Quite unsatisfying. Ring around the Rosy is as meritorious as Chaucer?
The morality of Shakespeare’s later tragedies is not religious in the ordinary sense, and certainly is not Christian. Only two of them, Hamlet and Othello, are supposedly occurring inside the Christian era, and even in those, apart from the antics of the ghost in Hamlet, there is no indication of a “next world” where everything is to be put right.
Orwell, unfortunately, cannot respond to contemporary studies of Hamlet which place the apparition of the gloomy Dane's father in context: this spirit fits all the motifs of a ghost from purgatory. Ghosts meant much more to the people of Shakespeare's time than to moderns. Moreover, I think Orwell is far too dismissive of Christian references throughout the play; it is redolent of Christian belief about the afterlife: Hamlet refuses suicide because the Almighty has fixed his canon against self-slaughter; Hamlet does not kill Claudius at prayer, for fear he will send him to heaven; Ophelia is presumed to be damned because of her suicide, and only her connections have secured her a Christian burial. And in the graveyard scene, Hamlet's mockery of death evokes St. Paul--or at least the imagery of Ash Wednesday: Thou art dust, and unto dust thou shall return.
We do not know a great deal about Shakespeare’s religious beliefs,
Oral history around Stratford did hold that he "died a papist."
Lear is a play in which this tendency is particularly well marked. It contains a great deal of veiled social criticism — a point Tolstoy misses — but it is all uttered either by the Fool, by Edgar when he is pretending to be mad, or by Lear during his bouts of madness.
Germaine Greer holds that this is consistent only with a Christian Shakespeare; truth comes "out of the mouths of babes" and madmen. For a humanist, these two types of people are less human.
At every level it is the same issue — this world against the next: and certainly the music of words is something that belongs to this world.
Orwell projects a sort of dualism upon Tolstoi, which may be proper, but he then accuses all Christianity of dualism. I'm not sure this can hold up. The Kingdom of Heaven is supposed to be within us, after all, and death is not a gateway, but a consequence of sin; at the Second Coming, death itself will die.
Moreover, I doubt that words themselves are worldly in the material sense; they can translate themselves across time and space in a way that is practically spiritual. As Auden wrote in his encomium to Yeats, "Time... worships language and forgives everyone by whom it lives." And our world is hardly superior to Time. Finally, beautiful words are especially singular, if it is true that Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are convertible.
Of course, Lear is not a sermon in favour of altruism. It merely points out the results of practising self-denial for selfish reasons.
This particularly provoked me into thought. Since self-denial and self-sacrifice, rightly understood, are but negative descriptions of love, we find Lear's tragic flaw: a failure to love.
This is a very interesting essay. Thanks for posting it.
He also said "poetry makes nothing happen". Making something happen would be an interesting standard by which to judge fiction, plays, and poetry.