Between yesterday's post and the present moment, I came across a far more elegant rebuttal to Tolstoy's attack on Shakespeare (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27726.bibrec.html) than I could ever write. It's by George Orwell, so no shame there. Here's the link: http://www.george-orwell.org/Lear,_Tolstoy_and_the_Fool/0.html

Further to this, two things: 1. Tolstoy's opinion seems to come partly from the position that I tried to describe yesterday: the idea that literature should be used to some end, or to instruct. I don't concur, and I don't think Shakespeare did either. (By the way, yesterday's post also stated that commentators are getting into hazardous terrain when they try to figure out Shakespeare's motivations. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be attempted, I often do it myself - I think it's important to try, but we have to remember that Shakespeare is always going to be out there ahead of us, to paraphrase Harold Bloom.) 2. Tolstoy was almost certainly the type of critic that T.S. Eliot was referring to in his essay entitled "Hamlet", i.e. the "most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order". Either that, or he was bonkers, as a commentator, anyway. Have a look at the two pieces above, and decide for yourself.

T.S. Eliot once said, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood". Jackson Pollock once asked an interviewer: "Do you stand in front of a bank of flowers tearing your hair out and wondering what it all means?" The point I'm trying to make here is that there is a very large part of artistic endeavour that transcends simple comprehension. Perhaps the title of John Ciardi and Miller Williams' 1959 handbook on poetry said it better: How Does a Poem Mean? So when we're dealing with poetic writing, we must keep in mind that it gives off meaning in more and different ways than regular prose: it suggests, compares, symbolizes, even obfuscates (as Nietzsche noted when he said that writers sometimes write to reveal meaning, and at other times to conceal it). For an example of this, let's consider the following line from 2.2 in Hamlet, in which the prince is perhaps toying with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, or perhaps not: "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw." In every annotated edition of the play that I've seen, those two sentences are given a different gloss. And the more interpretations I see, the more admiration I have, because I've come to realize no one really knows what they mean. Isn't that great?