marco
2017-05-16 01:06:43 UTC
After the palaver of wall-to-wall Shakespeare during the past five years –
the London Olympic Games opening ceremony in 2012, 2014’s celebration of
the playwright’s 450th birthday, the 2016 overdose of Shakespeariana
to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death – Ewan Fernie worries
that “there is a real and frankly reasonable danger of everybody without a
vested interest in the playwright simply getting sick of him”. There’s
selfless virtue in those pointed words, “vested interest”, since Fernie would
be sawing off the branch on which he is (and I am) sitting. While the
cultural ubiquity of Shakespeare silently reinforces the liberal
humanist assumption that these plays have survived because of their inherent
or transcendent value, Fernie bravely, like the boy wondering out loud about
the emperor’s new clothes, dares to ask, “What good is Shakespeare?”
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-shakespeare-for-freedom-ewan-fernie-cambridge-university-press
marc
the London Olympic Games opening ceremony in 2012, 2014’s celebration of
the playwright’s 450th birthday, the 2016 overdose of Shakespeariana
to commemorate the 400th anniversary of his death – Ewan Fernie worries
that “there is a real and frankly reasonable danger of everybody without a
vested interest in the playwright simply getting sick of him”. There’s
selfless virtue in those pointed words, “vested interest”, since Fernie would
be sawing off the branch on which he is (and I am) sitting. While the
cultural ubiquity of Shakespeare silently reinforces the liberal
humanist assumption that these plays have survived because of their inherent
or transcendent value, Fernie bravely, like the boy wondering out loud about
the emperor’s new clothes, dares to ask, “What good is Shakespeare?”
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-shakespeare-for-freedom-ewan-fernie-cambridge-university-press
marc