02-24-2023, 03:32 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-24-2023, 03:33 PM by RiverNotch.)
It still makes sense if, like me, you specify you're looking at a particular canon -- the Western Canon, the Eastern Canon, the Native American Canon. And I did specify. xD
The question could be why someone *should* specify, but then again, why *shouldn't* one? Surely such universal claims are far less defensible than those with a smaller scope, and I'd say that, since we're looking at Shakespeare, the scope is naturally limited to the authors of his time and place. The authors that come after him are much more likely to say they are his heirs, rather than his peers; those authors that come far, far before him, to the point that the language of their works is no longer something people are born with -- and this likely includes the Koran, considering the changes Arabic underwent across the millennium, if Arabic is to be considered a "Western" language, which it perhaps could -- can only be considered as having come from a world completely different from his. And, of course, the Koran and the Psalms and the Torah and the Gospel are all Holy Scripture: society, of which all critics are necessarily members, is bound to view them very, very differently to the likes of Spenser and Shakespeare. Though with the way sayings like "to gild a lily" or "star-cross'd lovers" have infected the English (if not the Western) way of thinking in the same way as "fly in the ointment" or "camel through the needle's eye" is quite the witness, at least for Shakespeare.
I have no intention to read the Koran any time soon, btw. I have so many other things to read (and so many other languages to learn, all of them Western xD), and I'm not a Muslim, so....
The question could be why someone *should* specify, but then again, why *shouldn't* one? Surely such universal claims are far less defensible than those with a smaller scope, and I'd say that, since we're looking at Shakespeare, the scope is naturally limited to the authors of his time and place. The authors that come after him are much more likely to say they are his heirs, rather than his peers; those authors that come far, far before him, to the point that the language of their works is no longer something people are born with -- and this likely includes the Koran, considering the changes Arabic underwent across the millennium, if Arabic is to be considered a "Western" language, which it perhaps could -- can only be considered as having come from a world completely different from his. And, of course, the Koran and the Psalms and the Torah and the Gospel are all Holy Scripture: society, of which all critics are necessarily members, is bound to view them very, very differently to the likes of Spenser and Shakespeare. Though with the way sayings like "to gild a lily" or "star-cross'd lovers" have infected the English (if not the Western) way of thinking in the same way as "fly in the ointment" or "camel through the needle's eye" is quite the witness, at least for Shakespeare.
I have no intention to read the Koran any time soon, btw. I have so many other things to read (and so many other languages to learn, all of them Western xD), and I'm not a Muslim, so....