.jpg)
Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 14, No. 10. August 9, 1951
Class Conflict
Class Conflict
is the crux of the whole tragedy. Faced with a time that is out of joint, he is too conscious of his own shortcomings to try to deal with it, and his principles are too revolted to let him try."The time is out of joint; O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right," (1.5).
I realise that it lays me open to all manner of abuse to suggest that a Soviet spokesman has even said anything sensible. But in 1932, following on Akimov's famous Moscow production of Hamlet, Radek wrote in Izvestia: "Hamlet is a monument to an epoch of upheaval. He is the man of the sixteenth century, of the beginning of the Reformation. He is a person in whom old beliefs are undermined, though not completely destroyed. He is no longer capable of direct action dictated by his old outlook."
"the Everlasting . . . fix'd
"that dread of something after death." (III,1)
he settled nothing. For when the time is out of joint it takes more than one man to set it right."take up arms against a sea of troubles"
And, as history proved, the Renascence did more good for the world than harm. The Claudiuses—and the Edmunds and Macbeths and Faustuses and Barabases and Tamburlaincs—were also the pirate kings of politics and commerce and adventure on whose privateering was built the material (and untimately the cultural) prosperity of capitalist England; and the Hamlets, like the young gentlemen in Auden's poem (himself, in turn, a descendant of the pirate kings),
"owned a world that had its day."
—Despard.