A basic literacy of landscape is falling away up and down the ages. A common language — a language of the commons — is getting rarer. And what is lost along with this literacy is something precious: a kind of word magic, the power that certain terms possess to enchant our relationship with nature and place. Macfarlane, Robert. Landmarks. London: Penguin Books, 2016, p.4.This blog supports a roadmap to our mythical understanding–to how small basic elements of myth (mythemes) manifest and resonate through our literature and our culture, and especially how these elements surface repeatedly in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The pieces tend to maintain a focus on Shakespeare and early modern drama and poetry in part because Shakespeare’s endless innovative weaving of mythemes through his works teaches us much about how our own understanding presents and evolves, but I have also kept the focus broad, so that it might touch on the relevance such subjects have to more contemporary culture and events. This deliberately embraces creative integration and presentation, especially in ways that might extend beyond more typical academic investigation and province while specifically linking the creative and the academic together. While there is great value in intellectual advancement promoted through the academic rigor inherent in the exploration and mapping of intellectual aspects of concepts and ideas relating to Shakespeare and early modern literature, or theatre and drama, this blog continues to attempt to bridge academic rigor and more creative and speculative perspectives. Naturally, these different ways of looking at things are hardly mutually exclusive, and the point remains not only that there is value in any number of different perspectives, and also that there may be a tremendous potential advantage in sometimes combining not only different viewpoints, but also by combining different methodologies. As beings capable of great breadth and depth in our experience, it can be immensely positive to allow for a wider compass in the ways in which we approach and precipitate our explorations, in the ways that we foster greater understanding. This blog is about words, and much more–early modern drama and the drama of our lives as well. Never good at compartmentalizing, pigeonholing, delineating, this still sees wheat as wheat, as a whole organism and not a division of germ and chaff. Never good at seeing night and day but as a continuation. Humans as seed pods of the great potential of the cosmos in which they live, part and parcel of a larger space of which we only can perceive and conceive the very smallest part, which makes our judgements infinitely fallible and all our conclusions suspect. In short, this is Shakespeare, literature, drama, theatre, philosophy, politics, and human experience all rolled into one big dream. It is supported by the idea that we gain insight from picking something up and turning it over to examine it from all angles. Spending time with something, we can begin to see answers not just in the thing itself, but also for everything else, for all the realms to which that thing is connected–for everything around us. Shakespeare can help us think more clearly about politics, about history, about our feelings, about art and literature, and about our own human experience. For illustrations of how this works, please read some of the ongoing posts. For more ghosts, and more Shakespearean discussion, please take a look at Blogging Shakespeare: http://bloggingshakespeare.com/great-caesars-ghost
Intro: what ghosts haunt this barren heath?
In his book, Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane offers up a passionate defense of language, especially of the language of nature and of place. Part philosophical treatise and part lexicon, Landmarks presents us with a kind of roadmap to the natural world, to a place where roads often do not go, and cannot take us. Macfarlane laments that: