In the process old ideas will be rediscovered and sometimes even repeated, while genuinely new insights will be introduced. Though more comfortable and seemingly more natural than anything else, our view is not the right view it departs from what preceded it but only at the cost of introducing new distortions that will in turn need to be corrected. A corollary of Eliot's insight is that one benefit of recognizing how Shakespeare has been understood in the past is to recognize better how we understand him ourselves.
Eliot's comment that while we can never be right about Shakespeare, "we should from time to time change our way of being wrong." Bate's point is that "the Romantics were especially good at driving out assorted errors of Voltaire and Dr Johnson with new errors of their own" ( Romantics, 3).
1Reflecting on the decisive transition from neo-classical to Romantic criticism of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate cites T.
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