possible right-up-the-plist-discussion alley?

[Mark Kohut]

I have remarked in this space how 400 years of critics and scholars have tried
to show the thematic relevance of every scene, every character, every remark in Shakespeare
---even the seeming throwaway lines of generic characters. "a citizen", etc. 
 
His always-active mind, his nuancing, is what makes him the genius he was.....
 
They say, generally. 
 
Some, even such as iris murdoch, no intellectual slouch she, say his genius as rich enough
to have some, of course usually minor, characters, throw off lines that are just .......
lines showing  the surprisingness of character......................
 
As happens in life, which is full of 'other people' revealing themselves often non-thematically.
 
So, a not-famous Shakespeare scholar wrote that he has enough of the Puritan in him to 
want to explain everything in a play somehow in his essays on Shakespeare. This brought me
up short---since I had never seen such total explanation as Puritan-like........(which I would
annotate as meaning 'nothing goes to waste" in understanding the play.)
 
And I thought of what some define as post-modernism: an openendedness in literary explication
that might be called anti-Puritan.............??.
 
I have unfurled myself as a Puritan. You? 
 
Comments? 
 
And, just to start the jousting, i say Pynchon is a literary Puritan--in the above sense---despite his
perspective on historical Puritanism...................
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