Ephemera - Unpublished Letters

                                                                                                      To Emma Smith, April 2023
 

It is always a pleasure to read
        a well-written well-reasoned critique of
        a work with which one is
        not only
                familiar
        but which holds
a special place in one’s heart
 
                        Thank you for
                        your exe-
                        gesis on
                        Twelfth Night
 
                        As always
the pleasure to be found in
        a meaty
        formalist
        essay
        based on a close reading of something in the canon
is derived
not from acquiring
        a deeper understanding
        of the author’s intentions
                        Shakespeare would have
                        been as bemused by your analysis
                                of Twelfth Night
                        as by a discussion of
                        Hamlet’s Oedipus complex
but from the intricacies
        of the critic’s thought
        and the wide-ranging references
which weave them together
 
        It was a bit disappointing
                but hardly surprising
        to find that your intention
              like that of some of the foundational practitioners of  
              formalist criticism                       
        was to discover a connection
between a canonical work and
a currently fashionable point of view
        taken for granted as
dogma
        and therefore as
universally applicable
 
                Back then it was
        Marxism or
        psychoanalysis  
now it is
                and man oh man I am sorry
                        simply as a conservative
                        when it comes to the English language
                to have to seriously
                inscribe this word
Wokeism.
 
        Nevertheless
I must thank you again
not only for
        your lucid argumentation
but for
liberating from obscurity a compelling
Shakespearian passage upholding
the right of asylum
                        from Thomas More
 
If it was
        written by Shakespeare
                and let’s say it was
then
yes
        Shakespeare may indeed have had a
        passionate
        appreciation
                of that right
 
But if that is the case
he
        evidently
felt no need to
curb its expression
        no need
                for example
        to bury his enthusiasm
        in opaque allusions in
        Twelfth Night
        where it might be exhumed
                centuries later
        by an intrepid literary archeologist