Jonathan O'Neill’s Reviews > Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human > Status Update
Jonathan O'Neill
is on page 96 of 745
Nietzsche on the morality of the stage:
Whoever thinks that Shakespeares’s theatre has moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy, and if the hero perishes [cont...}
— Oct 20, 2026 03:18AM
Whoever thinks that Shakespeares’s theatre has moral effect, and that the sight of Macbeth irresistibly repels one from the evil of ambition, is in error: and he is again in error if he thinks Shakespeare himself felt as he feels. He who is really possessed by raging ambition beholds this its image with joy, and if the hero perishes [cont...}
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Jonathan’s Previous Updates
Jonathan O'Neill
is on page 122 of 745
Read Macbeth Essay
Macbeth... scarcely shows us that crimes against nature are repaired when a legitimate social order is restored. Nature is crime in Macbeth, but hardly in the Christian sense that calls out for nature to be redeemed by grace, or by expiation and forgiveness. As in King Lear, we have no place to go in Macbeth, there is no sanctuary available to us. [cont.]
— Oct 22, 2026 08:40PM
Macbeth... scarcely shows us that crimes against nature are repaired when a legitimate social order is restored. Nature is crime in Macbeth, but hardly in the Christian sense that calls out for nature to be redeemed by grace, or by expiation and forgiveness. As in King Lear, we have no place to go in Macbeth, there is no sanctuary available to us. [cont.]
Jonathan O'Neill
is on page 90 of 745
Read ‘Midsummer’ Essay
Bloom “rejects the prevailing notion that sexual violence and bestiality are at the centre of this humane and wise drama” and finds the questions of whether or not Bottom was, in fact, the carnal lover of the Fairy Queen, “ambiguous or elliptical” and, in any case, “unimportant compared with Bottom’s uniqueness in the Dream.” [Cont...]
— Oct 05, 2026 03:01AM
Bloom “rejects the prevailing notion that sexual violence and bestiality are at the centre of this humane and wise drama” and finds the questions of whether or not Bottom was, in fact, the carnal lover of the Fairy Queen, “ambiguous or elliptical” and, in any case, “unimportant compared with Bottom’s uniqueness in the Dream.” [Cont...]
Jonathan O'Neill
is on page 68 of 745
Read ‘Hamlet’ Essay
The crux of the majority of Bloom’s essay surrounds his support of Peter Alexander’s surmise that the Ur-Hamlet, written no later than 1589, was not written, as many believe, by Thomas Kyd, but was indeed perhaps the earliest dramatic effort and failure of a young and inexperienced Shakespeare. {cont...]
— Oct 04, 2026 04:36AM
The crux of the majority of Bloom’s essay surrounds his support of Peter Alexander’s surmise that the Ur-Hamlet, written no later than 1589, was not written, as many believe, by Thomas Kyd, but was indeed perhaps the earliest dramatic effort and failure of a young and inexperienced Shakespeare. {cont...]
Jonathan O'Neill
is on page 15 of 745
Shakespeare perspectivizes his dramas so that, measure for measure, we are judged even as we attempt to judge. If your Falstaff is a roistering coward, a wastrel confidence man, an uncounted jester to Prince Hal, well, then, we know something of you, but we know no more about Falstaff. If your Cleopatra is an aging who're, and her Antony a would-be Alexander in his dotage, then we know a touch [cont...]
— Oct 01, 2026 12:56AM
Jonathan O'Neill
is on page 9 of 745
In reading Shakespeare's plays, and to a certain extent in attending their performances, the merely sensible procedure is to immerse yourself in the text and its speakers, and allow your understanding to move outward from what you read, hear and see to whatever contexts suggest themselves as relevant...
... Alas, sensible, even "natural" as this way was, it is now out of fashion, and has been cont...
— Sep 30, 2026 05:52AM
... Alas, sensible, even "natural" as this way was, it is now out of fashion, and has been cont...
Jonathan O'Neill
is on page 3 of 745
[Shakespeare] is a system of northern lights, an aurora borealis visible where most of us will never go. Libraries and playhouses (and cinemas) cannot contain him; he has become a spirit or "spell of light," almost too vast to apprehend. High romantic bardolatry, now so much disdained in our self-defiled academies, is merely the most normative of the faiths that worship him.
— Sep 30, 2026 05:13AM
Jonathan O'Neill
is starting
That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking
Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
— Sep 29, 2026 05:12AM
Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
… Do you suppose that Tristan and Isolde are preaching against adultery when they both perish by it? This would be to stand the poets on their head: they, and especially Shakespeare, are enamoured of the passions as such and not least of their death-welcoming moods—those moods in which the heart adheres to life no more firmly than does a drop of water to a glass. It is not the guilt and its evil outcome they have at heart, Shakespeare as little as Sophocles (in Ajax, Philoctetes, Oedipus) as easy as it would have been in these instances to make guilt the lever of the drama, just as surely has this been avoided. The tragic poet has just as little desire to take sides against life with his images of life! He cries rather: ‘it is the stimulant of stimulants, this excitement, changing, dangerous, gloomy and often sun-drenched existence! It is an adventure to live—espouse what party in it you will, it will always retain this character!