Some Sound And Some Fury: A soliloquy on missed Shakespearean references in an impoverished culture

American Conservative ^ | February 17, 2021 | E.J. Hutchinson

[C19fan]

No one has been quite as titularly ubiquitous in the Anglophone world as the Sweet Swan of Avon. There’s Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian fantasy Brave New World (title taken from The Tempest); there’s Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 black comedy To Be or Not to Be (title taken from Hamlet); from 1991, there’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Hamlet again); there’s the 1998 film What Dreams May Come (Hamlet yet again). And, setting titles aside, while we’re on the subject of Hamlet’s shadow one might mention the prominent role played by Ophelia in Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” as she perhaps does again a decade later in The Band’s eponymous song. (It’s debatable.)

But, like the old saw about the sound of the tree falling in the forest, what happens if you make a reference and no one gets it? The centuries-long system of cultural interchange, the erudite economy of the res publica litterarum in which the Bard is the common coin of barter, becomes dead, defunct, kaput. Don a suit of sables; the rest is silence.

[C19fan]

One thinks of Orwell and his quote about he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. The Culturak Arsonists are destroying our cultural memory to replace it with their twisted vision. They know the 99.999999% of their woke culture pales in comparison to creations that have passed the test of time. So the past must be destroyed so we can have Year 0.

[Blurb2350]

The very same is true of the Bible. It used to be that even an uneducated person would know many quotes and phrases from scripture. Nowadays we continue to use many of those same bits and pieces from the Bible without knowing their origin. Alas, persistent Christianity has become the fly in the ointment.

[seowulf]

I’ve been seeing far too many Orwell quotes lately showing displeasure of fascist censorship. Orwell must be banned!

—Woke Joke

[shadowlands1960]

The English translation of Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time’
was titled ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ from Shakespeare’s XXX Sonnet. The reference is apt... culture is in a sense a conscious remembrance.. if you break the chain of memory you lose the culture.

[ml/nj]

Sort of like reading Moby Dick and being ignorant about the Bible.

(Except, not to worry, no one should read Moby Dick anymore as it was written by a dead white guy. African literature is so much better.)

ML/NJ

[livius]

Good article. One point, however, is that this isn’t just about higher education. We began Shakespeare and other great authors in junior high school and even before that, we leaned little quotes or phrases that were considered useful in conversation or presented skits from a play.

I grew up on the Upper West Side of NY and went to an elementary school where the kids spoke an amazing number of languages...Spanish, French, Russian, Hungarian, among them. One of the things they were concerned about was teaching the non-English speakers traditional American sayings or expressions. The principal would go on the PA system and ask who could explain a particularly saying, such as ‘March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.’ Nothing particularly profound; the purpose was just to give non-native speakers a store of phrases shared by most English speakers around them, and thus to integrate them into the cultural language, so to speak.

Their cupboard is bare now, I’m afraid. The easy currency of cultural communication even in its most innocuous form has been stolen from our population.

[amihow]

thus to integrate them into the cultural language, so to speak.
........
Very important point you make.
Almost without exception, every foreign doctor, health care worker, any worker or professional may speak the language, but they do not speak the culture and it is dangerous.

[BEJ]

We will be like Klingons, technologically sophisticated and culturally backwards. It is happening with the young who imitate gangsta rappers where it is a weakness to show any decent or soft emotions. It’s all about brutality and power. Some scholars have the argument that liberal education has failed... failed to cultivate the imagination needed to appreciate liberal education. I don’t think the imagination is lacking, but rather is misdirected. Education in the classics had continued even in brutal cultures as the Romans. But the Romans and Greeks didn’t always see the finer sentiments as weakness as we do today, men were allowed to cry, were allowed to express themselves, and the mind was allowed to flourish with an appreciation of the greatness of the past. They had gods who expressed emotions and were models of behavior.

But today in our secular world there are no gods. Only man is GOD. Everything falls back on man, his ego, his will, his desires. There is nothing that shapes him but himself and the immediate culture. If you remove history, you have removed the gods or God, and you have removed any standards for civilization.