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PARTISAN REVIEW
did find himself in trouble with the authorities on account of his writ–
ings - took fuller advantage than Shakespeare of that casual privilege,
freedom of creation, granted playwrights in Elizabethan England.
The result : that fresco of man and his demons - political, social, reli–
gious, and sexual- that dazzles us with its variety and subtlety and,
better than armies of psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists,
illuminates for us the vertiginous complexity of human nature. In
Shakespeare's thirty-seven theatrical works, he reduced to dust that
rigid symmetry (among other things) which from the dawn of the
Christian era until his day had served to categorize mankind and
human actions : good or bad, saintly or sinning, libertine or chaste,
extravagant or miserly. For the first time, in the Shakespearean char–
acter, appears that man in whom, as Bataille wrote, the contradic–
tions mingle .
In speaking on the topic of freedom - perhaps the most vast and
multifaceted of all themes - if one does not wish to get lost in gener–
alities or to drown in details , but does hope to grasp reality, it is best
to start out from some concrete experience, as I have tried to do with
these brief references to Homer and Shakespeare. Jean
Fran~ois
Revel
has remarked that we should distrust those who claim to define free–
dom because, as a general rule, lying in wait behind each definition
of freedom that is proposed, lurks the intention of suppressing it.
And this much is true : the experience offreedom, like the experience
of love, is richer than any of the formulas that attempt to express it.
Yet while defining it is immeasurably difficult, nothing is easier than
identifying it and knowing when it is present or absent, if it is genuine
or an imitation, if we possess and enjoy it, or if they have snatched it
away from us.
Therefore , rather than seeking a definition to encompass free–
dom entirely, in its myriad nuances, it would be more useful to trace
its presence in history and evaluate the results - as would examining
the perils that besiege it, and knowing what it means to an individual
and a society to have or to lose it.
In almost all fields of human endeavor, as in literature, freedom
sprouts up in unexpected, casual fashion, by accident or thanks to
the inattentiveness of the dominant culture. For that culture leaves
certain areas of endeavor unregulated or unorganized, and there, as
a result of this unusual situation, individual initiative can reveal it–
self fully , in relative or complete dissonance with the prevailing cul–
ture . The result, in the short or the long run, is always just what we
have seen embodied in the works of such as Homer or Shakespeare:
