Base Uses

Abstract

I hope it is not to consider too curiously .to examine the way in which many Shakespearean scholars and many of his admirers who would not pretend to scholarship, use his work in illegitimate ways by backing their own hobby-horses. Of course we come to Shakespeare from different environments, with different education and different genes, and this variety is a useful safeguard against the senility of received opinions. We need a Pushkin or a Pasternak, a Stendhal or a Hazlitt, a Freud or a Jung from time to time. In our own day we need an Ernst Honigmann to question the orthodox chronology of the plays, to demonstrate the instability of all poetic texts, and to give a new meaning to the gossip that the poet began his career as a schoolmaster in the country.

Hamlet: ‘To what base uses may we return, Horatio! Why, may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

Horatio: ‘Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.

Hamlet: No, faith, not a jot...