Exclusivity

There are some writers who have hated Shakespeare, including some writers I admire such as Tolstoy and George Bernard Shaw. Voltaire was another of the Shakespeare haters, and I used to be a great admirer of Voltaire. However, the more Leibniz I read, the model for Voltaire's ridiculous and useless Dr Pangloss, the more difficult it becomes for me to summon any enthusiasm for Voltaire.

I do not share this loathing, but I think I understand it, or at least a major component of it: the attention given to Shakespeare's work is so extraordinarily great that it robs attention from other, worthy authors. 

 

In an episode of "Boardwalk Empire," there is a flashback showing Jimmy Darmody, played by Michael Pitt, in his time at Princeton, reading aloud from -- what?! What was that?! Immediately the viewer could hear that it was a play in English written around the time of Shakespeare, but not Shakespeare, and even if the language of the passage were not so beautiful in its own right, the fact of it not being Shakespeare would've made it interesting, because most of us never hear anything written in English near Shakespeare's time except Shakespeare. To be sure, we hear anecdotes about Ben Johnson and Christopher Marlowe, but only in connection with Shakespeare, and we never hear a passage read from one of their plays, let alone actually seeing one of their plays from start to finish.

Just that snippet of Webster in "Boardwalk Empire" made me extraordinarily curious. I am no expert on English literature --  I'm more of a dilettante: I have a very weak grasp of a very great many languages -- but I can very easily imagine how someone with a great and detailed knowledge of literature in English, someone like George Bernard Shaw, could have been driven quite deeply and regularly batty by the way that Shakespeare has blinded us to so many interesting writers in or near his time, like the sun hiding many interesting stars from view: Ah, so we're going to discuss an English masterpiece written around 1600? Let me guess: Shakespeare, for the 10,000th time in a row? 

The knowledge that it was going to be Shakespeare for the next 10,000 times as well, at least as far as any broad public was concerned -- yes, I can easily see how that would drive an expert crazy, quite apart from any appraisal of Shakespeare's own merits. 

I know a bit more about Latin literature, where Cicero is not only widely -- very widely -- considered to be the finest writer ever to have written it, often enough by readers who have read little enough Latin written by anyone else. Not only that, and not only that many people consider him the best Latin author to emulate. No, over and above that, for a number of centuries now, a not inconsiderable faction has insisted, with the unbending assurance of the blind art critic, that the ONLY correct way to write Latin is to imitate Cicero.

Even before I ever suspected that anyone had ever insisted such a strange thing, I was tired of Cicero. By volume, about one-fifth of all surviving Classical Latin literature is that written by Cicero. From its beginnings in the 3rd century BC to the end of the Classical era in the 5th century AD when it gave way to the Christian Medieval era, about one-fifth of all that people thought well enough of to hold on to, has been Cicero's rhetorical and philosophical works and his speeches and letters. From the 3rd century BC to the 5th century AD many fine Latin authors survive only in paltry scraps. Hundreds more we know only from the admiring comments contained in the surviving scraps of their contemporaries and colleagues, and who knows how many thoroughly deserving ancient Latin poets, historians, philosophers and others have disappeared so thoroughly that no one even knows their names, all to make more shelf space for, ugh, Cicero? 

I've come to grips with the possibility that I may have always drastically under-estimated Cicero. I'm not here to insult him, nor to insist that he's the last Latin author you should read. I've gained a little more humility than that, at last, and acknowledge that I may have been, and may remain, pretty much blinded in my assessment of Cicero's writings, because of all of those other, relatively neglected authors. 

I AM here to insist, gently but firmly, that Cicero is not the only Classical Latin author worth reading, nor even the only one worth emulating. Latin, just like English and French and other languages, offers a variety of ways to skin a cat.

The attention which Erasmus holds at the expense of his contemporaries may be even more extreme than Shakespeare versus other Renaissance authors in English and Cicero vs other Classical Latin authors. Just as wide swaths of the public, when asked to name as many luxury watch brands as they can, will say, "Rolex... Uhhhmmmm..." so many Latinists, when asked to name some of the finest Latin authors who lived after the Classical period, will reply, "Erasmus... Uhhhmmmm..."

I recall shaking with rage in the stacks of a major US university library, upon seeing that the several very large editions of Erasmus, plus the books about Erasmus, covered several times as much shelf space as the rest of ALL Latin literature past the Classical period: Medieval, Renaissance Latin except Erasmus, more recent Latin... I stood there with my dilettante's weak grasp of those other categories of Latin which I felt worthy of attention, and shook with the outsider's powerless rage. 

I'm less enraged now. Those other categories of Latin, as far as I can tell, have begun to rebound in the amount of attention paid to them. Or maybe not. Maybe it's just that I'm beginning to find the nooks and crannies where they're appreciated. And as far as Erasmus himself is concerned, I've found it impossible to dislike him nearly as much as before I stumbled across his dialogue "Ciceronianus," which pokes fun quite mercilessly at people convinced that the only proper way to speak Latin is to imitate Cicero.

I laughed until I fell off of my chair, and then I lay on the floor shaking with laughter. Laughter may be the best cure for rage over things like this, which aren't actually matters of life and death. 

There are circles in which Lingua Latina per se Illustrata (LLPSI), a Latin-language course by Hans Ørberg, is the favorite course for beginners, and the one most often recommended. 

There are circles in which it is the ONLY Latin course recommended to beginners, and in which those who mention other routes are angrily shouted down. What has been seen cannot be unseen, and just recently I suddenly saw the resemblance between this level of exclusive support for LLPSI, and those who insist that one must imitate Cicero, or who have never read anything written in English between Shakespeare and Swift, or in Latin between Gellius and Erasmus...

"Be angry at the sun for setting," Robinson Jeffers advised those of us who get all worked up over the way things are. "Yours is not theirs," he added. Like many others, I first read that poem because Hunter S Thompson reprinted it in one of his books.  I am not required to feel superior to the others who read it there and did not, like me, go on to read many more of Jeffers' poems. 

There are various forms of exclusivity, and if I am going to be consistent and regret that John Webster and Ausonius and the ENTIRE Carmina Burana and Jeffers' long poem Dear Judas and Leibniz are not more widely read, I must be consistent, and not resent Cicero and Erasmus and Shakespeare and Dr Thompson simply because they are more popular. For one thing, snobs are singularly unpleasant and make very bad advertisers. 

But more importantly, although Shaw may have been right to be exasperated at all the fine authors who go unread, he may have been wrong about Shakespeare. I may have been wrong about Cicero, and, as I have hinted, I'm already beginning to see that I was wrong about Erasmus. Let's not stop trashing Dan Brown. He deserves it. But not everyone who's extremely popular is a bad writer.