Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Pulp, Fiction?

It would be curious to see if we could go a few hundred years into the future, what would be treated as high art, a lasting value and quintessential of our era.
Superman? 12 Monkeys? Citizen Kane? 
And why is something treated as a lasting value today? Let’s see Shakespeare. Master drama writer. Comedy expert. The epitome of dramaturgical achievement.
Shakespeare, among other things, was a real crowd-pleaser. His works are filled with crude farce all the way through. The grave-diggers from Hamlet? The drunken doorkeeper fro Macbeth? You could write it off as pure pulp to keep the plebs from throwing apple cores on the stage. But what is Shakespeare only wanted to write a blockbuster without any deeper implications?

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