About two years ago, I worked as a lecturer at a college in Ilford, London. My immediate colleague had obtained, he said, a degree in English literature from a Pakistani university. He then explicated to me the contents of one of one of his essays. It was meant to impress me I think. His essay was original-ie clever. He apparently proposed that Shakespeare's characters were types. This he informed me that this was an innovative concept.
Now, in fact it would be extremely difficult to make such a case. Shakespeare, unlike many of his peers, such as Ben Jonson, is noted for the opposite. His escape from archetypes is what makes Shakespeare so great. Modern western literature owes him an extraordinary debt for his construction of complex personalities. For example, the MacBeths, Hamlet and Lear. It can be equally said, with justification, that modern psychology owes him the same debt.
This was an absurd claim, made by someone without perception or knowledge. As he later, in front of students, used such words as 'challengingdising', and others of equal strangeness, I wondered what kind of university he had studied at.
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