SHAKESPEARE LIED

No moral lessons, just gorgeous language and vibrant voices lie at the heart of Shakespeare’s plays.

So argues Canadian multihyphenate Gilbert (a novelist, playwright, and founder of a gay theater in Toronto), who also argues that “the recent intrusion of the woke left into aesthetics…threatens to destroy art.” This mindset, he states, has transformed artistic works into vehicles for didactic and/or propagandist ends. In this collection of essays, Gilbert, working from the premise that the analytical, “left brain cultural takeover” began during Shakespeare’s life, analyzes how the Bard’s plays and poems reveal a rejection of reason and empiricism. He begins by observing that Shakespeare’s writing style is as complex as it is heavily connotative, which he sees as atypical for an era when most writers followed one of three styles: “grand, middle or low.” Indeed, the Bard often adopted a variety of styles within single passages of text. His stylistic “slipperiness” extends to how he played arguments and counterarguments against each other to create works “steeped in paradox.” That, Gilbert suggests, marks Shakespeare’s plays as amoral and the playwright as a skeptic. He further argues that the playwright’s commitment to rhetoric and language before all else placed him in a position where he could simply allow his characters to speak and act rather than use them to reveal any particular social or political bent. Working during a time when theater was under attack by Puritans, who favored plays that moralized, the Bard chose instead to follow a Classical aesthetic grounded in the thinking of philosophers like Gorgias, who believed that “what is real is defined by the artist in collaboration with the audience.” Shakespeare, then, was not only a literary craftsman but also an early modern aesthete dedicated to creating beauty rather than delivering messages for the ages. This view of Shakespeare is hardly new, but its application to today’s woke culture is stimulating, if not necessarily persuasive.

Provocative, intelligent reading for literary scholars and Shakespeare aficionados.