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quote from Terence Hawkes
Aug. 27th, 2003 06:28 pmTerence Hawkes's essay "Telmah" (and, yes, that is Hamlet spelled backwards) is essentially a meditation on the intersection of text (W. W. Greg's positively heretical article on Hamlet) and politics (World War I and the Russian Revolution) in the psyche of John Dover Wilson in 1917. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oursin, the article also had some interesting things to say about class and education in pre-WWII England which made me think of your comment on the most recent Sayers post.) In the course of his argument, Hawkes discusses an article written about Russia by Dover Wilson in 1914, which asserts boldly and naïvely that the Russian peasants are HAPPY under the Csars; Hawkes has this to say:
What fascinates me about this--aside from the light it casts on certain critical habits of thought among Shakespeare scholars of previous generations--is the way in which Hawkes's description could be, with only the slightest of changes, a description of J. R. R. Tolkien and Middle-Earth.
At least Tolkien had the decency to admit that his world was a fantasy.
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WORKS CITED
Hawkes, Terence. "Telmah." Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen, 1985. 310-32.
oursin, the article also had some interesting things to say about class and education in pre-WWII England which made me think of your comment on the most recent Sayers post.) In the course of his argument, Hawkes discusses an article written about Russia by Dover Wilson in 1914, which asserts boldly and naïvely that the Russian peasants are HAPPY under the Csars; Hawkes has this to say:World-picture fanciers will already have recognized in it [Dover Wilson's view of Russia in 1914] a version of what, by the time of the second world war, had become a standard British response to national crisis: the construction of long-past, green, alternative worlds of percipient peasants, organic communities, festivals, folk art, and absolute monarchy to set against present chaos. Dover Wilson's revised Russian World Picture of 1914 has developed, since his essay of 1906, features which surface regularly in our century as part of a recurrent siege mentality. It thus has much more than a coincidental resemblance to E. M. W. Tillyard's well known war-effort, The Elizabethan World Picture of 1943. A discourse which, seeking for the final, confirming presence of authority, nominates the linchpin of the political structure as "God's representative on earth" is clearly heard in both. Each represents, less an accurate picture of the world it purports to describe, than an intimate, covert measure of its author's fears about the fallen world in which he currently lives, and in the face of which he has constructed a peculiarly English Eden.
(Hawkes 324)
What fascinates me about this--aside from the light it casts on certain critical habits of thought among Shakespeare scholars of previous generations--is the way in which Hawkes's description could be, with only the slightest of changes, a description of J. R. R. Tolkien and Middle-Earth.
At least Tolkien had the decency to admit that his world was a fantasy.
---
WORKS CITED
Hawkes, Terence. "Telmah." Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New York: Methuen, 1985. 310-32.
