Abstract

This paper traces the struggle over the meaning of Shakespeare evident in the different uses interpretations of his plays have been put to in the twentieth century. True to C.S. Lewis's claim that "In certain senses of the world 'love', Shakespeare is not so much our best as our only love poet", T. S. Eliot, Huxley, Orwell, Joyce, Virginia Woolf - major English 'modernists' of the first half of the twentieth century - used Shakespeare to reinforce their own pacifist sentiments and oppose war by celebrating, like him, life and love. The next generation of writers, who reached maturity in the second half of the century, 're-discovered' Shakespeare in the same way and for the same reason - through their efforts to find the most meaningful way to order their reactions to the wars they had witnessed or participated in: the Cold War, the Vietnam war. In the last year of the century Shakespeare was invoked by NATO's spokesmen in support of the illegal war undertaken by that military organization against Yugoslavia. A number of performances of Shakespeare's plays, inspired by the same ideology, and funded by the same sources, also appeared. This paper is an attempt to understand what these new uses of Shakespeare tell us about the post-modern state of this civilization, about the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the brave new world of the next one. It is about the war against art, about the mental fight for its meaning, the same one that another great English artist, Blake, fought, in defense of which, as he says, the sward in his hand never slept, and his arrows of desire never ceased to fly