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13 - Strange Shakespeare: Symons and others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2010

Peter Holbrook
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Summary

My aesthetic instincts became perverted. I relished nothing that was not vicious, morbid, fantastic, abnormal. When I was in the company of men and women, of thieves and of prostitutes, I made no excuses – no excuses were ever needed.

The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art in the 1890s, ed. K. Beckson (University Park, 1977), 72.

In Sex, Literature, and Censorship, Jonathan Dollimore cites an article from 1908 proclaiming the ‘sanity of [Shakespeare's] genius’. Dollimore thinks this judgement wrong. Instead, he argues, Shakespeare expresses – under cover of conventional plots, speeches and so on – highly unconventional perspectives on basic moral, social and other questions: he is a purveyor of ‘dangerous knowledge’ (xii) – a reality that both ‘traditional’ and committed, or politically radical, criticism prefers not to notice. Dollimore rather valiantly assails enlightened critics – those in the habit of dismissing works of art as ‘sexist’, ‘racist’, ‘homophobic’, etc. – as all too often ‘defended against’ the challenges to progressive values such works might present (125). (For instance, a work of art might show that cruelty isn't invariably a product of bad social conditions.) Dollimore sees Shakespeare's sexual imagination as difficult in this way – as anti-social, even sick. Shakespeare is like Iago, a ‘malconent … complicit with what he condemns’.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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References

Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York, 1991)Google Scholar
Studies in the Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1919), 1
Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life (London, 2001), 131
Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets (London, 1997), 6
The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 37
The Tender Passion (New York, 1986)
Harris, Frank, The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story, second revised edn (London, 1911; first pub. 1909), xviGoogle Scholar
Shakespeare's Lives (Oxford, 1970), 669
‘Leonardo da Vinci’, in Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (first pub. 1873), ed. Phillips, A. (Oxford, 1986), 80Google Scholar
Symons, Arthur, ‘A Prelude to Life’, Spiritual Adventures (London, 1905), 3Google Scholar
Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Evans, L. (Oxford, 1970)
‘Introduction’, Shakspere's Venus and Adonis: The First Quarto, 1593 (London, 1885), iii, iv
Arthur Symons: A Life (Oxford, 1987), 24
Symons, Arthur, ‘John Addington Symonds’, Studies in Prose and Verse (New York, 1922), 83Google Scholar
‘Walter Pater’, Studies in Two Literatures (London, 1897), 185

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