>>> <lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org> 12/11/07 7:57 PM >>>
From: Robert Wrubel <bobwrubel at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Shakespeare
Tahir commented that Shakespeare's language is often too poetic, too elevated. This might apply to the English history plays, but not to Hamlet or even less to King Lear. What Tahir calls "the dialectic of high and low" speech is more central to Shakespeare than any other writer I can think of. And that may be the core of why Carrol finds S so fascinating ("weird") -- the continual intermingling and testing of the lofty with the base ( e.g. "th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame. ." ) Marianne Moore called it making "imaginary gardens with real toads".
I can see that I'm not going to get very far with any anti-Shakespeare sentiments in this crowd! I am familiar with the above arguments, and I did think someone would raise them. I don't disagree completely of course. But I was referring to Bakhtin's notion, which has influenced me enormously, that the poeticising tendency is always on the conservative, official side of language, unless it is being explicitly debunked by common speech. That means that poetic speech, if it appears to be close to an authorial point of view (i.e. not being debunked in any way), serves a conservative function. And in Sakespeare the poeticising tendency IS dominant. Of course Bakhtin was a populist, for whom Rabelais was an ultimate hero, and I don't share his views on everything - I don't share his admiration for Dostoevsky for example - but his view has been tremendously important for me. I think that it is fundamentally right. But even Bakhtin would have said (and probably did say somewhere) that the 'novelising' tendency is also present in Shakespeare. Tahir
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