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the ability, time and again, to elude centuries and the barriers of ge–
ography and of language, keeping a freshness and power that time,
far from tarnishing, only increases. The twists of fortune of the gods
and men of Hellas, sung by a blind poet three thousand years ago,
dazzle us still. Andjust like these remote predecessors of our culture,
who first heard these exploits from the mouths of the rhapsodes, we
too are made to experience vicariously those ceremonies of passion and
adventure for which, it would seem, the human heart greedily yearns
in all civilizations and all eras . The fire that sparked Shakespeare as,
in his tragedies and comedies, he recreated the Elizabethan universe
- from plebeian street gossip, with its sweep of picturesque types
and its rich vulgarity, to the refined cunning of the power-struggles
between princes and warriors, or the daintiness and torments oflove
and the celebration of desire - that fire blazes each time his stories
materialize on stage. And in spite of chronology and distance, it goes
on burning us in his verbal spell. Dreaming about the flesh-and-blood
beings of his time, and about the demons that stirred them on, Shake–
speare drew certain images in which the people of all epochs can find
- immutable and changing- their own faces .
The miracle would not have been possible if the old bard of the
beginnings of Greek civilization, and the English playwright, had
not been able to rely not only on a prodigious command of language
and an incandescent imagination, but on the possibility - at the mo–
ment of confronting the papyrus , or the paper - of opening the doors
to their own private phantoms, of letting them move about at will
and submitting themselves to the dictates of those specters. The civi–
lizations to which both writers belonged were repressive and abusive .
They perpetuated themselves by means of discrimination, inequality,
and injustice. But in the specific sphere within which the two men
operated - artistic creation - what we today would call "permissive–
ness," using our modern concept, was almost absolute. To the Greeks,
the poet was a spokesman for the gods, an intermediary for the be–
yond, someone in whom artistic and religious values were indissolubly
mingled. Unlike our own, that culture was unable to separate litera–
ture and art from morality and religion - or the spirit from the body.
How then could it have hindered the work of a man whose function
was that of priest and prophet, and at the same time of conjurer? The
poet, the artist, the thinker, served as bridges across which men and
gods , this world and the next could communicate. To the unlimited
freedom which they enjoyed, Greek culture owes its development
and that direction which allowed it to achieve, in ideas , in arts, and
