To sublimate the malaise of election campaigns, no one like Shakespeare. Today's campaigns aim to make new bread with flour kneaded with the yeast of hatred. And of hate, Shakespeare knew a nest. What has always fascinated him are his formidable approaches to the human soul. It seems impossible that a small theatrical entrepreneur had the gift of exploring passions in such a precise and brilliant way at the same time, so deep, truthful, shocking. That is why so many lives have been invented for him. It has taken centuries to accept that a man from the village, with minor studies, could explore the main human drives so well.
The characters that Shakespeare studies come to us through his plays with the dazzling clarity of lightning. Ambition (Macbeth), jealousy (Othello), doubt (Hamlet), malice (Iago), delusional fatherhood (Lear)... Now, fascinated by this spectacular gallery of archetypes, we might forget that, in one of his most bittersweet works, Romeo and Juliet, tells us something perhaps definitive: the call of hate is more powerful than that of love.
Experts in the evolution of species refute this idea, explaining that the evolutionary victory of the human race has only one explanation: we are cooperative beings, we help each other. In the end: we love each other. The law of the jungle was not favorable to us and love saved us. That is why we won the primacy of the species and, to put it like the Bible, we dominated the earth.
Now, since Shakespeare (since Homer, in fact), the prestige of the rhetoric of war, strength and triumph has been so consolidated that cooperation is laughable, kindness is considered synonymous with imbecility ( bonism) and dialogue, understanding or pact are perceived as weakness and surrender. Nietzsche's resentment against the repressive Lutheran culture of his childhood has become a structural law of today's culture: love is for the weak and the weak.
