Huxley And Shakespeare
Do they read Shakespeare? asked the Savage as they walked, on their way to the Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the School Library. Certainly not, said the Head Mistress, blushing.
In Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World, allusions to William Shakespeare and his works emphasize the contrast between the Brave New World and the world in Shakespeares time and even the current time period. Enhancing the works meaning, the allusions and characters reactions to the allusions reveal the positive and negative aspects of our society today.
The main characters in 'Brave New World', Lenina Crowne, Henry Foster, and Bernard Marx, live in a futuristic world where babies are mass produced in laboratories and raised to perform various functions in society. In order to assure community, stability, and identity, the basis of their world, these functions must be met and solitary amusements are discouraged. Inferring that reading Shakespeare is entertaining, people in the ''Brave New World'' have 'feelies' to amuse themselves instead. To demonstrate the differences between the two worlds, Huxley alludes to Shakespeares works which the characters consider distracting and uncivilized. With little knowledge of the past, the characters only have heard vague information about worship of God, respect for Shakespeare, and psychology of Freud. Instead of God, they worship Ford partially because of his T-model and its influence on the future of technology and his existence as the spark for their world. They cannot fathom the events in Shakespeares works. For example, in Romeo and Juliet, Capulet and Lady Capulet plan Juliets marriage to Paris even though Juliet loves Romeo. Since the characters in Brave New World live in a self-satisfying world where they are promiscuous and rely on drugs like soma and mescal, they cannot relate to Shakespeare.
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