Shakespeare’s Cure for Xenophobia | The New Yorker

/shakespeares-cure-for-xenophobia

  • Shakespeare’s Cure for Xenophobia | By Stephen Greenblatt
    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/shakespeares-cure-for-xenophobia

    What “The Merchant of Venice” taught me about ethnic #hatred and the literary imagination.

    What #Shakespeare bequeathed to us offers the possibility of an escape from the mental ghettos most of us inhabit. Even in his own world, his imagination seems to have led him in surprising directions. At a time when alehouses and inns were full of spies trolling for subversive comments, this is a playwright who could depict on the public stage a twisted sociopath lying his way to supreme authority. This is a playwright who could have a character stand up and declare to the spectators that “a dog’s obeyed in office.” This is a playwright who could approvingly depict a servant mortally wounding the realm’s ruler in order to stop him from torturing a prisoner in the name of national security. And, finally, this is a playwright who almost certainly penned the critical lines we find preserved in the British Library’s manuscript of an Elizabethan play about Sir Thomas #More. (The play was probably banned from performance by the censor.) The lines speak movingly to one of our most pressing contemporary dilemmas. Shakespeare depicts Thomas More confronting an angry mob that demands the expulsion of the “strangers”—the foreigners—from England. “Grant them removed,” More tells the mob:

    Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,
    Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,
    Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,
    And that you sit as kings in your desires . . .
    What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught
    How insolence and strong hand should prevail,
    How order should be quelled; and by this pattern
    Not one of you should live an aged man,
    For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,
    With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,
    Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes
    Would feed on one another.

    #antisémitisme #littérature #xénophobie