’s sense of life is hackneyed and petty, while Bunyan’s is vital and original.

And then there are the quotes Shaw cites. I agree, myself, that the heart does indeed vibrate to Christian’s mighty declaration, while the tags from Shakespeare are feeble, petulant, and tinkling. How to prove this, I don’t know. But if you’re not sufficiently in awe of Shaw and Lawrence as critics and prose masters (as opposed to a twit like Amis) to at least pause long and respectfully before their judgments of Shakespeare’s language, then I leave you in triumphant possession of the field.

A funny sentence:

Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress had infinitely outdone the Tale of a Tub, which, perhaps, had not made a single convert to infidelity, whereas the Pilgrim’s Progress has converted many sinners to Christ.

Therefore Bunyan>Swift.

The businesses of visual ancient art, folk art, and primitive art make a nice compare-and-contrast: we find the same marketing and critical concerns with authenticity, but the posited authentic source is a culture rather than an individual artist.

Whoops. Cross-posted.

My point was not to diminish the contribution of directors, but to establish that film is a genuinely collaborative are – most people seem to have an incredibly hard time getting to grips with this concept because they think making a film is essentially similar to writing a novel or creating a painting, but it just isn’t.

John@21—

I thought of using Titus Andronicus as an example, and it seems pretty clear that no one much would be interested in Titus Andronicus by Beaumont and Fletcher.

If Beaumont and Fletcher had written Titus Andronicus, then “Beaumont and Fletcher” would mean something very different.

geo@51—

I’m not insisting that Shaw and Lawrence are right (though I think they mostly are). Only suggesting that since they’re both giants of modern literature and among the best literary critics ever

Shaw is very often an atrocious critic; in particular he had a hard-on for dissing Shakespeare, because he seriously thought his own plays deserved to supplant Shakespeare’s at the summit of the canon (lol).

their judgments should be taken more seriously than anyone here has so far seemed willing to do

Yes, or I could, y’know, remember that I have read Shakespeare and then make up my own mind, at which point it becomes clear that Shaw is talking monstrous balls.

novakant: In other venues, I’ve written about the historical link between attempts to move “commercial art” to “high art” status and attempts to extract canonizable proper names from collaborative efforts. For movies, there was an earlier critical push to treat the screenwriter as key, and there’s always been a niche for certain cinematographers, but directors have won out in the “heroic narrative” game — for good reason, but with often ludicrous results. Similarly, the studio systems behind comic strips and comic books tend to be ignored in favor of specific artists or writers.

As a wise man once said.
“While it is true that commercial art is always in danger of ending up as a prostitute, it is equally true that noncommercial art is always in danger of ending up as an old maid. Non commercial art has given us Seurat’s “Grande Jatte” and Shakespeare’s sonnets,but also much that is esoteric to the point of incommunicability. Conversely, commercial art has given us much that is vulgar or snobbish (two aspects of the same thing) to the point of loathsomeness, but also Durer’s prints and Shakespeare’s plays. For, we mustnot forget that Durer’s prints were partly made on commission and partly intended to be sold in the open market; and that Shakespeare’s plays -in contrast to the earlier masques and intermezzi which were produced at court by aristocratic amateurs and could afford to be so incomprehensible that even those who described them in printed monographs occasionally failed to grasp their intended significance— were meant to appeal, and did appeal, not only to the select few but also to everyone who was prepared to pay a shilling for admission.

It is this requirement of communicability that makes commercial art more vital than noncommercial, and therefore potentially much more effective for better or for worse. The commercial producer can both educate and pervert the general public, and can allow thegeneral public —or rather his idea of the general public— both to educate and to pervert himself. As is demonstrated by a number of excellent films that proved to be great box office successes, the public does not refuse to accept good products if it gets them. That it does not get them very often is caused not so much by commercialism as such as by too little discernment and, paradoxical though it may seem, too much timidity in its application. Hollywood believes that it must produce “what the public wants” while the public would take whatever Hollywood produces. If Hollywood were to decide for itself what it wants it would get away with it —even ifit should decide to “depart from evil and do good.” For, to revert to whence we started, in modern life the movies are what most other forms of art have ceased to be, not an adornment but a necessity.”

Ray, that sounds interesting – where did you write about this? Cheers

novakant: Briefly at my blog; formally in a future issue of Genre. And cheers backatcha, mate.

Walt: why would you say that?

Geo @ #60:

One reading of Shakespeare’s plays is that some were encoded messages to, and about the plight of, England’s Catholics under the religious oppression of Elizabeth I and James I/VI. The play Hamlet, for example, may be an allegory in which the Gertrude represents England, old King Hamlet Catholicism, and his brother, Gertrude’s second husband and now King, Protestantism. Young Hamlet represents the English recusant Catholic community, torn between acquiescence to the new religious regime and rebellion against it. In the play he finally chooses rebellion, with disastrous consequences for all. Shakespeare, according to this interpretation, was sending a message to his recusant confreres, not to oppose the regime.

peter:

Yes, that seems like a plausible reading. It doesn’t greatly increase my respect for Shakespeare, though; actually, it seems to fit under the final category of his characters’ purposes that I mentioned: ie, “other trivial matters.” There was nothing vital at stake, at least as represented by Shakespeare, in the quarrels between English Catholics and Protestants: they were simply religious factional squabbles, with political prizes at stake rather than profound moral or metaphysical differences. The Hebrew prophets and the Puritans were — even if one rejects their beliefs and ideals — moral and religious geniuses and heroes. Shakespeare’s protagonists may have been brave or loyal or in other ways virtuous, but they are all the servants of paltry, utterly conventional purposes, because Shakespeare (or Bacon) was a fine dramatic craftsman and very clever wordsmith, but no more than that.

At least, this is what Shaw thinks. I’ve only begun thinking over the question, but so far I think he’s right.

Sorry for the double post. Dunno how that happened.

I too think the original post was too dismissive of the history plays. Besides the Henry IVs and Henry V, Richard II is also very fine (I was in it in college). And Richard III, though pretty cheesy and one-dimensional in my personal view, has held the stage more or less continually for 400 years, so it can’t be dismissed.

peter:

1) This seems to me a very sad and blinkered vision of Shaw’s dramatic art. Heartbreak House, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Pygmalion, John Bull’s Other Island, and the rest — these seem to you one-dimensional, superficial, without rounded characters, subtle plots, brilliant dialogue, complex themes?

2) Shaw was the most famous and influential musical and dramatic critic of his time, and possibly of all time, at least in English. A mistaken (though hardly implausible) judgment, eg, about Mendelssohn, is hardly equivalent to a “complete inability to appreciate subtlety or nuance.” You’re swinging wildly here.

3) Shaw did indeed end his life saying outrageous things. But this hardly invalidates the many wise and sane things he said earlier in his life. His Common Sense About the War, Everybody’s Political What’s What, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Fabian Essays, are masterpieces of political criticism. By the same criterion, you’d have to dismiss the entire oeuvre of Wordsworth, Mill, Brecht, Heidegger, Foucault, Solzhenitzyn, and innumerable others because of their sometime political follies.

I’m afraid Shakespeare’s putative greatness is going pretty much undefended here, except by assertion or ad hominem dismissal of his critic(s). Maybe we should get a little less polemical and actually try to figure out what makes for heroism, moral grandeur, imaginative depth, aesthetic originality.

Then again, it’s Christmas Day. Maybe we should take a rest.

The plays the thing; Shakespeare was a playwright not a philosopher.
But people aren’t heroes. Shakespeare described us and the complexity of what is, of the world as we experience it, better than most.
If Shaw had been as interested in people than was in ideas he wouldn’t have ended up saying so many stupid things late in life, or even earlier. Shakespeare was Aristophanes and Euripides, and one of the founders of the modern popular democratic form of culture.
I think your early experience with Plato and Opus Dei has done lasting harm to your imagination. You have a weakness for authority.

Maybe we should get a little less polemical and actually try to figure out what makes for heroism, moral grandeur, imaginative depth, aesthetic originality.

The first two items on your list don’t seem to me to be a requirement for a great work, which you outline as Shaw’s beef. There is a long list of great works that do not set the Bowling Pin of Virtue against the Tenpins of Vice; Shaw’s complaint is absurd.

Back in the day, who wasn’t supporting eugenics and mass murder?

@61
“so the central complain here is:

bunyan gives us traditional christian eschatology with immortality and post-mortem salvation; the rest is not silence, our little life is not rounded by a sleep, and if we’re good little pilgrims then we get to go to the celestial city.

some of shakespeare’s characters, including a moor and an ancient athenian, do not offer us slogans of christian redemption.”

You are missing the point. (At least with respect to Shakespeare; I’ve no interest in defending Bunyan.) The point is that Shakespeare (and every high school English teacher since him) defines tragedy as *psychological* tragedy, sad stuff that is the result of particular flaws within the individual.
This viewpoint is cramped and limited insofar as it does not acknowledge that there is more to life than this, that there are *ontological* tragedies that reflect the outer world and society, that don’t result simply from the individual himself.
To draw a modern analogy, one might compare the view that racism is a disease of individuals with wicked thoughts to the view that racism is embedded in social structures.

Now there are of course those who claim that Shakespeare made a great leap forward by this move, inventing modern psychology and suchlike. I don’t know enough about the relevant history to comment on that. I will, however, say that I, personally, find discussions of structure and society to be substantially more interesting than discussion of the personality traits of individuals, so I find plenty of literature rather more interesting than Shakespeare, and it strikes me as silly and empty-headed for someone to denounce such a preference as unreasonable.

(One could, of course, throw in something here about libertarianism, but, honestly, the connections are so obvious why bother?)

As I said, I’m not interested in defending Bunyan, or, for that matter Shaw; I’m more interested simply in dedeifying Shakespeare.

Yes, the term ontological tragedy has been used in connection with greek tragedy, but I see it as being larger than that.
You can write a play about individuals contracting AIDS; or you can write a play about the social system that led to the way AIDS was treated in the US in the 1980s. _And the Band Played On_ was not a play (and was not an especially great book or documentary) but I nonetheless found it more interesting, and moving, than Rent.

The reader may complain that it’s not possible to write drama focussed on “the system” rather than individuals, but I’m not sure that that is true. I have not yet seen many episodes of _Battlestar Galactica_, but my understanding is that that is a show that tried to make issues more important than the characters in the show. One could argue that the early _West Wing_ episodes, or _A Few Good Men_ likewise tread that path. I don’t hold any of these as perfect exemplars of what I’m saying, but I think they suggest the possibility.

Of course one difficulty is that people, for the most part, have much stronger feelings about “the system” than about individuals. Few of the audience are going to conclude, they hate it before even seeing a play about a 40 year old man struggling to deal with the fact that he truly loves his girlfriend but finds the young women he sees all around him so so desirable. But the audience, on hearing that a play is “about” (social topic of the week) will immediately view it through the lens of their opinions on the topic.
I admit this is a very real issue.

I guess my resolution to this would be that if you want to write a play that is about issues, but that is also great art, choose issues that are larger and more timeless than your current decade. eg
• Investigate the problem of how to reconcile finite resources with infinite desires, putting your play 1000 years in the past. OR
• Question how an individual, who wants to learn everything there is to know, comes to terms, in his early twenties, with the fact that he will never know anything but the tiniest fragment of the tiniest fragment of what is already known, putting your play fifty years in the future.

Just, for gods sake, don’t give us more “racism is bad”, or “abortion: it’s a tough question” or “who can fathom the mind of God? meanwhile, here’s my spin on Job” crap.