Shakespeare, Establishment Poet? Further Thoughts

Recently reconsidering the matter of Shakespeare's standing as an Establishment poet I found myself thinking of how English literature's opinion-makers esteem as the greatest of idols a figure from rather further back in the past than do other European literatures--the French, the German, the Russian. These three derive their literary idols from more recent times (Hugo, Goethe, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy) and I cannot help wondering if the fact that English literature does not do the same does not reflect something particularly conservative and backward-looking in the English tradition--that inclination to see history as having properly stopped in 1688 that Wells satirized a century ago and which can seem hardly less true of the country today.

Considering this I find myself recalling what Upton Sinclair had to say about Percy Bysshe Shelley in his own consideration of literature in Mammonart: that Shelley, not Shakespeare, was "the finest mind the English race produced." Well aware of the "ridicule" this statement "will excite," Sinclair acknowledged that few would compare Shelley's body of work with Shakespeare's--but stressed that Shelley's career and life ended prematurely at thirty, and had Shakespeare's been cut off at the same point his legacy would be very different today. Indeed, hailing Shelley as "among the sons of Rousseau who did not falter and turn back to feudalism, Catholicism or mysticism of any sort," and instead "fixed his eyes upon the future, and never wavered for a moment"; who, exemplifying that unfaltering, unwavering, forward-looking commitment to humanity and its liberation "attacked class privilege, not merely political, but industrial"; Sinclair predicted that in an England where the working class has been emancipated they would remember him as "one inspired saint in their history who visioned that glad day, and gave up everything in life to bring it nearer," and honor him by "making him their poet-laureate, and hailing him as the supreme glory of English letters"--Shakespeare dethroned once and for all.

It seems quite relevant that such a suggestion does not seem to be entertained today by anyone remotely of Sinclair's stature. Indeed, coming into contact with the sonnet by which Shelley is best known, "Ozymandias," they are most likely to see it used as an expression of disdain for those mainstream, Establishment-safe opinion has labeled tyrants, generally small-timers as small as Breaking Bad's Walter White--the old element of social rebellion so prominent within Shelley's career utterly gone out of it.