Shakespeare As a Cultural Construct

Shakespeare As a Cultural Construct

SHAKESPEARE AS A CULTURAL CONSTRUCT

“He was not of an age, but for all time!” (Ben Jonson, “To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” 1623)

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,

The labor of an age in pilèd stones,

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid

Under a star-ypointing pyramid?

Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,

What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?

Thou in our wonder and astonishment

Hast built thyself a live-long monument.

For whilst to th’ shame of slow-endeavouring art,

Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart

Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book

Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,

Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,

Dost make us marble with too much conceiving;

And so sepúlchred in such pomp dost lie,

That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. (John Milton, “On Shakespeare,” 1630)

“He [Shakespeare] was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul [...] He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there” (John Dryden, Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 1668)

“Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life” (Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare preface, 1765).

“Our Myriad-Minded Shakespeare” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817).

“Shakespeare…is of no age—nor of any religion, or party or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable depths of his own oceanic soul” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, 1835).

“Shakespeare led a life of allegory; his works are the comments on it” (John Keats, “Letter to George and Georgina Keats,” February-May 1819)

“When Rutlandbaconsouthhamptonshakespeare or another poet of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote Hamlet he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born for nature, as Mr. Magee understands her, abhors perfection” (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922).

“Whatever Shakespeare had to say is now irrelevant and thoroughly unimportant, except as a basis of departure […] People simply do not read Shakespeare anymore, nor the Bible either. They read about Shakespeare. The critical literature built up about his name and works is vastly more fruitful and stimulating than Shakespeare himself, about whom nobody seems to know very much, his identity being a mystery” (Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, 1939).

If you can't be a ham and do Hamlet

They will not give a damn or a damlet

Just recite an occasional sonnet

And your lap'll have honey upon it.

When your baby is pleading for pleasure

Let her sample your Measure for Measure

Brush up your Shakespeare

And they'll all kow-tow - Forsooth

And they'll all kow-tow - I' faith

And they'll all kow-tow. (Cole Porter, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare,” 1948)

“The ships at first sailed down the Nile carrying guns not bread, and the railways were originally set up to teach us how to say ‘Yes’ in their language. They imported to us the germ of the greatest European violence, as seen on the Somme and at Verdun, the like of which the world has never previously known, the germ of a deadly disease that struck them more than a thousand years ago. Yes, my dear sirs, I came as an invader into your very homes: a drop of the poison which you have injected into the veins of history. ‘I am no Othello. Othello was a lie” (Tayeb Salih, Seasons of Migration to the North, 1969).

“‘Mama,’ Sammy pulled on her arm, ‘Shakespeare’s black?’

‘Not yet,’ she said softly, remembering she had beaten him for writing rhymes on her bathroom walls.” (Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 1980)