"THE PARIAH" REPLIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 204, 21 May 1943, Page 3

"THE PARIAH" REPLIES

Sir,-Having been pursued by Bears, Jutchmen, Seadogs and young females of the species, I am going to exercise my privilege to have a final snap at them

before retiring to my kennel. Nothing they have said has convinced me that I had anything to regret in walking out of Shakespeare or to be ashamed of in making my action public. They tell me, quite irrelevantly, that every time I open my mouth I speak Shakespeare. I have never denied it: for that matter I expect I also sometimes speak Chaucer and the Bible. "The Bear" declares that Shakespeare had "a perfectly good reason" for writing his women’s parts to be played by men, because women were not welcomed on the stage in Elizabethan England. Exactly: doesn’t that perfectly support my own point that his plays were "written to be produced for his day and age" and, to this extent anyway, seem unnatural when produced in ours? | But as I said in my original "confes- | sion," I’ve done with defensive fighting. You see, when I walked out of Twelfth Night it was mostly an instinctive reaction of protest against the traditional belief in which I had been reared that Shakespeare occupies a place pretty close to God, but I’ve since found authority to support me in what I did far better than anything the pack at my heels has produced. For the comfort of other lonely souls who may wish they had followed me, and for the mortification of the Shakespearean-addicts, I recommend Tolstoy’s essay (written after he had read and re-read all Shakespeare’s plays in several languages over a period of 50 years to make certain he hadn’t missed anything), in which he arrives at the "firm indubitable conviction" that Shakespeare "cannot be recognised either as a great genius or even as an average author," and that his fame depends on a form of "hypnotic suggestion," a tradition of blind adoration built up over many years. I wouldn’t go nearly as far as Tolstoy myself (I still think Shakespeare's a great genius of a kind) — but, oh boy, to one who has never believed in the divine right of kings, his essay makes fine reading! In the same healthy rebellious spirit I also recommend (if you can get it), an essay by E-nest H. Crosby on "Shakespeare and the Working Classes," which sets out to show that Shakespeare was an aristocratic toady, who fawned on all of high degree but seldom expressed anything except scorn and contumely for those of lowly birth, and who was. quite untouched by the rising spirit of revolt against authority that only a few years later was to produce Hampden and the Civil War. See also Bernard Shaw on Shakespeare. In such good company I feel that I need no longer regard mvself |

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THE PARIAH

(Wellington)_

[We did not expect that "The Pariah," in closing this controversy, would introduce two new issues, (1) Shakespeare’s position in general, (2) his attitude to the so-called lower classes. No good purpose would be served by a discussion of (1), but brief letters will be accepted on the subject of (2)--Ed.]