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Sep 4View SourceThe thorny of question of who - or rather, what, we should say - was behind the works attributed to "Shakespeare" has divided the scholars for centuries, and continues to do so, but chiefly for reasons which have little to do with the central preoccupations of this group.
There is no question that the works of Shakespeare have been used to disseminate ideas, rather than merely presenting themselves as the expression of the ideas of an age or of one man.
One work worth looking at, for a number of reasons, is that of Martin Lings, one-time secretary of R. Guénon and like him, a convert to Islam. This book has been republished under a variety of names, no doubt for marketing reasons: "The Secret of Shakespeare", and so on. It derives from a series of annual conferences on Shakespeare's plays. Yet Lings, the wily old fox, resisted the temptation to explicitly state his central thesis until shortly before his recent death:
"“We know what we are, but know not what we may become,” observed Shakespeare, who no doubt knew not that four hundred years after his death, he himself would be proclaimed a Sufi Muslim. “Shakespeare would have delighted in Sufism,” said the Islamic scholar Martin Lings, himself a Sufi Muslim who also goes by the name Abu Bakr Siraj ad-Din. “We can see he obviously knew a lot about some kind of equivalent sect or order.”" [ http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=10805 ]
The "negative consequences" can easily be deduced from the foregoing statement.
Moreover, to say that many characters in the Shakespearian canon are not examples to emulate is an understatement, yet we ought to take into account the theatrical device of the "foil" - deliberately contrasting one character with another.
evola_as_he_is@yahoogroups.com
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