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.