The past is another country

One not much like ours and in no way better.

I’ve been reading Shakespeare, again.

The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth in the last couple of weeks with Titus and The Tempest in between.

And now I’m starting the histories with King John, a batch of plays I have not read, except for Richard III, since my college days.

The older I get the more the world of Shakespeare seems not only alien but worse.

Theocracy?

Sure.

Obsessed with female virginity?

They made a fetish of it. (So to speak.)

Anti-Semitism?

Oh, my, yes.

Racism?

Unquestionably and even shockingly.

But the worst of it all is the bottomless, empty-headed, oblivious, and totally secure selfishness of the rich and the mighty who owned and ruled not only Shakespeare’s own world but the worlds in his past that he chose to depict.

Shakespeare was, indeed, a wonderful dramatist with a beautiful mastery of language that he put into the mouths of so many of his characters.

But who, today, would dare to claim as a leading critic once did that both playwright and plays display an “unerring moral sensibility”?

We are not used to seeing dramatic presentations of such rulers without even a hint that the author does or anyone might deplore their attitudes towards their own power.