Monday, March 12, 2007

Checks and disasters

Over at the New Republic's Open University blog, U. Chicago English prof Richard Stern points out a "transfiguring expression of contemporary difficulties" in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida." In Act 1, Scene 3, King Agamemnon complains to the leaders of the coalition of the willing (Greeks) about their inability to conquer Troy:

The ample proposition that hope makes/In all designs begun on earth below/Fails in the promis'd largeness: checks and disasters/Grow in the veins of actions highest rear'd,/As knots, by the conflux of meeting sap,/Infects the sound pine and diverts his grain/Tortive and errant from his course of growth.

In the comments section, a reader responds:

I don't know how instructive [Shakespeare] is in looking at current problems. He had a foot in Ptolemy's universe, which ultimately led to, I argue, a kind of quietism and hopelessness at the heart of his tragic vision.

As is so often the case in the blogosphere, the comment is more interesting than the original post. When, I beseech you? will Boston.com turn on the comments functions for its blogs. For, as the Bard put it, in "King Richard III":

Come, I have heard that fearful commenting/Is leaden servitor to dull delay;/Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary/Then fiery expedition be my wing,/Jove's Mercury, and herald for a king!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 07:36 AM

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