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Cover to Cover with Jack Foley

Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – June 26, 2019

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On January 23, KPFA presented an event at The Hillside Club in Berkeley. That event was a talk by the Chinese-American novelist, poet, and National Book Award winner, Ha Jin, who had recently published The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Li Po). The event was hosted by Jack Foley. Today’s show is the second half of a presentation of excerpts from that event; the recording was done by Jane Heaven.

Cover to Cover with Jack Foley

Cover to Cover with Jack Foley – June 12, 2019

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Today’s show speculates in various ways about William Shakespeare. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, in Germany, there lived a philosopher named Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel had something to say about William Shakespeare, who lived about two hundred years earlier, from 1564 to 1616, and whose birthday is celebrated as April 26. Hegel said that, in the portrayal of individual characters, Shakespeare stands “at an almost unapproachable height”; he made his creations “free artists of their own selves.” As such, Shakespeare’s characters are “real, directly living, extremely varied.” Hegel believed that Shakespeare was creating people—“real, directly living, extremely varied”—and that these people possessed the self-consciousness that is the hallmark of Hegel’s understanding: they were “free artists of their own selves.” Is this true of Shakespeare? Was Hegel correct in his analysis of Shakespeare’s characters? I don’t think so.