I found it interesting the declension of peoples’ speech: Gods, Aristocrats, Men/People, Chaos, and their respected idioms.  Having not studied much Shakespeare, I started reading Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare And The Goddess Of Complete Being.  As we have been talking about in class, that Shakespeare wrote for the whole populace and to both the high and low class.  I was thinking if that was even realistic and possible.  Hughes actually gave me a definitive answer, ” While the mythic writer turns inward, facing what Eliot called ‘the higher dream,’ interpreting that mystical vision in imagery wholly commandeered by the subjective meanings of the vision, the realist faces in the opposite direction, interpreting our shared, external reality through the creation of human characters who seem in every way like real people in real circumstances.  Because of Shakespeare’s power to create such characters, it is customary to set him among these realists, as one of the very greatest,”(40).  So according to Hughes, not only is it possible to write for everyone, but Shakespeare was perhaps the greatest at communicating to the whole populace.

I haven’t read Joyce, but Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are tied for my favorite books.  Hughes gives a good imagery of their prose, “-as if while Balzac’s realism is wrought iron, and Dicken’s bronze, and Tolstoy’s phosphor-bronze, and Joyce’s steel, each giving off, as it certainly does, its own unique poetry of burnish, Shakespeare’s realism is some not-yet-identified metal melted from a chunk of meteor-but still a metal of true realism,”(41).  By not categorizing Shakespeare’s realism, in itself is categorizing Shakespeare’s realism by itself, which makes it all the more interesting to me.