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...of even if we should bother. The balance of opinion is that, at the very least, the topic should be framed in different terms from the ones posed by the title question.
I'm very pleased by this dissent. The aim of the question when I suggested it was to provoke discussion of a paradoxical situation that I have observed in much recent criticism of Shakespeare and other dramatists. Despite an overt skepticism among postmodern literary critics regarding the existence of a coherent individual subject, and despite a fairly widespread devaluation of early twentieth-century notions of characters as persons, critics continue to refer to Hamlet, Cleopatra, King Lear, Falstaff, and many others in language not easily divorced from the older language they eschew. As a result, a kind of doublespeak has developed among some critics, as if it were permissible to use the defunct language of character as long as one...
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