[No] one would have guessed from the title or the sub-title [of Edward Bond's Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death] that its hero was William Shakespeare. This is entirely appropriate because in an important sense it is not about Shakespeare at all….

[Essentially the play] is the continuation of an argument Bond had begun earlier …, in Narrow Road to the Deep North, his bitter parable about the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho. In the play, you will recollect, Basho helped to bring terrible suffering to his country by ignoring individual suffering as he travelled north in search of personal enlightenment.

The subject of Bingo is the same: the utter inadequacy, indeed the harmfulness, of the artist as a social animal. Bond's point is that writing is not enough: the artist is a man among men and must be a functioning part of the moral structure of society….

[In an...