As I work through the impossible process of producing a book-length (and hopefully book-worthy) academic work, I find that much of what I have to say all boils down to the same basic point and the same basic elements.
On the one hand, this is A Good Thing. This means that my organizing thesis isn't insane. It means that I am on to Something. It also means that each of my plays ends up proving the same thing in ways that are only very subtly different. Trying to wrap my head around how to articulate why, for instance, Richard II isn't exactly like 3 Henry VI is fascinating. In the "oh, look, bone poking through my skin" kind of way.
You'll forgive me for being paranoid and not posting it here. Suffice it to say, it involves dying and Jesus. Of course, so do many things in our Christian-centered nation. But that's another bone to chew.
The main point here is that I've discovered that inversion and opposition are a very useful way to make the same point. Now, you wouldn't think that saying the opposite of what I just said would in fact prove it all over again, but that's just how screwed up academics are sometimes. For example, "Bob is a tree, and therefore we can cut him down," is astonishingly the same thing as "We cut down Jimmy, and therefore he is a tree."
Now before the philosophers and logicians out there all have heart attacks, I realize that this appears to fail. But in the dissertation, it doesn't. There are magical categories in the world for which the above formulation actually follows.
Unfortunately, sometimes they appear in the real world, too. And they get used even when they fail. Miserably. (Choose to apply that modifier to whatever you wish.)
For instance, in supporting the government and being a terrorist. It may be true that if you are a terrorist, you do not support the government. No objections from me. However, if you do not support the government, there is no law in logic or even in creation that says you are automatically a terrorist. Not even in Shakespeare. Hell, especially not in Shakespeare. But that's another rant.
The world, as I am often fond of saying, is not a set of dichotomies. We are not all either one thing or another. In the most platitudinous of phrases: the world is not black and white.
Come on, people. Shakespeare got it. Even Beaumont and Fletcher got it, and I'm convinced they got the shorter end of the smart-stick. Even - and this is the big one - even Elizabeth I got it, and let me tell you, she was not a merciful lady. That woman was brutal, but very politically savvy.
She said (supposedly), "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" She chopped off the head of the Earl of Essex when he rebelled... even though he was one of her favorites. But she didn't order the execution, imprisonment, or even the censure of the players who put on Richard II, performed on the eve of the rebellion and commissioned by Essex.
And why not?
Because she understood the difference between terrorism and political commentary. Amazing. In 1601. Four-hundred and seven years ago. She didn't even send any of the actors to Guantanamo... er... the Tower.
Was Elizabethan England a veritable paradise? No. Not in the least. Between the plague rats and the smell, I much prefer the twenty-first century, thank you. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from the ghosts of our own history. They were not idiots, our social and political predecessors. They were not barbarians, at least not any more so than we are today.
Sure, they enjoyed violent entertainment... but then, so do we. They unjustly imprisoned traitors... but so do we. They censured dissidents... but so do we. Did they like a little more poetry with their gore? Sure. But they didn't have CGI.
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