Mark Weiss wrote:

> Someone let me know if this comes through.
>
> Mark

No problem. This:

> At 05:51 AM 4/16/2005, you wrote:
>
>> What version of Shakes is this NEA going to disseminate? Mrs
>> Grundy's? I only ask because one's heard a lot about school board
>> censorship etc in the States. I'm a little sceptical about Shakes
>> "generating" anything - can't see much evidence of that in
>> contemporary Britain, perhaps I'm missing something. I dare say a few
>> fundamentalist freaks have read Shakespeare - *their* way. -
>> Interesting that Creeley, at least during his youth, couldn't get
>> started (I'm broken-hearted) with Shakes at all, at least according
>> to his early correspondence with Olson. - Shakespeare a Lutheran? I
>> thought Purgatory was a no-no under the protestant dispensation, and
>> everyone is always going on about the Shakespeares' Catholic
>> connections.
>> Robin, no doubt, will clear this up.
>
I've heard lots over the years about school boards coming down on
certain Shakespeare plays because of anti-this or anti-that. Merchant
of Venice was always supposed to be on the shitlist, joined by
Huckleberry Finn, which was not written by Shakespeare. Bad language,
ugly attitudes, etc. Might as well add Taming of the Shrew to the list
unless the play has music and is sung by Patricia Morrison and Alfred
Drake. I recall one discussion in high school of Merchant that went
head-on at the antisemitism issue. It helped that the teacher was
Jewish as were most of the kids in class. The teacher took the "Hath
not a Jew..." speech and said in her estimation the audience at the
Globe was rolling on the floor laughing at that point. Why? Because
"everyone knew" in late 16th century London knew that Jews DIDN'T have
the same body parts and emotions as "normal" people. The fact there
were no above-ground Jews in England from 1290(?) until the Restoration
made it easier to believe. Nobody was offended by the play. Would I
have experienced it differently if I'd read it at Fordham Prep--a Jesuit
high school--in those years? Perhaps.

What was Shakespeare religiously? Probably raised as what today we'd
call High Church, Anglo-Catholic. What did he believe? Probably
whatever was dramatically expedient. No idea what stock the Church of
England placed in the Purgatory idea that early in its history (I've
tried to read Richard Hooker but makes me feel the pain of the Episcopal
seminarians who have to), but it seemed to work for Shakespeare when it
came to depicting the Ghost of Hamlet's father. At one time I had an
elaborate MA-program theory that Hamlet's presence in Wittenberg,
because that was the early center of Lutheranism, meant that Hamlet was
being thrown backwards into a world of "old belief" where ghosts walk
and rise out of a Catholic Purgatory. A play about faith as well as
revenge. Now I have no idea what it's supposed to mean.

Ken

-----------------------------
Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com

"A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank balance was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove...but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child."