Comments by "" (@EbenBransome) on "Interrupting THE TEMPEST" video.

  1. I once worked with a guy who had a double First in English from Cambridge and several published novels. His spelling was atrocious because he knew how words sounded, he knew what they meant, but he recognised them by shape not individual letters. He was apparently reading before he was three, but already in whole words. This was in the days before everybody learned to type; I still am amazed to recall that in 1980-86 the engineering departments I worked for had secretarial staff because engineers were not expected to be able to type. He struggled with English O levels because of his spelling and terrible handwriting, but if Cambridge made you an offer in those days you only needed two grade E at A level, which he was able to get, and they recognised his talent.
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  2. Given that my own ancestry includes Sephardic Jews, I think I'm entitled to say that given the time it was written and the context, MoV is actually progressive. Marlowe wrote a play in which a Jew was wicked, well, because he was Jewish. Shakespeare wrote a play in which a Jewish businessman has been driven crazy by anti-Semitism and the death of his wife, with an ending necessary to get past the censor. Antonio is an anti-Semite, all the other male Christians are at least as avaricious as Shylock, only the women come out with any credit. That things are very different today is partly down to people like Shakespeare (and Joyce of course, who subtly undermined anti-Semitism in Ulysses, affecting the views of a lot of educated people in the 1920s.)
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  3. To a degree Shakespeare is who he is because of the industry that grew up around him, just as Jesus is a construction of the Jesus industries. Every scrap of possible meaning has been extracted from the plays creating bodies of work like the Mishnah or the works of Aquinas. But a couple of middle class people marching on stage at a performance of one of the better plays with a "Just stop oil" message, seemingly an attempt to discredit the people who believe we need to take urgent action to mitigate climate change by presenting them as self-important and arrogant, really isn't anything to do with Shakespeare. It's just "choose somewhere where people are looking, it's a cultural icon and importantly there won't be any armed police". If they are being paid by oil industry PR, it's venial, and if they are not, it's narcissistic.
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