Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Instead of working on today's blogpost, I'll simply use something I've already written. It appears in Quora, where one poster asks, "What are some famous writers who have had a negative view of lawyers, like Shakespeare did?"  Well ... "as" would work better than "like" there. But that was not the big problem. The problem was ... Shakespeare didn't. So far as we know. This is what I wrote in response to that poster: So far as I know, Shakespeare did NOT have a negative view of lawyers. He does have a character in one play say “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” But that character is a member of an unruly mob. The Bard clearly did not mean for us to sympathize with the statement. Many writers do have negative views of lawyers. It should not be too difficult for you to find real examples. I suggest you leave Shakespeare out of it. Guess I told HIM. I was about to go on and discuss an equally famous Dickens line, but that might ...

The April issue of Harper's includes a review of a book by Stephen Greenblatt and Peter Platt, Shakespeare's Montaigne. Joshua Cohen, writing the review, calls it "a crash course in Elizabethan lit, a multi-culti study of the development of English and, above all, a revisionist biography of a monumental dramatist who not only cribbed the classical education he lacked but also responded to his sources with a fierce and censorious intelligence." So the working hypothesis of the study is that Shakespeare got his classical education second-hand, largely by reading Montaigne, and that he was at the same time willing to bite the hand that fed him some good material. For example, in his essay "Of the Cannibals," Montaigne sentimentalizes the just discovered people of the Americas, seeing them as peaceful anarchists. He writes that they: hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic super...

The photo above is from the movie Shakespeare in Love (1998). I have used it just to lure you cinephiles in. I have nothing to say about that movie at all. Or movies in general -- I'm thinking of live theatre this morning for some reason. And I'll present without further comment the following, from a review by Terry Teachout in last Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. "Broadway is one of the worst places in America to see Shakespeare done right -- not because nobody there knows how to mount his plays (though I sometimes have my doubts), but because virtually all of the theatres on the Great White Way are conventional proscenium-style houses in which the actors and audience are placed on opposite sides of a rectangular arch that frames the stage. Shakespeare's plays, by contrast, were written for a far more intimate kind of space, the closest contemporary counterpart of which is a thrust stage that allows the audience to sit on three sides of the actors."

I'm working on something for  Just sheet music about the large portion of the operatic canon that has Shakespearean inspiration. Consider this a preview. One of the operas I plan to highlight is Le Marchand de Venise (1935), by French composer Reynaldo Hahn and librettist Miguel Zamacois. I've just described Hahn as a "French" composer advisedly. Though he was born in Venezuela in 1874, he arrived in Paris at the age of three, and stayed there through two world wars, dying there in 1947. Indeed, one reference book calls Hahn "one of the most fragrantly Parisian of composers." I'm not sure that isn't a misprint. Wouldn't "flagrantly" have been a more natural turn of phrase?  Nothing in the context supports the notion that it's an intentional pun. But, hey, follow the above link and decide that for yourself. The opera involves the usual compressions: the five acts of the Shakespeare original are turned into three, and some...

The second of Barzun's four revolutions was that of and on behalf of the monarchs. Or, more strictly, it was of and on behalf of kings and queens, and it is the way in which they made themselves into monarchs properly speaking. Monarchs in the strict sense are monocrats, the only rulers of their realms. Anyone else who exercises authority in a realm is doing so as the agent of the monocrat, or is in rebellion. That was not true of kings in medieval times. Indeed, King Louis XIV, in a memoir, complains that it still wasn't true enough in his own day. He said that every provincial gentleman feels free to "act the tyrant toward his peasants," and that rather than a single ruler, the people "have a thousand." If that same King also said, "I am the state," (Barzun doubts it, but the legend is tenacious) he meant it in a rather different sense from the way in which it is usually quoted. It was an aspiration . One could paraphrase it this way: ...