At 10:08 PM +0000 10/12/02, paul murphy wrote:
>I meant the Victorian obsession with history as the biographies of
>Great Men. Those Greek and Roman biographers were focusing on
>supposedly significant personages, but not in the deliberately
>ideologocial sense that stirred the Victorians.
The ideology may be different, but you can't tell me the Romans
weren't ideological. What's the Aeneid but a legitimisation of the
paternity of Empire?
The best essay I've read on Shakespeare is Harold Pinter's _The
Peopled Wound_. And another short one by Peter Brook talks about
Shakespeare's prodigious memory, his belief that Shakespeare's mind
was peculiarly available to him when he wrote (he also believed that
most of the plays were written very fast, which seems correct). One
reason for disbelieving that they were written by WS is that no one
could have written that much, which strikes me as rather
unimaginative. The question whether the plays were written by a
canny lucerne farmer or not seems to me irrelevant: somebody wrote
them, and it was most likely WS; and in the end the plays themselves
are more interesting than anything else.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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