A mole-hill as high as Tenerife

although i agree that shaw’s opinions vis a vis shakespeare are “absurd and ridiculous”, i also do not think he was staking his preference on bunyan’s elegance. bunyan’s diction is not elegant, but rather direct and plain-spoken, and even his admirers would say the same.

the basis of shaw’s criticism seems not so much stylistic as purely ideological.

so he might even share hume’s opinion on the relative elegance of bunyan and addison (and elegance of diction is exactly where addison excelled), while still preferring bunyan’s ideology to anyone’s (other than his own).

indeed, which was why i left that half unaddressed in my comment.

it seems perfectly possible that shaw and hume will simply disagree about bunyan’s genius.

(though even in respect of genius, one might wonder whether bunyan’s is not of the kind that we call ‘the genius of the people’ or ‘of the age’, i.e. a reflection of some wider phenomenon rather than a strictly personal possession. but i should leave that point for shaw and geo to enlarge upon.)

Oh good, I wanted a chance to talk about this some more. I think it’s worth pointing out one of the ways that Shaw’s cheating there: aside from the fact that the quote from Bunyan is significantly longer than those from Shakespeare, it’s a difference in style between the two authors. That kind of straightforward, powerful summing-up in a couple of sentences is something Bunyan does beautifully, and works well with the confident, simple, “stay-on-the-one path” journey of Christian. It’s not something Shakespeare tries to do very often, and it’s hard to imagine how it could be done by any character in, say, Macbeth. “Out, out, brief candle” is pretty obviously not famous because it is, in itself, an amazingly beautiful phrase, but because it’s part of a really wonderful monologue. And if you put that monologue next to, say, a big narrative chunk of Bunyan, you could easily “prove” (as too many people think) that Bunyan is dull and pointless.

Also, as I mentioned in the previous thread, if you really want to read some crazy opinions about the relative value of different artists (literary and otherwise), you should pick up Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” It combines some really interesting general ideas about aesthetics with some specific judgments so totally round-the-bend as to boggle the mind.

Whoops: that last should have been addressed to Steve LaBonne

irrelevant side note–

i see that tenerife has an elevation of 12,200 ft. (3700 m).
interesting to think that this was hume’s everest.
i suppose none of the american rockies were familiar to europeans yet.
but surely the alps? or is it that tenerife is more monolithic?

Bunyan conceives of the universe as an arena of grand struggle, with the forces of supreme Good arrayed against those of fearsome Evil, both on the cosmic level and in every individual life in thoroughly adolescent terms whereas Shakespeare was a grownup.

Or what Substance just said.

yeah, though even bunyan-haters have never accused him of committing any jar-jars.

Each of the quotations that Shaw takes from Shakespeare is an expression of disbelief in the immortality of the soul.

Bloix beat me to what I was going to say, but let me restate the point: Several peaks in the Alps are taller, but the difference in elevation between their summits and the nearest point from which you can see them is (I assume with some confidence) less than the difference between the peak of Tenerife and sea level. (Mount Rainier, of which Hume was probably not aware, is taller than Tenerife, visible from sea level, and pretty damn impressive. I have never seen Tenerife. If somebody wants to get me a grant, I would be happy to do some research.

As for the actual topic, some people including Shaw seem to be making the assumption that one or more of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays is expressing the views of the author. This is not an uncommon procedure, which can and does lead to the conclusion that Shakespeare held any set of opinions imaginable.

(Shakespeare’s Lives, by S. Schoenbaum, argues persuasively that we know hardly anything useful about Shakespeare the person. Beyond, of course, the fact that he was a working professional playwright — which is very important, because it conclusively punctures the notion that someone outside the immediate theatrical circle wrote the plays. Most especially not the Earl of Oxford, who I gather is the favored candidate these days.)

roac @21: some people including Shaw seem to be making the assumption that one or more of the characters in Shakespeare’s plays is expressing the views of the author

No, I don’t think that’s true. Shaw’s argument is that Shakespeare’s tragic heroes are an aesthetic failure, because they simply don’t have the required moral stature: they have no conception of a good larger than their own (or their tribe’s or faction’s) success. What Shakespeare himself believed is neither here nor there.

The Hebrew prophets? You mean, like the author of Jonah, who was a rather sophisticated religious / social satirist? Or the author of Job, who in no uncertain terms mocks the idea that the universe is a morality play?

“it’s a long time since “elegant” has been a term of praise, even among those who value prose style over substance.”

Maybe in the bar you’re drinking in, but us historians still like us some elegant prose, thanks. Perhaps because we know how rarely it is encountered, especially in our own works.

But then, perhaps the definition of ‘elegant’ that you’re using has something to do with ‘incredibly verbose, in an eighteenth-century kind of way’?

23: Fair enough — I withdraw the words “including Shaw” from my comment, without which, however, I think it is valid.

To start over: Scientific theory is tested by whether it matches the facts observed through experiment. Literary theory, I would argue, is tested by whether it matches the consensus of the educated public as to what is good and what is not. Which is a highly fuzzy and shifting standard — but who can suggest a better one? If your physical theory suggests that a pan of water at sea level will boil at 80 degrees Celsius, people will reject it. Likewise with literary theories like those of Tolstoy, Shaw, and F.R. Leavis, which say that works greatly admired by the “three-dimensional” educated public are actually lousy, if they could only see it.

Leaving Shakespeare out of it entirely, Shaw’s theory in particular is particularly problematic in an age of “demotic” art (namecheck: N. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism). For my (fading) generation, the great modern novels were Ulysses, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, and Lolita, and I’m sticking with that (though I actually prefer Pale Fire.) Did/would those books meet with Shaw’s approval? He can’t have been unaware of the first two. If he rejected them because they lack noble characters with high objectives, that proves to my personal satisfaction that his theory is full of it.

It is hard to take Shaw’s criticism too seriously when you compare, say, Anthony and Cleopatra with Caesar and Cleopatra. Chesterton says Shaw justly represents the Puritan view against Shakespeare’s more complex Catholicism. I don’t know about that – I do know that Shaw’s portrayal of women seems to give us an endless reproduction of the very pleasant, highly placed Liberal Party hostesses of the late 19th century – and his Cleopatra is one of his least successful attempts at that kind of thing, a sort of English school girl (with the executions and brother-sister marriage thrown in to shock ) the good Edwardian bourgeois. Of course, not too much shock – after all, Caesar and Cleopatra did have sex. Which you can easily imagine happening with Shakespeare’s Cleopatra – with Shaw’s, it would definitely be a Lolita act at best. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra seems infinitely closer to royalty – to the real politics of being the ruler of a peripheral state on the losing side of an imperial struggle. And, to continue the characterization, the play also contains one of Shaw’s tiresome projections of the strong man – in a lifelong search for the strong man – Caesar, or Mussolini, or Stalin, they are all seen by Shaw as cynical, genial, truly working for the public good – although having, sometimes, to seize some strong instruments.

If you’re looking for a mountain that comes up out of nothing to be huge, why not pick Etna? Most impressive rise I’ve ever seen, well surpassing the Western US mountains, even the Owens Valley where you have 14,000 mountains on either side of a 4,000 foot valley.

Surely the point about Addison is that he’s a pioneer who did a lot to mold a language that everyone could use, not that he displayed some sort of ostentatious elegance? Rather like the once overpraised now no longer read poets who had “molded our numbers,” or whatever Johnson (?) said.

And Bunyan, like his follower Buchan, doesn’t really display the imagination of George Lucas since his point is that this is what is happening to us and in us all the time, not some spectacle out there.

Roger again: For the purposes of this particular discussion, the useful comparison isn’t between Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and Shaw’s but between Antony and Caesar. Antony hasn’t an idea in his head. He simply wants to win power and lay Cleopatra. Caesar has a conception of Rome’s civilizing mission. Whatever you think of that ideal, it is at least an ideal — something grander than Antony’s mere lust and ambition.

To turn it around, then, is it possible Shakespeare wears so well because he is not obviously didactic?

Geo – actually, if we are comparing Anthony to Caesar, then of course we should remember that Anthony has been treated before – in Julius Caesar. Indeed, I think your reading of character=idea is a fatal narrowing of character. To show that a man hasn’t an idea in his head – re Underwood in Heartbreak House – is not to eliminate ideas from one’s work, but to illuminate the circumstances that create the character. I would say that is done very well by Shakespeare – in fact, the fall into a sybaritic idiocy out in the periphery of the empire is an artistic meme that reflects a political fact. To flash forward to our own imperial folly, Bremer was a man with many ideas in his head – but he was an essentially stupid man. Anthony is the decayed end of the republican ideal, once it has saturated itself in unilateral imperial power. To bad Shaw couldn’t see that.

The Shakespeare criticism in Shaw’s Saturday Review theatre column is most directly aimed at a particular Victorian version of Shakespeare, in which his genius lies in great heroic characters as portrayed by Henry Irving. Shaw campaigns not only for new, more serious playwrights (such as this Shaw fellow we have all heard so much about), but also for productions of Shakespeare that are less bombastic and more attentive to the text; in this he was fighting on a winning side, and helping it to win. It’s also some of the most gleeful and effective trolling in the history of journalism.

Which is not to deny that it’s also a sincere position, as argued ably here by George; only to say that there are thick layers of Sensible and Brilliant on top of the foundation of Bonkers or (if you prefer) Wise.

33: Etna, Fuji, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Baker, and Mt. Hood in the Pacific Northwest, and Aorangi/Aoraki/Mt. Cook are all stratovolcanoes fairly closely visible from sea level or thereabouts. Rainier is the tallest at over 14,000 ft. Impressiveness is obviously a subjective criterion, but it beats Baker and Hood IMO.

roger: Sorry, I thought at first you meant Undershaft of Major Barbara. Yes, Underwood is quite brainless. Remind me, please, what this goes to show?

Peter @41: Thanks, that’s fascinating.

I can’t be fighting with Hume when I haven’t read Hume. I was exposed to Hume in a sophomore philosophy survey course, which I scraped through with a D after it became very clear that this was not for me. I’m just a lawyer who once thought he wanted to be a literary critic. I am on this blog on rare occasions and on the proprietors’ kind sufferance, like a vampire coming out during a solar eclipse. The post you refer to stated my opinion that there is nothing intrinsically inferior about a mannered literary style (though there are pitfalls involved). It’s all a matter of fashion.

(Honest-and-direct has its pitfalls too. People get fooled into thinking it’s easy. Good writing never is.)

geo – you misunderstand my argument if you think I am saying Anthony is a republican! Rather, he is a product of the decline of the republican ethos. Just as Underwood is a brainless administrator who is the epitome of the imperial ethos – whipping the natives.

Although I’m attacking Shaw, I’m attacking him from the perspective that Shakespeare was a better playwrite, as well as poet. Partly this is because ideas are worthless, in art, if they aren’t put into action – and you don’t put them into action by allegorizing an idea into a human figure and setting him lose in some landscape that you’ve gamed to trip him up or make him triumph. There is no chance, in Bunyan’s world, that the Christian ideal is simply wrong. It gets its force and its limit from that. In Shakespeare’s world, there’s every chance.

42: When you say that Shakespeares was “an intellectual and moral mediocrity,” I have to revert to the argument I made at 21, which is that we know nothing about Shakespeare’s intellectual interests or moral standpoint. All we have is his plays, which were written with the overriding goal of putting butts in seats and enabling Hemings and Condell to go on paying his salary.

At 38, I think you are evading the point originally made by someone else in a post I cannot now find. Shaw’s Caesar is not merely intended to be” interesting”; he is, as I remember (I was in high school when I read C&C, and that’s a long time ago), pretty clearly the mouthpiece for paticular views which Shaw wanted to sell to his audience. If that is correct, then the merits of the play have to be at least partly contingent on the merits of the ideas

My clearest memory of the play is of Caesar’s reaction to being told that the Library of Alexandria was on fire: “It is better that the Alexandrians should live their lives than dream them away with the help of books.” I remember trying to agree, since I was obviously supposed to, but ultimately failing.

geo: Peter @41: Thanks, that’s fascinating.

I think you would enjoy the Collected Letters (4 volumes, edited by Dan H. Laurence) if you haven’t already. Amazon.com shows some used copies, e.g. here.

The Harvard Bookstore had a complete set in very nice condition a couple of summers ago for $90. I was on the verge of going back in and buying it so that I would have a less battered set than my old one, but someone had beaten me to it.

Shakespeare was not a systematic thinker, his morality is not particularly Christian or even noticeably religious

The blatant obviousness of this always makes me shake my head when the currently fashionable topic of Shakespeare’s supposed Catholic-ness comes up. I’d have a hard time thinking of a writer anywhere between antiquity and the 18th Century whose work shows fewer traces of any variety of Christianity.

“the fiction of ideas ” vs the fiction of preferences and of preferences described in common form. When the fiction of ideas lasts, it’s not because of the author’s intent but in spite of it. The only immorality in craft is hypocrisy. There’s something hypocritical in fascist art, but there’s nothing hypocritical in a Titian portrait of the schmuck Philip II.

What Titian gives us is a complex description of the language and categories of meaning in the period. Categories of perception in Venice in 1550 are worlds away from those of Florence in 1520: the difference between flat and idealized images of substance and substance used to to describe immateriality. At the end of his life Titian was painting with his fingers. Try reading Kant for half an hour and then a page of Hegel. You feel like you’re suddenly on a different planet. Same thing

Mimetic art is the description of something you love so much you can be honest about it, or that you hate so profoundly and know so well that you show it in all its complexity. Marx and both Eliot work. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong about the subject only that you’re observant, articulate and honest in describing your response.

Shakespeare will be with us as long as Plato. But Plato’s taste for intellectual elegance is both his strength and his weakness. It’s only possible because Socrates is supplied with straw men to go against.

geo@34 Where did that “cosmic” come from? The idea that Bunyan’s way is superior might be almost persuasive without that “cosmic.” And how does that square with @35 Julius Caesar’s idea of “Rome’s civilizing mission” anyway?

bianca: By “cosmic” I simply meant that in every corner of the universe, to readers at any stage of evolution, Christian’s struggle to conquer his baser self and achieve his salvation, or Caesar’s ambition to bring engineering, rational administration, and Greek literature to the slave empires of the East and the barbarians of the North, will probably seem more interesting than whether Macbeth or Duncan wears a silly round piece of metal on his head, or whether Antony or Octavian wears laurel leaves and presides at the Coliseum.

I’m not sure what this could possibly mean: “Caesar’s ambition to bring engineering, rational administration, and Greek literature to the slave empires of the East and the barbarians of the North. The slave empires of the East? So, Sparticus goes down the hole of forgetfulness. Rome was the greatest slave principality of the Mediterranean, and exhausted the patience of its conquests with its penchant for enslaving inhabitants.

Indeed, the ‘slave’ empires of the east were doing pretty good as far as engineering and Greek literature goes. Adrienne Mayor makes a pretty good case that the first mechanical calculating machine – found off the shore of Antikythera Crete – was probably made at King Mithradates court, the king who opposed the Roman advance in the Eastern meditteranean, and was easily able to rouse the people of Asia minor to slaughter 80,000 of them – since the Romans came to pillage and prey. What did they bring Egypt but an inordinate appetite for grain. Caesar, of course, was in Egypt – Ptolomeic Egypt, the last redoubt of Hellenic culture once Sulla devastated Greece – to have his debt repaid. The Romans spread culture in the same way the mosquito spreads malaria – both the Romans and the mosquito were out to sate themselves on blood. Culture, like disease, was an accidental byproduct.

To come at this discussion from another angle, is it reasonable to apply the same critique to music? Should sacred, patriotic or revolutionary works be exalted over mere secular fare? In this case the question of meaning or intent is a bit more difficult to resolve, since the title of a piece might be the only indication, and might not be dependable.

For example, the third movement of Beethoven’s Op. 132 quartet starts with a theme entitled “A convalescent’s holy song of thanks to the Godhead in the Lydian Mode”. Should this be taken at face value, or was Beethoven just noodling around with modal music and using it as a ground from which “Feeling new strength”, the lyrical contrasting theme, could rise? (The next untitled movement sounds like more modal musing, and the finale is positively perky.)

The issue seems to be that Shakespeare’s art isn’t sufficiently instructive or instructive. I seem to recall that similar complaints once were lodged against Shostakovich, as well as practitioners of the visual arts. It’s now no longer fashionable to insist that the arts ought to have practical value beyond the pleasure they give us (and of course their value as class and cultural identifiers). Perhaps literature deserves an exception because it can’t always be distinguished from exposition.

Anyone mention Wittgenstein yet? He didn’t like Shakespeare either did he? Lawrence, Shaw, Wittgenstein…It seems to me what unites these people is a devotion to complicated and structured thinking, and at the same time a yearning to be literary people, to master words and make words work for them, so they thought of those two things as tied together. Shakespeare was thumbing his nose at them, and they didn’t like it.
So I think maybe the moral-grandeur thing is almost a red herring. Maybe it would be better to say they thought putting words together and making them work goes with another another kind of activity you could call intellectual or in the broad sense visionary or “prophetic”, that the one was an expression of the other, and that it was under suspicion of self-promotion and cheapness if you tried to sneak into great literature without the latter.
It’s a tough view to really understand or assimilate nowadays, as I think we can see from this discussion…
Anyway, what about Wittgenstein’s views on this, you professional philosophers?

Before packing it in for the night, let me just ask: Does anyone know who OGILBY was?

Good lord I write terribly.

¿Playas? ¡Ando por la playa cada día! (Beach town humor, sorry.)

That Shakespeare’s heroes and villains aren’t exemplars wasn’t a defect in his day and isn’t in ours. Obama hasn’t met our expectations, nor could he; Reagan, in his bumbling geniality was a worse monster than twisted Nixon, who out of expediency furthered Johnson’s agenda. The banality of good is seldom emphasized, while the ideals of heroism tend to be orthogonal to merely human needs (God, honor, nation, &c).

We can see ourselves in almost any of Shakespeare’s all-too-human characters, from comic foil to tragic fool. That’s hardly a defect; it makes them more real. More to the point, though, we watch them again and again for the sake of the music of the verse.

“More to the point, though, we watch them again and again for the sake of the music of the verse.”
It’s more than that. The characters themselves are works of art: complex and contradictory and memorable unities, even if we can’t quite say of what sort.

Matthias: Shakespeare was not a nihilist, in the sense that Nietzsche was, or in the somewhat different sense that Bazarov in Fathers and Sons was. On the contrary: nihilism is a rejection of social convention and received wisdom. Shakespeare has no interest whatever in rejecting social convention and received wisdom. It’s not that he embraces them. He simply takes them for granted, apparently never giving the matter any thought at all. The powers that be are ordained of God; be loyal to your prince; sow your wild oats when young; avenge wrongs and insults; do not overreach; moderation in all things; etc, etc. A stock of aristocratic and bourgeois platitudes, ready-made; that’s all his characters live by. It isn’t that they’re not “moral exemplars,” in the sense of not being sufficiently virtuous. It’s that they’re not tragic enough. Tragedy, remember, is supposed to “purge the soul, by means of pity and terror.” Shaw thinks Shakespeare’s heroes are simply too small to accomplish this. As I mentioned before, I’ve only begun to think about the matter, but I have a suspicion he may be right.

There may have some good sense layered on top of the bonkers in Shaw’s attacks on Shakespeare. But I think there was something simple below too – g0od all fashioned envy. Shaw was not satisfied to be a great playwright. He wanted to be the greatest. And it was conventional wisdom that Shakespeare was not only a better playwright than Shaw, but a better class of playwright than Shaw. Well Shaw had proven the conventional wisdom not only wrong but absurd before, so why not when it came to Shakespeare? Only, the conventional wisdom happens to be right here. (Shaw was also under the illusion that he was a competent poet. As someone who loves Shaw, I made the mistake of buying a collection of his poems. I won’t retype any because I can’t bear to, but here is a link to one that happens to be online. I’m afraid it is is typical: http://www.vegsoc.org.au/religion_poetry_shaw.asp. (If you are curious to read more of Shaw’s poetry, pick up “Lady Wilt Thou Love Me?” – but only in the same spirit one rents “Plan 9 From Outer Space).

A stock of aristocratic and bourgeois platitudes, ready-made; that’s all his characters live by.

In the words of the great tragedian, that is all my bum.

Geo: “A stock of aristocratic and bourgeois platitudes, ready-made; that’s all his characters live by.” Two things.

First. Hamlet? Richard II? Richard III? Henry V? Iago? Hotspur? Viola? I’m not seeing it.

Second. In an era of Bush and Blair, I think you and others are way selling short the merits of some of those ideas, like “do not overreach; moderation in all things; etc,” The fact is that no matter how banal they may seem to you, great power has been gathered up by people who either aren’t aware of them or don’t feel obliged to do anything about them, and affirming the existence of communities and the desirability of a balanced life and stuff like that doesn’t strike me as trivial at all.

I don’t live in the cosmos at large. I am a human body with a human mind living among humans and the rest of our world, and I don’t feel that I live in the midst of a glut of effective, compelling messages about the importance and worth of some simple moral principles. I do feel I live in a glut of vainglorious praise of epic schemes, and would like fewer of them, and if this makes me a moral cripple inclined to dubious art, well, so be it.

A stock of aristocratic and bourgeois platitudes, ready-made; that’s all his characters live by

Come on, George. Leave it to Khrushchev.

Here it is, Samuel Johnson:

Other dramatists can only gain attention by hyperbolical or aggravated characters, by fabulous and unexampled excellence or depravity, as the writers of barbarous romances invigorated the reader by a giant and a dwarf; and he that should form his expectations of human affairs from the play, or from the tale, would be equally deceived. Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion: Even where the agency is supernatural the dialogue is level with life. Other writers disguise the most natural passions and most frequent incidents: so that he who contemplates them in the book will not know them in the world: Shakespeare approximates the remote, and familiarizes the wonderful; the event which he represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would be probably such as he has assigned; and it may be said, that he has not only shewn human nature as it acts in real exigencies, but as it would be found in trials, to which it cannot be exposed.

The fact that, generally speaking, the world is run by “whiny, petty-minded blowhards” rather than tragic heroes might help explain our continued appreciation of Shakespeare’s plays, their timeless relevance.

novakant, well, yes, but timeless? I don’t think anything will prove to be timeless – and the convoluted here-and-there (I just finished re-reading a play in preparation of some personal project of mine) of Shakespeare is becoming quite dated. I also went to a play recently and the horrible pettiness of most characters really cannot but be overacted – as per usual Hume has it right I think but his is a comparison, not an absolute appraisal.

Also, there is a difference between the genius of an individual – and the everlastingness of her work. The former is not merely a show of cultural pessimism (“they do not make them like that nowadays”).

PS: even if he truthfully degraded what was considered ‘grand’ – he did not belittle what was common because it was ‘common’ – which is some kind of morality right there

@75–
i’ve not seen ogilby’s maps, but i’m pretty sure that hume has compared him to milton because of his translation of vergil’s aeneid. (that would give you the right apples-to-apples, or at least epic-to-epic, sort of comparison).

a little clicking around shows that it was well-received until eclipsed by dryden’s vergil. i wish i could also read a few couplets–then we could vindicate it against that puritan botcher.

oh–it’s also clear that ogilby was a middle-class scotsman who got ahead with his wits and his pen. part of what hume is doing in dissing him is to join in the typical self-loathing gesture of the anglophilic scot.

96 – we’re agreed.

Yes, I think this goes back to a point I made in the earlier thread (and that several other people have made in this one). All these Shaw-vs.-Shakespeare comparisons start from accepting a very contentious set of terms: grand systematic ideas are good, confused petty ones are bad. Of course, if you have the opposite set of preferences you can easily turn this on its head: Shakespeare’s ideas are human and realistic, Shaw’s are abstracted, preachy and ham-handed. (that is, in fact, my set of preferences, by the way.)

C.S. Lewis has a good passage in “The Allegory of Love,” where he talks about Spenser vs. Ariosto/Tasso, and how easy it is to show that either is truly greater. Really, it turns out that this isn’t a very useful way to talk about literature: writers do different things (which is certainly itself worth pointing out), and you can say of any two great writers, “Writer A does great thing X, which you will find nowhere in Writer B.”

In any case, I think we can all, no doubt, agree, that Addison is the bees knees, and Teneriffe is just about the highest thing ever.

Great examples, David Hume! They sure help you beg the question in your essay on taste! But then, in his value theory, does Hume ever not beg the question?

It’s awfully easy to oscillate between hero as functional necessity and “hero” as admirable individual.

According to my admittedly hazy memory of English Lit, Hamlet is a prime example of an anti-hero and Shakespeare somewhat special for promoting the concept of anti-hero.

105:

yeah right. even by calling it “ethically neutral” you are complicit in western culture’s arbitrary valorization of tagonists.

#98 “perhaps to describe Shakespeare as “amoral” would be better”
But he’s not amoral. Is Euripides amoral because he’s not Plato?
In as English harden chaotic because it’s not modeled on Versailles?
And Geo is the one arguing for Versailles. He’s the conservative. Shakespeare is radical by comparison, but he describes the radical so as to make it normative, and in a sense unthreatening.
Shakespeare’s order is unstable and protean but it’s an order. It’s just not something you can remove from the language of the plays: the subject matter and form are inseparable. There’s no takeaway without loss. The plays the thing. That’s the idea.
He doesn’t profess a philosophy he makes one manifest.

Between Samuel Johnson and the rest of you, I’m floored, at least temporarily. Very much to think about. Thanks, all.

‘But then, in his value theory, does Hume ever not beg the question?’ (Platonist @ 101)

Depends if you think Hume intended to recommend particular values to us, or just to offer a naturalistic psychology of valuing based on examples conveniently to hand.

Geo –

Regarding tragedy and heroes, I would say that Arthur Miller’s corpus is a pretty good brief for how ordinary people can be tragic heroes.

If anyone wants to sample Ogilby’s Virgil translations, there are six pages of them in the Virgil in English volume of the regrettably short lived Penguin series of poet X in English.

Did anyone really say that Euripides killed tragedy by making his characters too interesting?

Geo @ 88: Richard II was a duffer; Richard III a gloriously vile intriguer; Henry V a reformed wild-oats sower; Hotspur a blustering, swaggering soldier. Hamlet is a charming, engaging, verbally dazzling, but fretful and narcissistic young man. None of them had any conception of or allegiance to a noble, original, capacious ideal, something that transcended their personal ambitions or grievances.

These are clever little phrases, but I don’t think they really work. To take one example, Prince Hal is not “a reformed wild-oats sower”; he plays one for public consumption. At the end of the second scene of 1 Henry IV, he informs us that Falstaff and all his other low-life companions are merely the “sullen ground” that will make his apparent reformation “show more goodly.” Is this betrayal merely for personal ambition? In one sense, yes: Hal is determined to be a more successful ruler than his usurping father. On another level, though, Hal does it because it is his role to rebuild a country torn apart by that usurpation, an act which (in Shakespeare’s hands) shattered one understanding of the commonwealth without replacing it with another. His task is “redeeming time,” which carries an apocalyptic aspect that will not be fully realized until Henry V but which also relates to his role as a symbol for national unity in Shakespeare’s own time–a role that clearly is being both celebrated and examined critically. The sheer brutality with which Hal consolidates his power, the inexorable way in which reasons of state demand the destruction of Hotspur, Falstaff, Pistol, and just about every other humane character across three plays is breathtaking. And yet we are placed in the uncomfortable position of endorsing these actions as part of the process of nation-building, not least because Hal is captivating: poetic, charming, philosophical–there’s a restless and creative mind there, one that understands the power of the political in compelling ways, one that is clearly engaged in a project larger than himself.

And yet, again, at the edge of Hal’s greatest triumph, the victory that will cement his fame for centuries to come, Shakespeare has a common soldier demonstrate a fairly ferocious moral imperative: “But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place;’ some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it; whom to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.” The soldier’s calculus pretty much demolishes the morality of any claims for the value of war as symbol of nation–which is surely what we’re all here in the audience for, to see “warlike Harry, like himself / Assume the port of Mars” (doesn’t Agincourt still cause a little thrill for some Britons?).

The next morning, before the battle, Hal will turn this indictment into the St. Crispin’s Day speech, transforming the testimony of the dismembered dead at Judgment Day into the proleptic nostalgia of “we band of brothers,” who will keep the memory of this day alive until the end of time. That is, he does what Shakespeare has been accused of doing: he turns it into the a beautiful expression of moral platitudes, conventional in implication and limited in scope. But Shakespeare is the one who shows us Hal doing this.

I can understand one thinking that Hal is something other than heroic, but he’s certainly not petty. He has great moral clarity; Shakespeare leaves us in a much more ambivalent place.

Can’t we just note that Shaw is criticizing Shakespeare for writing about what Shakespeare wanted to write about, and not what Shaw wanted Shakespeare to write about?

I tend to fall more on the Shakespeare side of things, probably due to a deep suspicion of people who feel that the world needs more Grand Heroic Narratives to give it meaning. But we’re arguing about topic choice.

no, no–you’re misreading ‘lear’. it’s not about fealty, feudalism, faith, or family. it’s not about gratitude, grace, or human frailty. none of those important ideas is in there. it’s just a real-estate transaction that went sour. oh, and an old man complaining about the weather. i think he may complain about his cataracts as well.

you can’t fool shaw.

It’s a matter of having a grand or petty character, and part of that, Shaw suggests, is the largeness or smallness of one’s ideals and aims.

Again, that makes me wonder whether any protagonist in Elizabethan or Jacobean drama (from Kyd to Ford, let’s say) passes such a test. If this is something which you’d consider a general characteristic of the period’s drama, then it becomes less a case of sacred-cow butchery and more an assessment of period and genre.

nick: I don’t know Elizabethan or Jacobean drama well enough to judge, myself. I suspect Shaw would say that it’s mostly because Shakespeare-worship conduces to the notion that merely personal ambitions of the kind that typically motivate Shakespeare’s heroes are something other than paltry and contemptible, and because that notion is partly to blame for the miserable egotism, selfishness, and shallowness prevalent in a world that worships Shakespeare and professes to be taught by him, that he thought it worthwhile to have a tilt at said Shakespeare-worship.

geo: I’m not sure I buy the claim that Shakespeare thinks his goals are more noble than they are. There are people in Shakespeare who thirst nobly for righteousness and virtue: Cordelia, for example, is quite willing to sacrifice her well-being to be sure that she is acting “according to her bond.” It’s just that Shakespeare doesn’t think that this gets you to the Celestial City, he thinks it gets you murdered by someone like Edmund, with much lower ideals (“Thou, Nature, art my goddess”).

In general, the idea that “hero with higher ideals” translates to “better tragedy” would take some really significant reimagining of the canon. Oedipus and Antigone, I suppose, can be said to thirst for justice. But not Medea or Phaedra.

And for that matter, within Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian has a lot more base intentions than Hopeful or Faithful; should one of them have been the hero? I would have thought that a large part of the point of Christian (as of Hamlet or Macbeth) is his deeply flawed, selfish nature; he’s very much not saved because of his heroic character (perish the un-Protestant thought!) but because God decided to save him.

I suspect Shaw would say that it’s mostly because Shakespeare-worship conduces to the notion that merely personal ambitions of the kind that typically motivate Shakespeare’s heroes are something other than paltry and contemptible, and because that notion is partly to blame for the miserable egotism, selfishness, and shallowness prevalent in a world that worships Shakespeare and professes to be taught by him, that he thought it worthwhile to have a tilt at said Shakespeare-worship.

There’s an assumption here that Shakespeare means his characters to be admired. I don’t see where that comes from. Nothing about Shakespeare requires that you endorse the protagonists’ goals in the say that Shaw or Bunyan does. (Maybe that’s why Shaw couldn’t understand him?) You’re just supposed to think all the contradictions they go through on the way there are heartbreaking, familiar, funny, &c.

124: Shakespeare clearly means us to think that Macbeth, Antony, et al are heroes, that there’s something sublime and awe-inspiring about their character and purposes.

“You, say that reality is under no obligation to le interesting. To which I’d reply that reality may disregard the obligation that that we may not”
Borges.

I think Geo doesn’t understand the difference between reactionary intellectualized nihilism and a sympathetic interest in people as they are. Wilder’s Double Indemnity like Macbeth has a central character as killer. And no one would justify his actions because they’re interesting, without misunderstand the movie. It’s not a mash note to Leopold and Loeb. Others have done that, and defended such things as necessary to counter bourgeois banality, but not Wilder, and not Shakespeare. To understand people you have to risk sympathizing with them, even if they’re murderers or pedophiles or criminals of whatever sort. It’s a standard line that authors needs to love all their characters, even the bad ones. And sympathy is risky, but not as risky as walling yourself off from experience. As I said on another thread refusing to ever take a drink is not a guarantee of being clearheaded. It could be another symptom of the opposite.

Count me among those who dislike Borges as a illustrator rather than an artist, and as a reactionary. But both Borges and Geo are interested in ideas more than people.
And by the way, the authors of mash notes to L&L are classed as a category of postmodernists and they are in the sense of being mannerists: imposing formal clarity on an unclear world. Like Borges. The mature post-modern is baroque. With Dworkin for example, neither legal positivism nor natural law theory but law as theater and argument as constitutive of justice. And with Shakespeare: conversation not truth is constitutive of society.

Revised to escape moderation.

Substance @128: Not Shaw but soc1alism. (I have every confidence that you’re not going to shoot back: “So only soc1alists can write tragedies?”)

Aulus @129: the idea that “hero with higher ideals” translates to “better tragedy”
Not exactly: the idea is the “hero with larger soul” translates to “better tragedy.”

Matthias @131: There’s an assumption here that Shakespeare means his characters to be admired
Not admired, exactly, but taken for tragic heroes; that is, characters of sufficient depth and interest that their downfall inspires us with pity and terror. Shaw’s claim is that , nowadays at least, you can hardly feel that about the fate of people who care for nothing more than political power or status or revenge or filial ingratitude or stealing someone else’s wife.

PS – Ceri: Yes, exactly. Shaw is saying, in effect: “How can one be interested nowadays in such flabby specimens, puling and mewling over their frustrated desires for power, status, revenge, filial reverence, sexual conquest, etc.? The universe is so much bigger than that.”

geo: Okay, but I think putting in “larger soul” doesn’t help. Is Medea’s soul large, in this sense? As opposed to Macbeth’s?

And again, I think we’ve moved a very long way indeed from Bunyan at this point. Bunyan would be horrified to hear it said that his book is great because of Christian’s “large soul.” Christian could be just about anyone; that’s why he’s named Christian, not John or David.[1] He’s saved because God chooses him (not only can he not escape Despair’s dungeon on his own; he can’t even remember that he’s been given a key to escape on his own) — and there are several monsters waiting to eat him if he tries to be saved by some greatness in himself. If that’s really what Shaw is saying, I can hardly imagine a worse example.

[1] Late in Part II, his kids appear, and they are named things like John and David, and it gets very odd indeed.

Shaw’s claim is that , nowadays at least, you can hardly feel [pity and terror] about the fate of people who care for nothing more than political power or status or revenge or filial ingratitude or stealing someone else’s wife.

For a person who actually is politically engaged, is your circle of empathy really that narrow? I find that extremely unlikely.

geo: but I still think this claim of “genuine heroism” is totally misapplied to Bunyan, who, again, is not concerned with great or heroic people at all. In Part 2 of Pilgrim’s progress, we do get characters like “Great-heart [or -spirit, or something]” and “Feeble”; but both of those characters get into the Celestial City. The difference between Christian and his neighbors is not that he is concerned with higher things, but that he realizes his city is doomed to destruction, and they don’t believe it. Christian is, in fact, concerned with trivial things like which path looks easier; but God saves him from his errors.

I don’t buy that Shakespeare’s plays are wholly concerned with trivial affairs. Also, I need a better explanation of the difference between “divine language” and “ingenious contrivance.” I certainly agree that Bunyan’s simple language can pierce me to the quick; but I find that Shakespeare’s complex language does also.

At some point, this really belongs in the comments to David’s post about relativism: our ideas about what makes literature great, after all, must to some extent come after we identify some great literature. If Shaw’s really saying what you describe him as saying, it seems like I’d have to deny greatness not only to Shakespeare, but to, e.g., Euripides, Austen, and just about every comic author ever. At which point I would say, not “wow, I guess those authors really aren’t great,” but, “I think we’re talking about some quality other than greatness.”

Geo: Yes, exactly. Shaw is saying, in effect: “How can one be interested nowadays in such flabby specimens, puling and mewling over their frustrated desires for power, status, revenge, filial reverence, sexual conquest, etc.? The universe is so much bigger than that.” This fills me with horror. I’m queer and transgendered and I hear in it the echoes of everyone who’s ever set out to destroy the ability of some group of people like me to find comfort or joy in life for the sake of their vision of greatness or just the uniquely true and correct bracket of acceptable human identity.

I think that there is no glory greater than human life, day by day, lived humanely and well. I dearly love Yosemite and the Cascades, but they are not more magnificent than an afternoon of joyful company, or an evening of loving cooperation on chores. I’m fascinated by the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and by the life in deep-sea volcanic rifts, but they are not more deserving than my neighbors struggling to make ends meet and to raise the puppy they’ve adopted not to bark so much. They are different, but they’re not better, not more important. Moral worth doesn’t scale like that, despite it being such a common superstition of our age. (One of C.S. Lewis’ better observations.)

What he’s saying to his readers is: “Enough of this mindless, automatic Shakespeare-worship.

I can run with that, but only to the extent that Shaw’s writing in the context of early 20th century EngLitCrit in its adolescent disciplinary period, when it had a tendency towards character- and author-based enconium. Read some of the published stuff from lofty scholars of that period, and it feels embarrassingly jejune, like looking back at your A-level essays.

We’re a century past that now, though; so while I’ll grant Shaw might have been a breath of fresh air amid contemporary critical pot-pourri and moribund dramatisation, I’m not sure that invoking him now actually gets us anywhere– not when most people who care about this stuff are much more comfortable citing and discussing Johnson’s assessment of Shakespeare than Leslie Stephen’s.

Alex
>GBS = Bit of a dick, really.

In some ways, but also a brilliant scholar, social reform, critic and playwright. Many of his characters still live and breathe when performed on the stage today. Even in the context of his own time, his critique of Shakespeare was wrongheaded and over the top, but people who dismiss his life and work for that reason are making essentially the same kind of mistake he made in dismissing Shakespeare.

Incidentally those who dismiss Shakespeare’s historical plays as propaganda are ignoring historical evidence. Shakespeare’s source for many of his plots were the plays written as Tudor propaganda. But he took those crude bits of propaganda and turned them into real stories. But as far as we know propaganda was not his primary purpose. As most playwrights did in his time he looked for good stories to retell. There were both good commercial and good artistic reasons to choose the stories he did. And no doubt patriotism was good business on several levels. It was popular, and it helped stay on the good side of a powerful monarchy. But as many have pointed out the result was a lot more three dimensional that “England good. Tudors good. Everyone else bad, or at the minimum, not quite as good”>

To be fair, I do sometimes sympathize with part of Shaw’s and, I think, geo’s point – on a gut level more than having a well thought-out position on this . I was watching “Frost/Nixon” and Olli Stone’s “Nixon” recently and thought to myself:

Why is all that effort made to explain such a vile character, isn’t Nixon being granted too much of our attention when we should just dismiss him as a major league @sshole with issues? Even if these artistic efforts are the opposite of a hagiography, isn’t the mere fact that this character is granted so much prominence questionable and testament to our celebrity obsessed culture and our preoccupation with great men making history? Shouldn’t literature, as Updike said, tell the stories of those who are living in oblivion, give people that are never heard otherwise a voice and make us sympathize with their plight.

Obvioulsy I’m only sympathizing with a very small part of Shaw/geo’s point and even that might be an extrapolation. Updike’s protagonists for instance are anything but heroic in the classical sense, but I do find them heroic in a modern, pedestrian sense and I think changing our perception of this concept was part of Updike’s mission.

149:“Come, let us sit on the ground and speak of dead kings”

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings

Sorry, but “dead kings” didn’t feel right, and it is my favorite part of my favorite S play.
Jacobi was good, but would have loved to see McKellen play the part in 1970.

Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a king?

Wiki mentions Kantororowicz The King’s Two Bodies in its Richard II article. What Shaw was trying to get at could have been developed and defended a little better than has been done in this thread, although certainly Shakespeare was not unaware of the Heroic.

I know they weren’t necessarily planned that way, but I feel that the histories are a structured series from the corruption of one body in Richard II to the corruption of another in Richard III. Those eight(?) plays feel like one sustained story, and is by far my favorite Shakespeare.

bob: What Shaw was trying to get at could have been developed and defended a little better than has been done in this thread

Could you say a bit more — a hint, at least?

You know, I’ll take part of 151 back. just a little. Shakespeare might be in opposition yo Bunyan, who I really don’t know.

Shakespeare is indeed conservative, and closer to the Catholic and Medieval than the Protestant and Reformation/Renaissance.

I avoided this argument for 150 comments, and really don’t want to play, but as a Joyce fan, well the distance between the Heroic and the Modern is something I have pondered. But Shakespeare belongs to the former, and can be made comfortable for Moderns only by reducing his work to psychology and the drama of character.

bob: Please, pleeze come back.

EMG: Yes, I guess that’s what it comes down to. Like Shaw, I wholeheartedly disapprove of adultery. Fornication, too.

would we see the merits of the history plays if they weren’t written by the author of Hamlet?

I can’t speak to the exposure side of the counterfactual (would I/we even know of the histories), but I suspect in particular the histories wouldn’t be taught in high schools anymore. I forget if Julius Caesar is categorized as a history, so maybe this is irrelevant.

This prompts another sorta-interesting (at least to me) counterfactual: take Shakespeare out of the high school curriculum for a couple generations, and have the kids read Shaw instead… to what extent is the preeminence of Shakespeare authorship-counterfactual sustained by public school curriculum?

After all, I really don’t think we would be asking “Would we have the same appreciation for Major Barbara, if it turned out someone else wrote it.” (Throw in nearly anything not by Shakespeare for Major Barbara, and even counterfactually presume the same set of historical discoveries and trumped-up controversies that imply some similar potentially-plausibly-legitimate questions of authorship. The same point applies. I’d compare the mystique to the popular conception of Milton; the answer to “would we still appreciate Paradise Regained the same way?” is clearly yes.)

I think Shakespeare is the one author for whom “we” all have a strong conception of the person (for some inevitably problematic definition of ‘we’) — even moreso than other figures, e.g. George Washington. In the U.S., specifically in the North because I’ve learned there’s a stark difference down here in the South, perhaps only Abraham Lincoln rises in comparable stature.

(By stature, I mean: one can envision the person, and acknowledge him as an exemplary human, the way we might in other circumstances revere a famed ancestor. By envision, I mean: you have some concrete sense of what it would be like to hang out with him for a day and chat over a beverage.)

And I think it’s this shared sense of stature, the sense of commonality it brings us, which fuels and informs

Therefore, I think questions of the form “would we recognize the merit of X by Shakespeare under an authorship change” are ambiguous between two questions: we are either asking “to what extent does our personal vision of Shakespeare and/or the commonly-shared stature of Shakespeare cloud our judgment of X?” or we are asking “to what extent would we be aware of X and what’s the change we’d hear about X in a way that prompts us to bother to read it considerately, if it wasn’t by our revered ancestor Shakespeare?”

Shorter me: Shakespeare is our common great grandfather. Our only one.

And what interest we have in Shakespeare authorial-counterfactuals arises because it allows us to probe, indirectly, what it means to have a common great grandfather.

George, faux-stupid literalism doesn’t wear well on you, or anyone. You would never get hung up on anything so *small* as sexual morality, right?

Presumably, the person making the decisions at the college bookstore was a straight-up philistine, unable to distinguish between an author and his characters. (Even his villains!) I won’t tar you with that. But – correcting for, or bracketing, levels of sophistication in readership and worldview (coolness toward sexual morality? lack of enthusiasm for the civilizing mission of empire? tomayto, tomahto) – your objection is fundamentally the same as his or hers: Shakespeare is insufficiently devoted to the Great and the Good; which trumps literary aesthetics (and even tempts one to argue that the various authors’ respective standing in aesthetic quality is something other than what everyone knows it is).

CT’s Boldface Names

George Scialabba</b was at a party last night, and he tells us Shaw was there, and he was going on about how a lot of people overdo it with Shakespeare. Called Shakespeare a pimp for petty scoundrels. Bunyan, he said, is “morning air and eternal youth.” Wow! People were pretty surprised! I mean it sounds crazy, but George tells us he actually agrees. Double Wow!! Are they both crazy? Every time we ask him what it means, he keeps repeating: What is beauty anyway, if not the avoidance of the mundane? What’s going on here?

I doubt that there’s ever been a US President who was a good person, but I’d much rather watch a movie about Richard Nixon than such a hypothetical creature.

Are they both crazy?
Most likely.

I have, though, explained “what [I think Shaw] means” fifteen or twenty times now over the course of two threads. Enough, maybe?

I’d much rather watch a movie about Richard Nixon than such a hypothetical creature.

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.

that was my feeling too

I have one in moderation. I won’t repost it, since I have no idea what set it off. Or maybe it’s just me. But I want to add something that makes the same point.
The title of Geo’s book is “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” not “What are Poets Good For?”
There’s a lot of Platonism in modern criticism, even modern literary criticism. Just throwing that out as a defender of poetry over professors.

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?

175:But do you think Shakespeare actually, consciously saw them that way?

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.

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”

Erwin Panofsky, The Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator.
In Three Essays on Style

“ to treat the Goddess [Nature] like a modest Fair,/Nor Overdress nor leave her wholly bare” The best response to Hayek..

Looking back over the thread, I realize there’s one other thing that I wanted to say.

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.

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