Thursday, February 12, 2015

Chandler on Shakespeare

"Shakespeare would have done well in any generation, because he would have refused to die in a corner; he would have taken the false gods and made them over, he would have taken the current formulae and forced them into something lesser men would have thought them incapable of. [...] If some people had called some of his work cheap (which some of it is), he wouldn't have cared a rap, because he would know that without some vulgarity there is no complete man. He would have hated refinement, as such, because it is always a withdrawal, a shrinking, and he was much too tough to shrink from anything."
~Raymond Chandler in a letter to Hamish Hamilton - April 22, 1949

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