Shakespeare Resources

This site for Shakespeare essays (that is, essays on Shakespeare, not essays by Shakespeare) is an example of the good and the bad side of the Internet. On the one hand, it is good because many of these essays are genuinely helpful and come from a variety of backgrounds and serve a variety of purposes. On the other hand, many of the links are dead.

One could go to a traditional library and find a fifty year old essay stowed away somewhere in a bound collection of journals or on microfiche. Today, the 'net is hit and miss. Something that might last for five years suddenly disappears one day and you can't find it anymore.

The 'net brings us some good stuff, but it is also curiously impermanent in some ways. It is transitory like the computer technology itself that has to be updated every five years (or less) at enormous expense, whereas the books waiting in the library can be cracked open even if they haven't been touched in decades. Can one ever expect a server, a hard drive, or a cd-rom of today to be accessible in fifty years? They will all be in a landfill or an attic or a museum somewhere.

Just some thoughts.

Russian Lear

Even though we are pretty much finished with our study of Shakespeare, I thought it would be worthwhile to point out one version some of you might want to watch.

This Russian version does some pretty amazing things visually with the story, such as in this scene; here, the storm scene is re-envisioned as a collection of the powerless among whom Lear falls in. The film is full of these interesting variations on what we normally assume Lear should look like.

The Cordelia in this version is one of the best I've seen. It seems that Cordelia is a hard part to play without going overboard. Portraying love and mercy is hard to do in film ,a medium that is better at displaying evil and horror since those are visually more appealing than goodness.

The stark black and white colors also serve the story well.

Finally, this version is a testimony to how much power Shakespeare has on even non-English speakers. The number of film, operas, and plays based on Shakespeare in other languages suggests that his power is not just in his amazing use of language.

New Semester

Well, we aren't exactly measuring our time in terms of semesters, but it's a roughly accurate way of keeping to some kind of schedule.

We begin this new year with Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Shakespeare is simply unavoidable, but in today's academy, the Bard is usually taught through the lens of some fashionable critical theory, such as Marxism or feminism. The joy and the darkness one finds in the plays are explained away as one "interrogates" the "text" instead of discovering the pleasure of the human in it.

A well known web site called I-Monk has a nice essay on this dimension of Shakespeare titled "Why I Love the Bard" . This is a fairly bland title, but the content is anything but--the author tells us how Shakespeare saved him from a white trash existence and expanded his Christian vision of human beings in all their strange, wonderful, fallen diversity. Hopefully, we too can expand on this humanizing aspect of Shakespeare's plays, widening our own vision of humanity and our relationship to God as we go.

Scholasticism

Recently we have spent some time getting familiar with the basic outlines of Thomist philosophy. Thomas Aquinas is so important in the development of Christian culture that one must necessarily deal with his brilliant output at some level. The term usually given to his kind of work is "Scholasticism," and Aquinas was certainly not the only Medieval to generate such material.

Also important to note is that Scholasticism did not really die with the Middle Ages, though in popular thought the two are nearly always put together--i.e., Scholasticism is a superrationalistic form of unnecessary disputation about things like how many angels can dance on the head of pin, a form of discourse that those benighted Medieval Catholics got lost in and from which Protestants rescued the Church.

In fact, Protestants developed their own forms of Scholasticism, and this article is useful for getting a feel for the development of that tradition, one that most Protestants are entirely ignorant of.

One Last Post On Dante

We are wrapping up our discussion of The Inferno, but one last post on Dante might be of interest.

I'll give you just the title to whet your appetite:

"Zombies Meet Dante at the Mall."

Many translations of Dante's Divine Comedy are available, but the one we are using is by Anthony Esolen. In this interview, Esolen discusses the work, but he also talks about contemporary cultural issues, especially the problems with defining masculinity today. Esolen is a professor of English, and he's also a conservative Catholic who has written widely on contemporary issues.

A good review of Esolan's translation can be found here.

Dante and Dostoevsky on Hell

Dante, of course, didn't literally believe that hell was structured the way he depicts it in The Inferno. Nor was his depiction of punishment for sins like lust, usury, and murder in any official way taught by the Medieval Church. Dante was getting at something deeper by using literary tools, and an interesting bit of help on what Dante was up to comes from the Russian novelist Dostoevsky.

Here is a passage from "The Brothers Karamazov" . Though there are some variations between Dostoevsky's Russian Orthodox Background and Dante's Medieval Catholic background, both literary artists put their finger on a truth all Christians can accept: hell is in a sense self-chosen. God does not send one to hell, but one sends him- or herself to hell.