does, of spitting in the face of a friend? I think not. Fugard reminds us, of course, even if he does not
mention it directly, that the grownup King Henry must, in Henry V , have his old friend Falstaff hanged.
Do the values endorsed by Shakespeare lead directly to the horrors of apartheid? For Fugard they do,
and his play leads us back to a reconsideration of those values and the play that contains them.
That’s what writers can do with Shakespeare. Of course, they can do it with other writers as well, and
they do, if somewhat less frequently. Why? You know why. The stories are great, the characters
compelling, the language fabulous. And we know him. You can allude to Fulke Greville, but you’d have
to provide your own footnotes.
p. 46So what’s in it for readers? As the Fugard example suggests, when we recognize the interplay
between these dramas, we become partners with the new dramatist in creating meaning. Fugard relies on
our awareness of the Shakespearean text as he constructs his play, and that reliance allows him to say
more with fewer direct statements. I often tell my students that reading is an activity of the imagination,
and the imagination in question is not the writer’s alone. Moreover, our understanding of both works
becomes richer and deeper as we hear this dialogue playing out; we see the implications for the new
work, while at the same time we reconfigure our thinking, if only slightly, about the earlier one. And the
writer we know better than any other, the one whose language and whose plays we “know” even if we
haven’t read him, is Shakespeare.
So if you’re reading a work and something sounds too good to be true, you know where it’s from.
The rest, dear friends, is silence.
7 –... Or the Bible
p. 47CONNECT THESE DOTS: garden, serpent, plagues, flood, parting of waters, loaves, fishes,
forty days, betrayal, denial, slavery and escape, fatted calves, milk and honey. Ever read a book with all
these things in them?
Guess what? So have your writers. Poets. Playwrights. Screenwriters. Samuel L. Jackson’s character in
Pulp Fiction, in between all the swearwords (or that one swearword all those times) is a Vesuvius of
biblical language, one steady burst of apocalyptic rhetoric and imagery. His linguistic behavior suggests
that at some time Quentin Tarantino, the writer-director, was in contact with the Good Book, despite all
his Bad Language. Why is that James Dean film called East of Eden? Because the author of the novel on
which the film is based,p. 48John Steinbeck, knew his Book of Genesis. To be east of Eden, as we shall
see, is to be in a fallen world, which is the only kind we know and certainly the only kind there could be
in a James Dean film.
The devil, as the old saying goes, can quote Scripture. So can writers. Even those who aren’t religious
or don’t live within the Judeo-Christian tradition may work something in from Job or Matthew or the
Psalms. That may explain all those gardens, serpents, tongues of flame, and voices from whirlwinds.
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), four white men ride up to the house in Ohio where the escaped
slave Sethe has been living with her small children. In a fit of determination to “save” her children from
slavery, she tries to kill them, succeeding only with her two-year-old daughter, known later as Beloved.
No one, neither ex-slave nor free white, can believe or understand her action, and that incomprehension
saves her life and rescues her remaining children from slavery. Does her violent frenzy make sense? No.
It’s irrational, excessive, disproportionate. They all agree on that. On the other hand, there’s something
about it that, to us, makes sense. The characters all see four white men from slave country riding up the