I just discovered that the Guardian coverage of the Hugo awards cited my page on this year’s nominees! Bounce!
Off to Austria now for a three-day staff meeting, topped and tailed by talks with OSCE diplomats.
From the Heart of Europe
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If you find this, along with usury, hoarding, and petty suits, compatible with ‘Shakespeare’s life-long artistic commitment, then probably we cannot agree.
This is very true.
It is rather an abstract argument to equate Shakspere’s relentless drives for gain with a sin of passion by Oxford.
of course, not actually the point I made – I was equating Shakespeare’s knowing a pimp with Oxford’s adultery. But if you want to be sure with comparing like with like, how about Oxford’s own relentless pursuit of money? I suppose that would be treated by Oxfordians as something different, which is at the heart of one of the problems with the thesis – that it consistently fails to apply the same standards to the evidence for Shakespeare as are applied to that for Oxford (e.g. the lack of definitive proof for Shakespeare’s authorship shows that he didn’t write the plays, whilst the lack of definitive proof for Oxford’s shows that he concealed his authorship).
I do not think that theoretical moralisms can include the soul who wrote this in the same body who loaned at interest and hoarded grain in a famine to increase his profit. There must be some mistake. Trying to realistically join them together is bound to be a ramshackle job that would defy ordinary logic.
No, it merely involves treating people as the self-contradictory complex entities that they are, rather than as one-dimensional cartoons.