(no subject)

[proximoception]

My take on Julius Caesar, last time I read it, was that Shakespeare's not truly coming out against the assassination of tyrants in principle, but instead (since he has to come out against it for SOME reason or not tell the story at all, what with Elizabeth) does so on the grounds that the two kinds of good person in the world, the ones willing to assassinate justly, can't create a steady enough alliance to prevent the tyrant's being even more bloodily replaced by another. The one kind of bad person in the world will have more focus and fewer principles, so will make short work of the good ones and refill the leviathan vacuum. Augustine and Antony have a very tight alliance against Cassius and Brutus. That they then go on to cheerfully try to destroy one another, a fact very well known though not explicitly foreshadowed in the play (Shakespeare being careful again), is part of the point: their eyes are on the prize alone so one of them will get it, then another, then another. The Cassiuses and Brutuses need to figure their shit out before they act. Shakespeare is explaining what their shit is. Shakespeare would then - but only then - like them to act.

They're the McGill brothers, they're the Clinton and Sanders wings of the Democratic Party, and while they quarrel this will be a world of Hamlins and Salamancas, Murdochs and Putins.

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Nice. And all too relevant.

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

Like this one a whole lot. Just started Better Call Saul two days ago, and I'm right with you in putting Gilligan up there with the Coens.

Also going through Hamlet for the first time since high school, and am finding the reading even more difficult, if that's possible, than I remember it was on the first go-round.

Paglia talks somewhere about its 'hostile virtuosity' (and maybe she had somewhere in mind one of those couplets from Jonson's 'What He Hath Left Us'). It wants you to resist it, strongly (I guess all good writing does, to varying degrees).

I wonder if Shakespeare felt something like remorse after writing this (if he ever finished writing this), or King Lear, for example. Didn't Pessoa say somewhere he'd live the rest of his life in shame if King Lear ever came from his own brain onto the paper? (And was there any other play of Shakespeare he wanted to write more?) Or maybe, as Hamlet says about that death sentence he wrote for R and G, the craft 'did me yeoman's service,' it helped him get back to the surface, from that miner's work back to the surface, clean as a lamb.

Taking notes, but they started to overrun the pages (I'm using an Arden from the 80s) so had to move them to my journal.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

That will make a fascinating read if you decide to transcribe it here.