I can’t make any sense of this:
>In a time deluged by ideology — when everyone is urged to take a side and join the political battle — Shakespeare offers a different message: that the most important and dramatic choices are made in the human soul. Some steps, once taken, cannot be retraced. Some appetites, once freed, become a prison.
“Choices made in the human soul” may involve taking sides in a political battle–and they may not be retraced: you can’t unkill all those people. After all.
Sort of fish in a barrel, no?
If a political piece reads “[literary/religious-figure-dead-for-hundreds-of-years] offers a different message,” there’s not much sense wasting time with a logical analysis.
Too often is it fish in a barrel–that’s why it’s so hard to comment about Jonah Goldberg and the rest of the NRO set. It’s just too easy to criticize them. But as long as the people writing this drek have positions of intellectual authority, comment is warranted.
Quote: “Yet Shakespeare’s influence is not primarily ideological or even religious; his views on these topics are cloaked and obscure.”
Well, thankfully we have Gerson to correctly interpret the famous bard for us. His powers of interpretation are obviously so good that he doesn’t even bother to hint at a source for the generalized view you quote above. Was it Hamlet or Macbeth or perhaps a Midsummer’s Night Dream? I have no clue. So I’m not even sure that Shakespeare meant what Gerson is attributing to him. But, even if Shakespeare did mean the vague generalization that Gerson throws at us, I still don’t see how that connects to ideology (ether for or against).
If someone had shown me this short little essay without telling me it had come out of the Washington Post, I would have sworn it was a product of a Postmodernism Generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo
You’re exactly right. Still, I thought it was slightly refreshing to read a Gerson column where I didn’t feel the need to debunk every single paragraph.
Matt K.–
It’s a nebulous reference to the role of Fate in MacBeth. Gerson handles Shakespeare with all the grace of a train wreck. In his hands, Shakespeare becomes a trite recapitulation of that tired personal responsibility line these neo-con parrot-teachers are constantly reiterating. It’s also mildly ironic that Gerson wastes several hundered words totally misconstruing the work of man who rarely, if ever, wasted words. You’ll find a better grasp of Shakespeare here: http://www.hobartshakespeareans.org/ and here: http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/hobart/index.html …only these people are sixth-graders, not WaPo columnists.