Prospero's Books: Shakespeare, post-Taliban

About this blog

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero, Duke of Milan, is ousted by his brother and exiled to an island. With the help of a friend, Prospero manages to take with him his beloved library.

Prospero, like his creator, lived in a time when boundaries between disciplines were not as rigid as they are today. Prospero's books would have dealt with the cosmos—spiritual and material, inner and outer—as a whole.

In this blog, I try to do the same. I'm not Prospero, just a student rummaging through his library and writing in the margins. Prospero's Books is a blog about seeing the world as a whole, by looking at
- signs, especially the relationships between signifiers and what they signify
- stories, especially big-picture stories, such as myths and the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce
- systems, especially complex, nonlinear systems
- spirit, especially as understood by the Christian and Western esoteric traditions
Welcome! Please join the conversation.

—Kenneth W. Davis

(Note: Although I admire Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books, this blog is not directly about that film. )

Who, and Some of What, I Am

15 July 2006

Shakespeare, post-Taliban

Shakespeare's universality was demonstrated again this month in Herat, Afghanistan, where an Afghan company presented Love's Labour's Lost in the Dari language. According to Jacob Baynham, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle,

. . . before an audience of 250, five women on a stage of carpets took off their veils. Ripples went through the crowd. Five years ago, under Taliban rule, Herat's women could scarcely leave their houses. But this evening's event showed that times had changed in Afghanistan. The throng was gathered to watch something that was until very recently unthinkable . . . .

Trickster Shakespeare would have loved it. Challenging fundamentalist politics and morality was something he knew about.

(Thanks to News on the Rialto for spreading the word.)

Posted by Kenneth W. Davis in Shakespeare, Spirit, Stories, Trickster | Permalink

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What I've been reading

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