“To say Shakespeare was a great writer is almost a clichéd insult to his prodigious body of work. For someone so relatively young at 52 when he died, his profound understanding of human nature is perhaps no better encapsulated than in sonnet 129:-

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
 All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Editorial

I’m at one with the views of the great American writer Lionel Shriver, who has rejected the modern trend, or at least that promulgated in some circles, of what amounts to literary stultification when it comes to artistic expression.

Shriver believes that she is as well-equipped as anyone to write about whatever subject or character she chooses. I agree.

There must be no circumscription of literary expression. If a writer chooses characters from a different cultural or ethnic background and moulds him and her into a story, so be it.

As readers, we become the sole judges of that endeavour rather than some self-appointed, censorious, offence-taking busybodies who want to spare our tender feelings and those of the particular grouping to whom they attribute their own in the most patronising of fashions.

Favorite writers

So many to choose from. One of the greatest was Charles Dickens. But if you think (A tale of Two Cities apart) you’re going to get a simple read, then forget it. The first fifty to a hundred pages of most of his novels are a challenge to be overcome. But once over the hurdle, it’s luxurious pasture thereafter. 

Only recently, I read Bleak House  from cover to cover. For many years, a piece here and some there was snatched, the doings of the Smallweed family an especial attraction. In the 1970’s, every new law student at the University of Qld was enjoined to read chapter one of that book with its incomparable descriptions of the Court of Chancery and its functioning.

Without the slightest hesitation, Bleak House is right up there with the best. Of it, G.K. Chesterton wrote:-

“Bleak House is not certainly Dickens’s best book; but perhaps it is his best novel. Such a distinction is not a mere verbal trick; it has to be remembered rather constantly in connection with his work. This particular story represents the highest point of his intellectual maturity. Maturity does not necessarily mean perfection. It is idle to say that a mature potato is perfect; some people like new potatoes. A mature potato is not perfect, but it is a mature potato; the mind of an intelligent epicure may find it less adapted to his particular purpose; but the mind of an intelligent potato would at once admit it as being, beyond all doubt, a genuine, fully developed specimen of his own particular species. The same is in some degree true even of literature. We can say more or less when a human being has come to his full mental growth, even if we go so far as to wish that he had never come to it. Children are very much nicer than grown-up people; but there is such a thing as growing up. When Dickens wrote Bleak House he had grown up.”