Posts from — March 2010

In Emerson’s Shakspeare; or, the Poet, the “sage of Concord” argues that great poets, contrary to the received view, do not deal in originality. Rather, they are the most free borrowers of ideas from others. This, perhaps, is not so controversial, but it is odd that Emerson goes on to write something like an Ode to the People out of this simple idea:

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection [...]

Undoubtedly, the machinery of culture is a complex thing, and much of Shakespeare might not have been written without Tyndale’s Bible, which obviously could not have been written without the Bible itself, and may have been radically different if not for the spirit of reformation in the Europe of the day. It is also undoubtedly true that Shakespeare would not have been quite the same Shakespeare had he been born thirty years earlier or later. But to reduce his role, as Emerson seems to do, to that of the man who gave the final tug on the final stone of the Great Pyramid, is greatly to misconceive the nature of genius. The bard stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton did, but those giants were not so different for Shakespeare than they were for Marlowe or for Jonson, yet those two, as brilliant as they were, paled in comparison. All writers since Shakespeare have him to add to the list of cultural progenitors, but there has not yet been anyone who can seriously challenge his position at the top of the canon. [Read more →]