Chasing ... Cutting

[Paul Mackin]

On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, Dave Monroe wrote:

> ... well, let's see ...
> 
> Those Shakespearean plays, whether or not they were written by the historical
> William Shakespeare (and there was one, and I have no problem with his cactually
> having written those plays), are, to the best of my recollection, never
> particularly set IN Elizabethan-to-Jacobean England, or in any particularly
> contemporary setting, for that matter (setting aside, for the moment, the
> contemporary costumes, sets, props, typically used in staging them at the time).
> And yet, after the heir-raising ("No puns where none intended"--Samuel Beckett)
> adventures of Henry VIII, after the contested ascension of the heirless (albeit not
> necessarily bald) Elizabeth I to the throne , and, again, the troubled reign (er
> ...) of James I , an awful lot of those plays seem to be about problems of
> succession, perhaps even the threat of civil war ...
> 
> Literary works, cultural productions, in general, are necessarily products
 of their
> time and place, texts of their contexts.  There's perhaps a reason why ostensibly
> "WWII" novels like Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five or Gravity's Rainbow or whatever
> were being written during the Cold War, after the Korean "Police Action," during
> the Vietnam "Conflict," or even during the Civil Rights Movement (and take a look
> at "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts" as well, @
> http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html) ...


This isn't suppose to have any point to it, is it?
			
			P.