ABSTRACT
In T. S. Eliot's famous 1919 essay, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', acknowledgment of the indispensability of tradition is linked to a stress on the value of achieving impersonality in art, this against a stress on self-expression. As Eliot puts it in the other essay of 1919, that on Hamlet, 'The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative", in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked'. The friend of Shakespeare who wants Shakespeare to stay in a living and widely accessible arts tradition will be happy to take on new rewritings and adaptations of the original.
