BRING ON THE BARD

I consider the Huxley and Orwell novels as both the blueprint for our modern ‘culture’ and a prophetic call presenting ways to avoid the (potentially)coming disaster.

In 1984 ‘the past has been abolished’. ‘History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right’. Such dystopian engineering is at work in my own country. By the deliberate decision of pedagogues, hundreds of thousands of children now leave school without knowing a single historical fact about their own country. The historical principles that museums have traditionally used to display art have given way to historical thematic displays-portraits of women from a jumble of eras, say. (Our Culture, What’s Left of It. T Dalrymple, loc 2796)

For both Huxley and Orwell, one man symbolised resistance to the dehumanising disconnection of man from his past: Shakespeare. In both writers, he stands for the highest pinnacle of human self-understanding, without which human life loses its depth and its possibility of transcendence. In Brave New World, possessing an old volume of Shakespeare that has mysteriously survived protects a man form the enfeebling effects of a purely hedonistic life. A few lines are sufficient to make him realise the superficiality of the Brave New World:

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!

And when Winston Smith wakes in 1984 from a dream about a time before the revolution, when people were still human, a single word rises to his lips, for reasons that eh does not understand: Shakespeare. (loc. 2797)

We need to teach our children Shakespeare!