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You have your homeland and can renounce it, and that may be the best thing one can do with a homeland, especially because in doing so one doesn’t give up that which cannot be renounced.

"To accept the [paradoxical] tactic is to grant Krieger's later works the status of nondiscursive symbolist poem; or, alternatively, to grant him WWhitman's intentionality (I am large, I contain multitudes). It is to grant, as I have not, that, in more than one sense, he is beyond criticism.

I hope to receive more news from you today. It turns out I’m a capitalist who doesn’t even know the extent of his possessions. This afternoon at work, as I was asking for news in vain, they brought me a letter of yours which had arrived in Meran shortly after I had left

like so many others in the intellectual circles, didn’t really believe in Partition, but they also didn’t mind it. They thought that if Pakistan was for everyone, they were very happy to be Pakistanis. They didn’t have anything against Pakistan until Pakistan had something against them

“It’s difficult to tell the truth, since there is only one truth, but that truth is alive and therefore has a lively, changing face”

if […] traditional theory represents the abuse of neutrality as a principle of interpretation, then much of what has been written recently in the wake of structuralism represents the abuse of partiality.

Structuralism in this sense can be understood as. a flight from romantic irrationalism and various epistemologies of intuitionism that culminate in the later philosophy of William James and in Henri Bergson.

No one has ever succeeded in this, not even Jesus, for example. He could only say: “Follow me” […]: act according to my word and you will see that it is not the word of man but the word of God. And he cast devils only out of those who followed him. And even that didn’t last forever, for once they forsook him then even he became ineffectual and ‘useless.’ True […] he, too, succumbed to the temptation.

I had heard several people assert that the fact that Bengali women often wore saris and adorned tikas, and that their language was ‘sanksritized’ and therefore ‘Hinduized’, meant that they were always closer to India than Pakistan. In these statements, I sensed an underlying defence of why Pakistan had lost the 1971 war—East Pakistan was never really Pakistan[.]

The Two Noble Kinsmen

Homosocial competition between best friends is initiated by incarceration as the condition of possibility for desire and terminated through conveyance of the object of rivalry as though she were a chattel. It is not identical to TGV, but it does bring the wheel full circle insofar as Emilia is not constrained to silence but her conveyance does restore male friendship.

Henry VIII

Somewhat episodic, packing disparate events into one presentation, perhaps of a piece with the romances. It lacks a central protagonist, but coalesces around episodes wherein we wait 'til the king's pleasure be known'--essentially elevating royal aesthetics to the law of the land--sovereign preference as sovereign decision. Thomas More appears very briefly but is deemphasized, limited to office.

The Tempest

Just lovely, of course. As though Shakespeare read Marlowe and said 'nope.' Caliban is a dangerous remainder who does not partake in the resolution; and of course enslaving Ariel is awful. This text in some ways looks at the thought experiment of CoE re: Occam's razor and Quine-Duhem from the other direction. Also: theater as governance.

With [Wallace] Stevens self-consciousness is a key to his vogue, for in it, or so it seemed, the tenacious hold of aestheticism on the American critical mind was finally broken, as fictions were opened to all the contamination of unliterary temporality, to history in an inclusive sense.

Cymbeline

Villainy is defeated so as to bring Britain back within Rome's ambit--it is definitely an odd result. The misogynist gossip about Innogen--that 'her beauty and her brain go not together'--is recognized as true about a different character later--but less about intelligence and more about the familiar shakespearean problem of inferring a person's interior intention from their exterior signs.

The Tragedy of King Lear

This is the folio version, which is more theatrical and economical. than the earlier 'history.' It has things that the quarto version lacks, and cuts a bit that the earlier presents. The scene progression is substantially identical, so it's not a large difference of plot--more that the local rhetorical changes shade significances differently. It's cool enough to warrant the time.

The Winter's Tale

Sovereignty internalizes Iago, and when jealousy--a property of the oikos--becomes a focus of the polis, we should expect disaster. The well known historical and geographical problems of this text are features of genre; complaining about them is to miss the point somewhat. My reading of the end is that it's deceptive theatricality rather than a supernaturalism.

Coriolanus

Almost single-minded, this one distinguishes itself by excluding almost all secondary matter, underplots, and suchlike, focusing instead on the principle class conflict in Rome. Though it is working itself out in the political process, the protagonist can't adapt to the theatricality of civic governance and must revert to soldierly virtues. Politics as extension of war by other means, maybe?

Pericles

It's difficult to overstate the effect of this play after the brutal run of Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth, A&C, and AWEW, all of which forefront desolating disloyalty. The family reunion here has a sweet but non-naive innocence that makes a surly old marxist weepy. The romance roots are patent, as the text is melodic,' driving forward incessantly, with no time for harmonizing parallel subplots.

Franco’s chief of propaganda, General Quiepo de Llano, had vowed that once Casals was captured, both of his arms would be cut off at the elbow.

All's Well That Ends Well

It's readily apparent why this one makes people nervous--coerced marriage (as in R&J, MND), a cruel handling of a fool (as with Malvolio), a bed trick (MFM), a theater of infidelity (Othello, MAN), all zipped up nifty as the title alleges (which comes from a refrain within the play). One cool part is that Helen steps into a learned techne much like Portia and with similar success.

Antony & Cleopatra

Astute and disciplined Antony is presented as a reckless voluptuary in his later years--the complex historical process of the disintegration of the second triumvirate is stripped down to an interpersonal dispute based on his akrasia. Great meta-theater moment toward the end when Cleopatra rejects the impending spectacle of herself on stage payed by a 'squeaking boy.'

The past, jumbled in the mind, survives in its own special tense, a form of ahistorical present.

Macbeth

In the broadest strokes, we might describe the story here as the witches act ultra vires, against the will of Hecate, to engineer the destruction of the Scottish aristocracy and importation of English forms of governance. The play highlights the familiar problem of interpreting the interior of a person from their exterior--Macbeth is too paranoid, whereas Duncan is like Lear, too trusting.

Timon of Athens

Famous veteran is over generous and, like Lear, fails to recognize flattery--the same study as in Hamlet and regarding the attempt to read exterior signs on a person for their interior belief. His descent into hostis humani generis is contrasted with actual bandits and a Diogenean cynic philosopher. Here NB the wilderness does not cure the problems of the polis.

History of King Lear

This collection made the decision that the Q and F versions of Lear are not reconcilable and thus amount to two plays rather than variants of one. So here is the Q version; F follows later in the volume. I note that the comic multi-adultery of Falstaff in MWW is here played straight--the tragic result is emblematic of conflating oikos and polis, which is this text's focus.

Othello

Always marvelous. This time through, I'm seeing Iago as a prototype politics of ressentiment right populist figure. He resents an educated foreigner promoted over him by another foreigner who happens to be dark-complected and married to a local woman. It's the normal nihilistic recipe of Trump-voter concerns, with fears of other religions, miscegenation, purported elitism in expertise, and so on.

Measure for Measure

Perhaps my favorite play of his, this one takes on anti-theatrical puritan writings and eviscerates them. We see it in the spectacle created out of sacrament in the duke's disguise but also in the stage-managed creation of Angelo's lust by means of a theater of chastity during an official court appeal. The defense of theater s a general institution couldn't be stronger.

She had read too much. Everything was like something else.

Sir Thomas More

A collaboration, this play presents More's handling of the insurrection of 1517 (xenophobic riots) via cosmopolitan reasoning, then moves to his refusal to sign the king's articles, as a matter of conscience. It strikes a balance between the limits of popular sovereignty and royal prerogative. It's a mess, and wasn't licensed in its time for fear of inciting more nativist riots.

Sonnets, 'The Lover's Complaint,' &c.

No. 126 marks the end of the sonnets addressed to the idealized youth, and then we get grotesque realism regarding the 'dark lady.' 126 itself is incomplete, a disruption of the form that matches the content, say. It's tempting to read the paired 'Lover's Complaint' back into the sonnets as a sort of key, insofar as it is nuanced and the sonnets are laden with grievance.