Mr Ted Hughes's very difficult and severe theological book, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, almost disqualifies itself from this argument by its complexity which contrasts so markedly with the simplicities which abound both on this thread and in the general argument as presented in the quotes wande provides from certain newspapers: the interconnectedness of which I often point out and which are scientific facts despite being consistently ignored and which give the lie to the impression that a large number of sources are being quoted when in actual fact there are a mere handful and all large corporations centred in megalopolitan areas where licentiousness is the Zietgeist.
Hence it is not easy to provide quotes from the book in the absence of the overall context. Nevertheless, here is one which might cause someone to acquire the book and follow up the argument and be abled to know why the simplicities are grossly misleading.
Quote:But while Iago performs this role, as the envious intelligence of the Puritan, inquisitorial outlook, he throws a bigger shadow. It is clear enough in the text that Iago inherits an old morality-play identity as a parody of the devil himself ( "I look down towards his feet, but that's a fable"), and that his obsession with the love of Othello and Desdemona resembles Satan's jealousy of Adam and Eve in Paradise---fanatic to manipulate and destroy the blissful reality and relationship that he can never share, and that excludes him. But Shakespeare goes further. Othello is powerless to resist the sheer pragmatic logicality of Iago's suggestions. Iago's conquest is a triumph of pure empirical reason. But as if this identification of loveless intelligence with reason and the scientific method, and all three with the Satan who destroys love, were not enough, Shakespeare uses various means to invest Iago with his full theological credentials. And there is little doubt , when Iago identifies himself with the pointed inversion: "I am not what I am", that Satan himself has taken on the mantle of Jehovah in the Reformation myth, as the destroyer of the Goddess. In this portrait , where the Jehovah God , the Jehovah Satan, and dogmatic, rational, objective (finally atheistic) intelligence coalesce in a malevolent onslaught on the world of love, Shakespeare passes close to Ivan Karamazov's Grand Inquisator on the one side and to Blake's Urizen on the other. And the fact that Iago is one of Shakespeare's most densely realized characters gives these theological and mythic elements in the algebra of his make-up the fullness, and the dynamic force, of a mystery of life.
So now we have not only Shakespeare banned from secular school curricula but also Dostoeevsky, Blake and Ted Hughes, a Poet Laureate. And, in the fullness of time, from the Stage, from libraries and private bookshelves. And Goethe's Faust.
And the rational scientific case for eugenics, which not one Darwinist dare make, then becomes unanswerable and lingerie and female beautification become anachronisms as neither affect biological determinism and the search for perfection.
So put that to Barbara Forrest, the NCSE, the ACLU, the ladies of wande's quotes and those others you might know less formally.
Incidentally, Bobby Jindal was on his Rhodes Scholarship in Oxford in the same year Hughes's book was published.
