Poor Shakespeare--obliged to motivate his tragedies with nothing more than seven terribly familiar sins and a smattering of Aristotle. How much richer his works might have been had the blessings of post-modernism been his. He might, for example, have been free to draw openly on incest as a theme instead of dropping little hints of it here and there for the scholars to ferret out 400 years later. And what about recovered memory? That's a dramatic device he never dreamed of.
You have to grant a certain credit to novelist Jane Smiley for the unapologetic boldness with which she appropriated the...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
