Shakespeare's Staying Power

Un comentario en "That Shakespeare Thing"—donde Bill Benzon protesta contra la mitificación de la grandeza de Shakespeare:

Dear Bill: I could agree less with what you say, but not much less. I must admit I’m a bit more on the Bloomian side here. The gist of the issue is that you’re ignoring historical distance. Coppola is great, sure, but he towers (if indeed tower he does) over other practitioners of his art much less (much- much- less) than Shakespeare did on anything early modern. He made lots of things up, as Bloom says, including in part our sensibility. And there is no way we can cut him out and let him drift away because he’s right here on our raft. There is a sense in which he wasn’t as great as people seem to think, ok, and that’s again an issue of historical distance. He’s a classic now, he wasn’t a classic then, but he can’t make himself into a classic without lots of people helping; that’s beyond his means. But now it’s happened and he’s there, and he’s there to stay. No way you’re going to discover his near equivalent, if only because it’s already a fact that people haven’t been pouring such a flood of commentary and attention and performance on anyone else, and that’s lots of kilowatts of social energy. Attention now doesn’t hold, it’s Lady Gaga this year and Adele last year, or was it the other way round, but there’s nothing in sight with even a hundredth of Shakespeare’s staying power.

Review of Frank Harris, El hombre Shakespeare

 

—oOo—