A Quote by Edward Bond
Shakespeare has no answers for us at all
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Shakespeare has no answers for us at all.
You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.
In fact, it is Shakespeare who gives us the map of the mind. It is Shakespeare who invents Freudian Psychology. Freud finds ways of translating it into supposedly analytical vocabulary.
For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong.
I won't say he [Shakespeare] 'invented' us, because journalists perpetually misunderstand me on that. I'll put it more simply: he contains us. Our ways of thinking and feeling-about ourselves, those we love, those we hate, those we realize are hopelessly 'other' to us-are more shaped by Shakespeare than they are by the experience of our own lives.
One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.
The answers we seek aren't always the answers we want, are they? But knowing the truth is what helps us sleep at night.
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.
What makes a leader great is not the fact that she (or he) has all the answers, but the ability to inspire and empower us to find the answers.
"With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart" once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!
All the unimaginative assholes in the world who imagine that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare because it was impossible from what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford that such a man would have had the experience to imagine such things - well, this denies the very thing that separates Shakespeare from almost every other writer in the world: an imagination that is untouchable and nonstop.
Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.
To gain knowledge, we must learn to ask the right questions; and to get answers, we must act, not wait for answers to occur to us.
Answers to prayer have to be on God's schedule, not ours. He hears us pray, and He answers according to His will in His own time.
Shakespeare doesn't belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now. It's like coal. The only meaningfulness of a piece of coal starts and finishes with its combustion, giving us light and heat. And that to me is Shakespeare.
The psychologists are valiantly trying to provide us with answers, the religious people are trying to provide us with answers. I think it properly falls on the cultural workers to investigate this predicament with a little less concern for the marketplace and a little more concern for their higher calling.
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