Orwell's Essays: Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool

Do you enjoy Shakespeare? What if someone told you that Shakespeare was a hack and that you have simply been conditioned to idolize a mid-rate playwright?

In 1903, Leo Tolstoy wrote an essay denouncing Shakespeare as a bad dramatist. He accused Shakespeare of lacking genuine moral purpose and dismissed his plays as contrived, melodramatic, and meaningless.

He felt that Shakespeare's fame was due to propaganda by German professors towards the end of the eighteenth century. Tolstoy claimed that Shakespeare was still admired only because of a sort of mass hypnosis or "epidemic suggestion".

George Orwell's response from 1947, titled “Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool,” is less about affirming Shakespeare’s talent and more about the psychology of contrarians who define their insight by standing against common admiration, mistaking the warmth of shared feeling for delusion.

Join us for this discussion about art, subjectivity, and the contrarians who won't let us enjoy. All are welcome, and no reading is required!

However, the Orwell essay is short, and worth the read, if you find the time.