2004: The Year in Movies
Certainly the Internet—on which any blowhard can build his or her own soapbox—has encouraged a slew of posturing hipster-critics (and, to be fair, a good many really smart, genuinely iconoclastic ones). But I've just finished Stephen Greenblatt's brilliant piece of speculative scholarship, Will in the World—an eye-opening treatment of the society that fed Shakespeare's plays, poems, and sonnets. And here's one cherce bit quoted by Greenblatt that puts our own critical stylings in perspective, a passage from pamphleteer and sometime critic Thomas Nashe on the subject of "upstarts" like the young William Shakespeare:
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StumbleUponIndeed it may be the engrafted overflow of some kill-cow conceit, that overcloyeth their imagination with a more than drunken resolution, being not extemporal in the invention of any other means to vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their choleric encumbrances to the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.
Methinks our own kill-cow conceits have a somewhat more euphonious decasyllabon.
David
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