Monthly Archive for March, 2011

From Morgan Meis at The Smart Set…

We know him not at all, and yet completely. That has always been the paradox of William Shakespeare. The characters he created in his plays have worked their way into the collective DNA of the English-speaking world, of Western culture broadly considered, and of world culture through Western culture. The language of Shakespeare — that unique and startling way he had of phrasing things–has become the common currency of thinking, acting, being. But we don’t know much about his life. We know the basic details: born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, married Anne Hathaway in 1582, died in 1616. Beyond that, he is a mystery. We don’t have any information that explains how he could have had such an immense and lasting influence, an influence that only seems to grow, century after century. When you reflect on it for a moment, it doesn’t seem possible that one person could have created Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, the Sonnets, etc. (to even attempt to make a list of Shakespeare’s greatness is absurd). Is there any other literary figure, any non-religious figure of nay kind so utterly essential to the world as we know it? Maybe Shakespeare is the only one.

This explains, I think, the suspicions regarding Shakespeare’s true identity that have percolated ever since the man died. We’ve been told that Shakespeare was actually Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon. We’ve been told that he was Edward de Vere, or some other English nobleman in disguise. The details of these various theories don’t matter so much. The point is the disbelief, the sense that Shakespeare can’t just be Shakespeare. More…

Tom Jacobs at 3quarksdaily.com…

…our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption.  The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history.  The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)

DIALECTICAL THINGS

The fourth floor of the New-York Historical Society houses the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, a collection encompassing over 40,000 objects spanning from prehistorical to 21^st century New York.  By adopting an “open storage” policy, the NYHS has opened what would otherwise be a warehouse to the public, so that the miles of shelved artifacts that would normally be languishing unseen in a storage area on the fourth-floor can now be observed (albeit, without placards or captions). Unless one consults the computer databases, one is left pretty much on one’s own to make sense of what one is seeing.  This can be a productive scene of fascination, recognition, and misrecognition. More…