Bunyan’s heaven doesn’t exist. Whatever celestial truth there may be, it isn’t that one. To the extent that his pilgrims succeed in turning their back on the world of humanity to pursue the Celestial City, they’re failing at dealing with the only world we actually do for sure share. By contrast, all the passions Shakespeare wrote about, all the things that make his characters great, small, smart, stupid, dedicated, flaky, whatever, those really do exist. Shakespeare is telling us stories about the world we share; Bunyan is only telling us how we can do our part to pull that world apart for the sake of a delusion.

Bunyan’s vision is not a matter of trying to replace the existing web of social bonds with something better – it’s not either a revolutionary vision, nor an incrementalist one, because it just gives up on the world as anything but a place you suffer through. But it’s the world we have, and it’s the one I want to understand and to improve, if possible. Bunyan doesn’t really have anything to say to people wanting to live in the world except “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Without even the benefits of getting stoned.

The hell with that. There’s a lot I don’t like about the material, social world, but since it’s here, I want to understand it and improve it.

Then Shaw is factually wrong. More people do care about Shakespeare’s characters than they do about Bunyan’s and Shaw’s, even if, according to Shaw, they shouldn’t do. Think how many millions enjoyed Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ – and compare how many you’d get to see ‘Pygmalion’ rather than ‘My Fair Lady’. And the idea that Shakespeare is successful largely because he is hyped doesn’t hold up. I don’t know about in the US, but the UK educational system I went through 30 years ago, with its compulsory Shakespeare, seemed designed deliberately to turn you off by its tedious trudge through the text. I have never again voluntarily opened a book by most of the English authors I studied at school, but I repeatedly go and watch Shakespeare. So Geo , you’re welcome to say that people shouldn’t prefer Shakespeare’s characters to Bunyan’s or Shaw’s, but you have to accept first that most of us do.

Shaftesbury in The Moralist (1709). seems to have been the first to stress the basic contrast between such “tailored” gardens and untouched nature “where neither Art nor the Conceit or Caprice of Man has spoiled” the “geiiuine order” of God’s creation. Even the rude rocks” he feels “the mossy Cavern. the irregular unwroght Grottoes, and broken Falls of Waters. with all the horrid graces of the Wilderness itself, as representing Nature more, will be more engaging, and appeal with a Magnificance beyond the formal Mockery of princely gardens.” It took only one further step to postulate that the gardens themselves conform to the “genuine order of nature” instead of contradicting it. Where Le Notre had said that good gardens must not look like woods, Joseph Addison in the Spectator of 1712 paintewd the image of an ideal garden which comforms to the laws of “nature unadorned” (as Pope was to express it seven years later).
…To conceive of a garden as a piece of “nature unadorned” is of course a contradiction in terms; for a Joshua Reynolds was judiciously to remark in his Discourses on Art, ” if the true taste consists. as many hold, in banishing every appearance of Art or any any traces of the footsteps of man it would then be no longer a garden.” He therefore prcfers the definition of a garden as “Nature to advantage dress’d”; and it was this concept (well expressed by Pope when he admonishes the gardener “to treat the Goddess [Nature] like a modest Fair,/Nor Overdress nor leave her wholly bare”

Does that matter? Leslie Stephen is not our critical touchstone any more.

Picking up on Salient’s point: I do think it’s the academic minority (of which I’ll admit myself a member) that get past “gentle Shakespeare meek and mild” biography-driven criticism to start looking at a set of plays, or more precisely, a set of texts that can be assembled into plays that approximate to the ones that were first performed alongside other plays written by other people at a particular point in time around 1600. Those plays usually concern themselves with a particular kind of protagonist—and when they don’t, they do so in explicit formal opposition to the expected protagonists, e.g. Bartholomew Fair, Knight of the Burning Pestle.

Anyway, the Iago vs Malvolio comparison is hardly a new one (though one I thought of afresh, seeing Richard Wilson in the role) but it bears mentioning to make the point that after 1600 or thereabouts, Shakespeare’s plays seem to continually test the boundaries of tragedy and comedy, so that by the time you reach The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest there seems to be an appreciation that you can write and perform plays that start like the end of tragedies and end like the beginning of comedies, or that you can drastically alter the portrayal of conventionally comic or tragic narrative through stagecraft alone. That’s a primarily formal critique, though it requires acceptance of authorial continuity, i.e. a dramatic career that takes into account a lifetime of writing for the stage and a recollection of past work.

To the degree I can see into the “myriad-minded” playwright himself, and am not projecting my own closeted conservatism, yes I do.

“That way” for the characters of Shakespeare, being agents and victims of their social roles and responsibilities, socially determined yet determining, maintaining society by acceptance (or not) of their roles. The audience would walk out of the Globe knowing that Romeo and Juliet were just WRONG, and caused much horror in their disobedience. But oh, wasn’t it beautiful and sad. There was the consensus about roles that allowed Shakespeare to make his sins and sinners so interesting and attractive, his job was to sell tickets after all, but this is like Milton giving Satan the best lines. Shakespeare was profound, but never socially subversive.

The Histories are what convinced me. Henry V is good and glorious and noble, maybe sorta, yet is accursed and a curse upon England because of his usurper line.

That may be the most austere New Year’s Eve celebration I’ve ever heard of.

Shakespeare saw them both as individuals and as … embodiments? social manifestations? spiritual roles?

Well, we (after being shown how by critics like Lukacs) see them that way, and it’s a very fruitful way to see them, at least potentially. But do you think Shakespeare actually, consciously saw them that way?

This whole debate is over philosophy by means of literature. Maybe you should make the philosophical debate explicit. In the wider scheme of things, is Shaw in fact a liberal? Are Geo’s arguments actually liberal?

Art is the manifestation of ideas in ordered form. The artist concentrates on the form, the critic concentrates on the ideas. Art by critics usually sucks. Historians are too smart to try. And the criticism by artists is as idiosyncratic the conducting of composers. But we learn from both the authors and their interpreters.

Q- Is Geo a liberal or a conservative? The fact that he may consider himself a liberal is irrelevant.

I understand where you’re coming from, but wouldn’t it be nice if more directors (there are just two exceptions I can come up with from the top of my head) took it upon themselves to make a feature about a Vietnamese peasant at the receiving end of the actions of the creatures we love to hate on screen. Such people’s tragedy is much more real, moving and interesting than Nixon’s petty issues.