Palin is NOT Shakespeare

I want to break away from anything current for a moment, and respond to Drew's post "Lies of Palin: We HAVE Seen This Before," because I believe he misread my post. I did liken the Palin saga to Jacobean tragedies: I did not liken her to Shakespeare; I was not being too nice.

The audience is what makes Jacobean tragedies fascinating. The plays were brutal and bloody, there were more casualties during a Jacobean tragedy than any other play genre at the time. Jacobean tragedies left the "dead" actors onstage for the entire rest of the play to display their deaths, and the audiences LOVED IT! People came from any- and everywhere to watch a disgusting tale unwind, and didn't do anything to stop the carnage onstage. There was a moral vision blurred within the play itself, and within the audience watching it.

The key to comparing Palin with Jacobean tragedy is to note that there were NOTHING nice about the plays. They are not the stereotypical "Shakespeare" play (although there is nothing nice about those either,) and they do not reflect the eloquence we tend to associate with playwrights from the 1500s.

Rather, Jacobean tragedies explored the moral reversal I mentioned in my last post (public/private and surface/depth) within the characters, and directly within the audience. Jacobean tragedies started a social phenomenon that removed people from their everyday quaint lives, and stuck them into their sadistic haven. That is what we see the Palin campaign doing with the American audience. Our moral understanding of private and public have been switched, and we like it.

Often, we look at Shakespearean contemporaries in an untouchable light. Considering 500 years difference between the 1500s and now, the names of the remaining playwrights ARE famous and well-respected (although, it was often due to reprinting and editing that made them well-written.) And I would ask you, as a scholar, to remove the social "wow factor" from the time of Shakespeare's contemporaries, so we can look at the real issue- Palin's campaign is a Jacobean tragedy because it is brutally affecting our social morals.

As writers, if we can't compare something brutally disgusting, and morally inept with Shakespeare's contemporaries, what can we do?



**For more information on Jacobean Tragedies, or for a good read, I would recommend starting with Thomas Kyd and read his play "The Spanish Tragedy."**