“People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.”

- Milan Kundera

There's a lot of truth in this, but I don't think it applies to the greatest people - people like Shakespeare, for instance. I think it's evident that he was concerned with the future, in the sense that the past is not where the real drama takes place. I believe he was writing for the stage itself in an eternal present, and that his work is intended to help us, not in fighting battles of the past, but to guide us into the future. Therefore, the anachronisms, the mixed-up settings, the disregard of the classical rules of drama - all of this was in the service of a higher principle: to tell the most honest, beneficial, and powerful stories that he possibly could. It's up to us, the living, to learn from them.

In the first era of Shakespeare criticism, there were many aspects of his work that were considered to be, well, outrageous. One of the biggest was the way that the three unities of time, place and action, first posited in Aristotle's Poetics, were not only not observed, but flouted. Consider A Midsummer Night's Dream which seems to be set simultaneously in ancient Greece and sixteenth-century England - and that's not including Puck, Oberon and Titania. What about the famous anachronism of the chiming clock in Julius Caesar? And how about Time, who acts as the Chorus in A Winter's Tale, beginning act four by stating that sixteen years have passed? Maybe flouted isn't a strong enough word. Also, there is a great deal of contention around Shakespeare's use of history. Many commentators feel, for example, that Richard III gets a very unfair treatment in the plays in which he appears, and that Shakespeare maligned him to win favour with Elizabeth I, a Tudor (and therefore a descendant of Richmond who takes the crown at the end of Richard III). Others say he did the same to Macbeth, and that this version of history flattered the new king, James I, who also had an interest in the occult, hence the witches, etc. What reasons could Shakespeare have had for these types of decisions? I'll give you my theory tomorrow.