Today we think of Shakespeare as a genius—the greatest writer of all English writers—but he wasn’t always thought of in those terms. It was eighteenth-century writers like Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson who created the idea of Shakespeare we have today, Brooke Allen writes in The Hudson Review, which doesn’t mean it is undeserved: “By the mid-eighteenth century, Shakespeare had become the iconic English genius—Britain’s answer to Homer, Dante, Cervantes. But this had not always been the general opinion and was not so at the outset of the eighteenth century. There had been a gradual elevation of Shakespeare from just one among several popular Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights to the one and only national treasure: ‘a kind of established religion in poetry,’ as the playwright Arthur Murphy was already describing him in 1753, as well as a focus for a new, patriotic British nationalism that had begun to coalesce at that time. It was a process in which several members of the Club were intimately involved, both individually and as a team. Shakespeare might well have achieved his cultural apotheosis without these men, but the process would have been slower and less certain. Scholarship, criticism, performance, interpretation: the Club members had a profound effect on each of these aspects of Shakespeareanism. The modern idea of ‘Shakespeare,’ both as artist and ideal genius, was essentially an eighteenth-century creation, though it is often credited to the Romantics.”

In other news, Kristin Vuković writes about medieval port cities shaped by illness: “In 1397, a decision was made to establish a quarantine in the Benedictine Monastery on the island of Mljet. The lazaretto at Danče was constructed in 1430, and subsequently, a larger and more modern lazaretto was built on the island of Lokrum. On 12 February 1590, the Dubrovnik Senate decreed that the last lazaretto was to be built at Ploče, the Old Town’s eastern entrance. Construction of the lazaretto complex was finished around 1647; in 1724, the Senate proclaimed it to be an integral part of the city’s fortifications. ‘The Lazaretto preserved its original function long after the fall of the Dubrovnik Republic, but we do not know the year when it was abolished as a healthcare institution; according to archival records from National Archives in Dubrovnik, it was around 1872,’ Bakija-Konsuo said. ‘This impressive stone building represents not only a unique architectural complex, but also an institution that best describe[s] the rich medical heritage of the old Dubrovnik.’ The Lazarettos of Dubrovnik, today a tourist attraction that host cultural events such as concerts and traditional Linđo (Lindjo) folklore dancing, are a reminder of the city’s foresight in combating infectious diseases centuries ago.”

How Samuel Pepys passed the time during the Great Plague of London: “Samuel Pepys, who lived through the Great Plague of London in 1665, was by temperament a cautious man who did not take greater risks with his health than he needed. (He did undergo an excruciating operation to remove a bladder stone, which, given the dangers of surgery, could easily have killed him. But the stone, the size of a tennis ball, was itself agony. After its removal, Pepys had it preserved in a special case.) But he still managed to have quite a good time. ‘I have never lived so merrily . . . as I have done this plague-time,’ he wrote on December 31, 1665.”

Jessica Hooten Wilson reviews Brett Foster’s posthumous collection of poetry, Extravagant Rescues: “Foster’s poetry is playful without being trivial, a hard balance to keep up. How to write so that readers enjoy the ride without worrying where you are leading them, only to find themselves vested with an eternal question that they cannot shake off any more than a dog whose jaws lock around their ankle?”

When did classical music get so loud? Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim explains.

Sumana Roy on the difficulties and pleasures of being a provincial reader: “I grew up in a small town not far from Kalimpong. In pre-liberalization India, everything arrived late: not just material things but also ideas. Deconstruction, for instance, arrived in Siliguri in the first years of this century, tired and exhausted after its long travel, and therefore pretty useless. Magazines — old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic — arrived late too, after the news had become stale by months or, often, years. This temporal gap turned journalism into literature, news into legend, and historical events into something akin to plotless stories. But like those who knew no other life, we accepted this as the norm . . . Two takeaways from these experiences have marked my understanding of the provincial reader’s life: the sense of belatedness, of everything coming late, and the desire for pleasure in language.”

Essay of the Day:

Like Socrates, Søren Kierkegaard was a gadfly—an outsider philosopher who lived as much “against” his society as “in” it. He anticipated Nietzsche, influenced Camus and Simone Weil, but his work is not nearly as popular today. Nevertheless, it has much to teach us, Christopher Beha writes in Harper’s:

“Despite the great urgency and excitement of his works, and the fact that he wrote for a general audience, Kierkegaard resists popularization. His ideas are so bound up with the form of his writing that they are near-impossible to paraphrase. His use of pseudonymous stand-ins—in some books, as many as five or six serve as characters, authors, and editors—makes it hard to determine which of those ideas he even meant to claim as his own. (This is a common feature of the Socratic-ironic mode, but it is particularly striking in Kierkegaard’s case.) His writing is often formidably challenging, largely by design. Every effort in the modern age, he wrote, is geared toward making life easier; realizing that he was unequipped to contribute to this grand project, he found for himself another job: ‘to make difficulties everywhere.’

“Yet for those willing to do the work, Kierkegaard has at least as much to tell us as any of his intellectual descendants. Carlisle notes, part of Kierkegaard’s great appeal is that he seems to be ‘the first great philosopher to attend to the experience of living in a recognizably modern world of newspapers, trains, window shopping, amusement parks, and great stores of knowledge and information.’

“He writes about the anxiety that comes with living in that world: facing endless decisions while suspecting that none of your choices really matter, being overwhelmed by information without seeing how any of it might be put to use in your life, constantly displaying yourself to a watching world while suspecting that your innermost truth remains unknown.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Emerald Lake

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