Re: Shakespeare

Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Thu, 05 Nov 1998 13:28:26 -0500 

Camille Scaysbrook wrote:
 
> Do you think the people who write Melrose Place consider themselves artists
> and poets? Because this is the esteem in which the sort of things
> Shakespeare wrote were held in. 

While this may be a handy analogy, it's misleading to the point of being
basically entirely wrong.  THere is a degree of similarity between
Melrose Place and Elizabethan theater because both are/were consumed by
the public as entertainment.  But there is a significant gap between the
aesthetic integrity of the two.  It would be silly, wouldn't it, to
suppose that, just because Elizabethan theatergoers spoke "Elizabethan
English," they understood every line and joke in Shakespeare as
television audiences understand every line and joke in television
shows?  Even lacking a proper education, Shakespeare's poetic capacity
exceeded the intelligence of most of his audience members.  Perhaps a
better analogy would be a difficult art film that happens also to be a
box office success.  Or suppose David Foster Wallace writes a sequal to
the Scream movies that has both excitement/gore and heavy
symoblism/literary merit.  THe event may be popular as public
entertainment, but its aesthetic merit operates independently and
survives independently of the popular audience.  And the author of such
a piece would be conscious both of a popular value and a poetic or
artistic value.

But I have wandered a bit.  "This is the esteem in which the sort of
things Shakespeare wrote were held in"... You may be suggesting that
because certain sections of the audience thought of Shakespeare as
entertainment devoid of artistic value, Shakespeare did, too.  This
suggestion would need support.    

> He didn't even bother to hold on to the
> scripts, let alone consider publishing them. 

That's speculation.  Besides which, it's a point equally suited to the
other side of the argument.  Supposing Shakespeare stood to profit from
the sale of his plays (they were popular enough to be pirated, anyway),
why wouldn't he publish them?  

Perhaps he didn't retain copies because the plays were the property of
company.  And Hemmings and Condel apparantly *did* retain copies of the
plays, probably on behalf of the company.  

> To Shakespeare his poetry, not
> his drama, was his highbrow stuff - ironic considering that your average
> Joe wouldn't be able to tell you what the Phoenix and the Turtle is about
> (let alone that the turtle's a bird, not a turtle).

We really don't know what the poetry "meant" to Shakespeare.  The
Sonnets may well have been commissioned by a wealthy mother of an errant
young man, as _Midsummer_ might have been commissioned for a noble
wedding.  In any case, is there any basis on which we can distinguish
the "poetry" of the poems from the poetry of the plays?  Can a formal
difference (ie, between a sonnet, say, and a soliloquy) account for
difference between art and pure entertainment, considering that the
lines of both sonnet and soliloquy are equally "poetic"?

Sonnet 129 features such poetic devices as enjambment, caesura,
polyptoton, asyndeton and chiasmus--so does "to be or not to be."  How
is the difference to be qualitatively evaluated with any consistency?
   
Finally, would Ben Jonson hang around with a person who didn't consider
himself an artist?
 
-- 
Matt Kozusko       mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu