This Saturday morning, a briefly noted paradox--or, rather, a paradox in question form: Why is it that two centuries of First Amendment artistic freedom can (or perhaps must) produce aesthetic garbage like The Interview, whereas Western civilization's greatest masterpieces -- singularly produced by Western civilization's greatest writer -- emerged under (or perhaps from) government censorship?
This is certainly not an original question or freshly observed paradox. But it does persist as a real puzzler.
Shakespeare was, perforce, always looking over his shoulder; he knew of his government's murder of Christopher Marlowe and its torture of Thomas Kyd, and it scarcely required a genius to say to himself, Methinks I'll be more careful, when it comes to powers that be.
Accordingly Shakespeare danced around his era's immensely obtrusive and potentially fatal religious disputes -- in his sociocultural works we detect no personal preferences, whether Protestant, Catholic, agnostic or atheist -- and in his dynastic plays he addressed the supremely delicate question of regicide, while somehow evading royal displeasure. Thuggish, bone-crushing censors lurked everywhere, and artistically Shakespeare responded to official censorship, well … let's say, with much prudence. And yet no artist ever wrote more brilliantly or profoundly on the "issues" of his day, as well as those of the ages.
All this, no doubt, was what Iago-like Harry Lime (Orson Welles) was getting at in his short, incisive Third Man oration: "[I]n Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love -- they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
This post is bound to be misread by a few, notwithstanding this protestation that I in no way endorse censorship. We are led to wonder, though, if at least some of Shakespeare's revealed genius was not a product of it.