Shakespeare, Pastiche, Imagination, Intellect, and Dogmatism

Reading Shakespeare creates several problems for me. He jogs my imagination from its lethargy. I want to write fictions that are feeble copies of his. I excuse myself by saying a paltry imagination is better than none at all. Even the meanest sort such as I have the desire to create something.

I also find it difficult to stop reading him once I have begun. The hours pass quickly before I realize it has grown late.

To call a piece of writing pastiche condemns the work in a not so subtle way. That is unfortunate since pastiche is how the imagination works. And the human imagination makes the human intellect.

Where does Shakespeare stand in terms of pastiche? I know some of the works that inspired his plays such as Plutarch’s Lives. He acutely observed his time and place and merged it with historical perspective. His vocabulary and mastery of blank verse did not arrive completely by itself without sources of inspiration. I think of Wittgenstein’s Private Language argument when I say this. I conclude he was one of the all time great masters of pastiche. Thus, I consider him a vast intellect.

The core issue with the intellect revolves around when the imagination has guessed aright about the answers to the questions with which it troubles itself. That is the central problem with dogmatism and how to decide whether the intellect has locked itself inside a stuffy room.

New problems present themselves to me unbidden. My imagination will work on these problems at the unconscious level even if I suspect I know the solutions from previously entrenched beliefs. I can run, but I cannot hide from my imagination. Affirming a dogmatic view at the expense of using my imagination creates a miserable psychic tension, for the imagination will not be denied.

How many conundrums of human nature would be resolved if we recognized the primacy of imagination and the power of pastiche that makes it go?