Changing Our Way of Being Wrong: T. S. Eliot's Shakespeare

Abstract

Persse McGarrigle, the questing young academic in David Lodge’s campus novel Small World (1984), seeks to impress the impressionable with a pretentious MA thesis on ‘The influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare’. Had Persse been a more attentive student of Eliot, he’d have known that the author of the dictum ‘that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’ anticipated his postmodern thunder by half a century (Eliot: 1951, p. 15). G. K. Hunter claimed, extravagantly, that Eliot ‘virtually invented the twentieth-century Shakespeare in a collection of asides’; a more judicious assessment of the evidence has been performed by Neil Corcoran’s recent study, which argues that Eliot is among the poets ‘manifestly responsible for making Shakespeare the first modern’ (Hunter: 1978, p. 299; Corcoran: 2010, p. 3). Yet the precise nature of Eliot’s modern Shakespeare remains elusive. In 1927, Eliot told the Shakespeare Association: ‘About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our way of being wrong’. According to Eliot, when changing our way of being wrong, ‘nothing is more effective in driving out error than a new error’ (Eliot: 1951, p. 126), recalling the merciless succession of power in Coriolanus: ‘One fire drives out...