On Tuesday, 7 December 2021 at 09:35:34 UTC, gggg gggg wrote:
(Recent Youtube upload)
I looked. I think the title should be "How anyone can find whatever they want to find in Shakespeare - even outright racists".
"...the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this
overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance o'erweigh a whole theatre of others."
Shakespeare is not a preacher - he holds up the mirror and you discover - perhaps for the first time - what you actually think. The open mind sees what it thinks - but then also glimpses, thanks to the genius of Shakespeare, what is beyond that, and
starts to explore other possibilities as first one viewpoint and then another is given its proper voice.
The rabid racist and antisemite looks at the mirror of Othello or The Merchant of Venice and sees what he himself thinks and is satisfied that is what Shakespeare thinks too. And dismisses all the niggling doubts as irrelevant Even Nazi Germany put on
productions of Shakespeare.
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