It's simply not disputed that the second tetralogy (considered in terms of composition, not historical chronology) is stronger than the first, but the first -- Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Henry VI and Richard III -- is not without great merit. The three parts of Henry VI -- of which Part 1 may actually have been composed last -- are sloppy, sprawling, and glorious. They are, to my mind, among the most purely entertaining of Shakespeare's plays. The winner at the end of Part 3 -- only a temporary winner, as the play makes quite clear -- is King Edward of the Yorkist faction, and upon his triumph he sums up the long list of the defeated quite well:
What valiant foemen, like to autumn's corn
Have we mown down in tops of all their pride!
Three dukes of Somerset, threefold renowned
... Two Cliffords, as the father and the son;
And two Northumberlands; two braver men
Ne'er spurred their coursers at the trumpet's sound. (5.7.3-9)
This is just a partial list, of course, of defeated Lancastrians -- just the names that have come in multiples. There's also murdered King Henry and his murdered son, Prince Edward, who is not to be confused with Edward of York (now king), and who may or may not be King Henry's son, anyway, given good Queen Margaret's long-term love for the Duke of Suffolk (who is also dead now). We have seen multiple Gloucesters, who stand out in sharpest contrast. Take good but ill-fated Humphrey, brother of the late Henry V and one of the very few characters in this series who can simply, unequivocally be called good. Then take, by contrast, that other Gloucester: crookback Dickie, who slashes his way to the throne in the last title in the tetralogy, the one that bears his name.
Richard III is often cited as Shakespeare's first great creation, and it is true that he bears a certain charisma. More and more, he comes to dominate 3 Henry VI, making him inevitably the focus of its sequel. Is Richard the first likeable slasher in the history of literature? We know he's evil, but he's got such a charm about him in knowing who he is. In an odd way, he is honest in his dishonesty, in the sense that he is true to himself. And he is true to us, to his audience, speaking to us so frankly in his soliloquies, delightfully sharing with us his plans to murder anyone who comes between him and the crown, be they the bearers of his own family's blood or no. We've seen killers, murderers, rapists, raving warriors before, but Richard might be our first true psychopath in all of literature. He has no remorse, little feeling, nothing that resembles what we call conscience, until it comes to him in a dream near the very end. He seems eerily, frighteningly real, nonetheless, frighteningly human. He's not the bogeyman; rather, his humanity, as limited as it is, is on full display. Richard is the medieval vice character, but with a depth that makes him more than just a prop or a walking idea. In that respect, the invention of his character is utterly brilliant. If Richard II was the poet-king, elegist for a vanquished sense of national unity, Richard III is the actor-king, one who can play any part that it takes to get to the top: the victim, the lover, the loving brother and uncle, the wounded soul, but above all the killer. His seduction of Lady Anne is masterful, an achievement that would be worthy of even Iago's admiration, and I wonder if perhaps Richard isn't the slicker and more subtle of the two. Richard's post-nightmare soliloquy in Act 5 is another achievement on Shakespeare's part. Is Shakespeare telling us that there is not a man alive, no matter how vile, who cannot feel the stab of remorse? Here we have Richard talking to himself, a fragmented conscience. This final soliloquy is not directed at us, but rather at himself. It's a remarkable innovation, with language that is blurred and elliptical to match his state of consciousness. Richard is never more alive than in this penultimate moment.
In the final analysis, however, Richard is unequivocally evil, but other characters tend to fall into a grayer moral domain -- or at least they weave in and out between the audience's moral censure and the audience's sympathy. We side first with one character, then with another. Richard of York (father of Edward, his eldest son who becomes king, and of crookback Richard, younger son but nonetheless the father's namesake) is despicable at times, such as when he contributes to the plot against Humphrey of Gloucester in Part 2, but admirable at other times, and never more so than when he falls victim first to Queen Margaret's scorn in Part 2, and then to her blade. As 'tis said multiple times in the series, the manner of his dying, the tears he sheds at the news of his youngest son Rutland's death, the wicked way that Queen Margaret and Lord Clifford rub -- literally -- Rutland's blood into him, all of that is enough to bring his own enemies, such as that Northumberland who is present, to tears.
That is, it will bring any enemies who have human hearts to tears -- Clifford seems to have lost his own heart in revenging his father's death, and Margaret's heart may well be less than fully human. Queen Margaret is one of Shakespeare's boldest, most audacious women, and famously the cause of the writer's first notoriety -- earning him a mention in Greene's Groats-worth of Wit (1592). York, in his final moments of defiance before he is slain, effectively sums up her character: "tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide" (1.4.140). As a character who appears in four separate plays, Margaret is distinctive in the Shakespearean canon. It's hard to find much sympathy for Margaret -- she borders on psychopathic herself -- but for the general fact that this life as queen was not one she chose for herself. Had her husband made a stronger king, she might not have to go to such lengths she goes to in order to secure his throne and to secure a royal future for her son. Unlike Queen Elizabeth, who made a battlefield appearance at Tilbury as a motivational gesture, Queen Margaret actually leads her army into battle, wielding a true sword. One cannot help but be fascinated by her character, whether you can find any cause to admire her or no -- rather, it's simply the idea of it, that a woman could be so remorselessly bad -- and so bold. In battle, she's more a man than her husband, whose effeminate nature brands him incompetent to rule, and who sits by haplessly, disinclined to join the fray.
How could that paragon of virtue, King Henry V, have borne such a son, so unfit to govern that he loses the English territories in France, sees the nation divided to its very core, and ultimately loses his own kingship (multiple times)? Hapless and hopeless, Henry himself makes clear to us throughout the plays that bear his name that he would make a better tender of sheep -- that is, real, live, bleating, wool-bearing sheep -- than he makes tender of the imperial flock. His weakness is in no small part the cause of the whole bloody debacle here. Yet he bears a meekness, a mildness, a gentleness of character that sometimes wins us over. He is too good to be king, perhaps, but he would have made a right honest clergyman. His death is positively Christ-like. And he is, after all, the king, for those who still believe in that sort of thing.
The quality of writing throughout this tetralogy varies widely, and most scholars agree that Shakespeare was not likely to have been the sole author of 1 Henry VI, which is particularly inconsistent. Whether Shakespeare revised someone else's work or collaborated, we cannot know. I myself am not past the idea that Shakespeare, a newly minted writer at this point, simply had not mastered the art of consistency yet. I have no doubt that Shakespeare could have written the weakly developed Act Five of 1 Henry VI. Maybe his boss just said to him, "Hey, kid, I like the material, but this Joan of Arc chick, she's gotta be bad in the end. Real bad, I mean. For Chrissakes, you gotta give us a reason to burn her at the stake." And sure enough, Shakespeare does just that. We have a conjuration of demons and Joan's own damning self-indictments to assure audiences that she is a witch and no maid by far. (She tells the English that they cannot burn her at the stake because she is pregnant, though with whose child she cannot offer an answer with any certainty. They burn her anyway. They are English, after all.) What had been a compelling and complex character study deflates in seconds flat.
Nevertheless, it's all quite entertaining, even Joan's conjuration of demons. It could give The Tudors a run for its money. Imagine -- a historical soap opera with the requisite HBO-ready "boobs and blood" that go along with the genre -- but with good dialogue. I'd pay to see it.
Richard III is sometimes considered Shakespeare's first great work of literature. True, it's ultimately the best of these plays, but it's also so clearly a continuation of them, almost a Part 4 to the Henry VI plays, which are not without their charms, primarily the fact that they are so brisk and entertaining, but also the sense that they convey a world that rings true politically and characters who generally possess a realistic depth. Together, these plays constitute a dramatically thrilling but politically demoralizing chapter in British history, a time when the political system had failed and English identity itself was at stake. True, in the end you can't remember the difference between the first Somerset and the second one, but the sense of movement still sweeps you along. This is exciting stuff to read. Whether he wrote it all or not, it's still Shakespeare.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Shakespeare's Tetralogies
Of course, Shakespeare never intended for anyone to read the two tetralogies straight through in chronological order -- he may never have intended anyone to read them at all. But that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile exercise to try them out in historical order, from Richard II straight through to Richard III. The effect of doing so is rather curious, and it presents a compelling insight into what Shakespeare might have meant by his notion of history.
History, at the time, was a literary art that had little concern for factual detail, and drama had in the eras preceding Shakespeare always been the stuff of moral pageantry. Combining the two together as Shakespeare did was a new invention being pioneered in his time. Indeed, Shakespeare has been said to have invented the history play himself, though to argue so might be to slight some of the efforts of his contemporaries. Certainly, though, the history play was a new thing, and Shakespeare proved himself adept at unlocking its potential. The result is that the moral certitude that provided the backbone of the medieval morality play was vanquished. Even that walking vice, Richard of Gloucester, is a curious character, one with dimension, and not the flat emblem at work in plays of past eras. Enter a world of moral complexity, of something altogether more real and more recognizably human.
As for the notion of history, the insight that Shakespeare seems to offer here is that it moves. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's famous statement, in his Second Inaugural, about the coming of the US Civil War. After a brief but far-reaching account of the circumstances leading up the war, Lincoln simply states, "And the war came." Ultimately, the mechanisms and motives of history are lost somewhere in the details, and we are left with a series of moving images attached to a result. From the perspective of the present, the events of the past always seem inevitable -- because we have no other past to take its place. Eventually, the names of individuals characters blur and become indistinct, and we are left merely with a sense of the inexorable sweep of it all.
Reading the two tetralogies from start to finish, I realized that the chronological approach captures the sweep of history, but it doesn't make for the dramatic arc that formed as Shakespeare wrote the plays. To end with the first tetralogy is to see England at its worst -- that is, history at it its worst, because Shakespeare's England is a stand-in for the bigger world and its history. In the first tetralogy, we see a nation taken to the brink of failure. That it is redeemed by the first triumph of the Tudor dynasty in the final pages of text does little to dispel the sense of collapse that dominates the series, which shakes the foundations of the notion of kingship and threatens to call the whole thing out as a fiction. We wonder how the puissant seed of glorious Henry V could produce such a milksop as Henry VI. If that's the case, then all indeed is vanity.
To build up, then, to Henry V, to end his long run of history plays on that note of rousing national unity, may seem a little cheap, but it works. This sequence re-establishes the myth of kingship, restores the political enterprise of the nation, gives the people what they want: a glimmering, shining moment of common purpose and shared glory. Of course, it was all probably an accident of his career (possibly a result of the fact that there was, purportedly, already a play about Henry V written in the early 1590s), but by disposing of Henry VI early on, Shakespeare freed himself up to end the story on a flourish of triumph. Revisionist history, as history generally is.
History, at the time, was a literary art that had little concern for factual detail, and drama had in the eras preceding Shakespeare always been the stuff of moral pageantry. Combining the two together as Shakespeare did was a new invention being pioneered in his time. Indeed, Shakespeare has been said to have invented the history play himself, though to argue so might be to slight some of the efforts of his contemporaries. Certainly, though, the history play was a new thing, and Shakespeare proved himself adept at unlocking its potential. The result is that the moral certitude that provided the backbone of the medieval morality play was vanquished. Even that walking vice, Richard of Gloucester, is a curious character, one with dimension, and not the flat emblem at work in plays of past eras. Enter a world of moral complexity, of something altogether more real and more recognizably human.
As for the notion of history, the insight that Shakespeare seems to offer here is that it moves. I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln's famous statement, in his Second Inaugural, about the coming of the US Civil War. After a brief but far-reaching account of the circumstances leading up the war, Lincoln simply states, "And the war came." Ultimately, the mechanisms and motives of history are lost somewhere in the details, and we are left with a series of moving images attached to a result. From the perspective of the present, the events of the past always seem inevitable -- because we have no other past to take its place. Eventually, the names of individuals characters blur and become indistinct, and we are left merely with a sense of the inexorable sweep of it all.
Reading the two tetralogies from start to finish, I realized that the chronological approach captures the sweep of history, but it doesn't make for the dramatic arc that formed as Shakespeare wrote the plays. To end with the first tetralogy is to see England at its worst -- that is, history at it its worst, because Shakespeare's England is a stand-in for the bigger world and its history. In the first tetralogy, we see a nation taken to the brink of failure. That it is redeemed by the first triumph of the Tudor dynasty in the final pages of text does little to dispel the sense of collapse that dominates the series, which shakes the foundations of the notion of kingship and threatens to call the whole thing out as a fiction. We wonder how the puissant seed of glorious Henry V could produce such a milksop as Henry VI. If that's the case, then all indeed is vanity.
To build up, then, to Henry V, to end his long run of history plays on that note of rousing national unity, may seem a little cheap, but it works. This sequence re-establishes the myth of kingship, restores the political enterprise of the nation, gives the people what they want: a glimmering, shining moment of common purpose and shared glory. Of course, it was all probably an accident of his career (possibly a result of the fact that there was, purportedly, already a play about Henry V written in the early 1590s), but by disposing of Henry VI early on, Shakespeare freed himself up to end the story on a flourish of triumph. Revisionist history, as history generally is.
Friday, June 14, 2013
The Other Richard
Richard II is Shakespeare's elegy for an England that once was whole. It's easy to see why it's not one of the bard's more popular plays: it's mostly talk and little action. So many gauntlets get thrown down and picked up again with hardly a drop of blood spilled till the end. As political theatre, though, it's pretty intriguing. Forget The West Wing and House of Cards; Richard II started all of that. Perhaps it's time for a revival.
The most interesting thing about King Richard's character is his complete ignorance of what an off-putting and charmless blighter he really is. Richard is a character without much character, and he never does much to deserve our sympathy. He doesn't seem to have a sense of identity separate from his title, and when that is taken away from him his only sense of substance comes from bemoaning the loss of what once was his. He has no substance until he realizes that he is nothing. In a way, Richard is Shakespeare's ultimate king because he has no other qualities to interfere in the definition of his character -- he is the pure essence of kingship.
Even within the realm of the play, it's hard to tell what's true about Richard and what's not. Is he really a lecherous debauchee? In his interactions with his queen, he doesn't come off as one. He does, however, bear a callous disregard for the interests of anyone lower than he is -- and that includes everyone, of course. Reckless and profligate he is, a financially imprudent manager of the kingdom, and weak in earning the respect of anyone who has cause to question the wisdom of his decisions. Richard rules without regard to his subjects, and in the medieval worldview he inhabits, this is simply his prerogative. Those in the play who do respect him seem to do so because of his office, and this notion they cling to with a fierceness and determination that goes no little distance in helping a modern audience to understand what the notion of kingship meant at a certain point in history. As Marjorie Garber notes, "the older generation is shown to be impotent and powerless, placing its faith in God and in an old world order" (Shakespeare After All 244). That old world order is about to vanish. Henry Bolingbroke -- later King Henry IV -- is shrewder than Richard in this new world order, and yet, ultimately, almost equally hapless, as the same political machinations by which he topples Richard immediately threaten him, too. Richard II bears witness to nothing less than the invention of politics as we know it, when power ceased to be a right and became instead something that a ruler had to manage, manipulate, and defend from internal threats as well as external threats. The play reveals kingship itself as a communally agreed-upon fiction, a social construction. The title is awarded to the one who does the best job of convincing others that he should be king. When Richard dies, it marks the end of an era in which the privilege of kingship could be taken as a given.
A paradise England was then, but perhaps only a paradise in retrospect. Between the lines, the play questions if it really could have been that perfect if it held within it the mechanism of its own downfall and decline by placing such a hollow man on the throne. Once the illusion of kingly virtue is shattered, it's gone for good, though, and England is left in a precarious place. Two hundred years later, this was the still precarious England in which Shakespeare found himself. The language of the play, though, is continuously retrospective, the language of a paradise lost, and the action is completely downward, or perhaps chiastic -- with Richard falling as Bolingbroke rises. The first elegy of the play is spoken in prophetic form by the dying John of Gaunt, who in the midst of a longer speech declares
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, ...
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
... Is now leased out ....
That England that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
(2.1.45-72)
Fittingly, given the Eden theme here, much of the casual conversation throughout the play is devoted to gardening, to tending plants and making them bear fruit. Richard is no Adam, though; whatever fruit he eats imparts little knowledge, and instead of a line of descent he engenders only a downward descent of fortune. Many of Richard's speeches, increasingly lengthy and increasingly elegiac, would not be out of place coming from exiled Lear's mouth, but Richard, unlike Lear, fails to excite much sympathy.
What Richard does do right and do well is to elegize. He elegizes not only his downward descent from kingship but also the wholeness of the England that was, when the office of the king was enough to unite the kingdom. "Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs," Richard says when he first realizes that all is lost,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills.
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
(3.2.150-155, 160-161)
Richard's elegies are inevitably part harangue, as well. He's incredulous, outraged, offended; he's histrionic and petulant. Unlike Lear, who finds himself in a situation that is in some ways analogous, Richard never demonstrates remorse, never demonstrates a glimmer of understanding why he has fallen, only that he has: "for I must nothing be" (4.1.210). His most dramatic gesture is to smash a mirror in which he sees a reflection of himself, to prove "How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face" (4.1.302). The action produces a cool and measured rebuke from pragmatic Bolingbroke: "The shadow of your sorrow" -- meaning the sorrow that Richard's imprudent actions have produced -- "hath destroyed / The shadow of your face" (4.1.303-304). The unresolved irony of Richard's character is that he never once seems to acknowledge that his own weaknesses, his own poor decisions as a ruler, are the cause of his own downfall. Still, there are glimmers of an active consciousness, most especially in an exceptionally long and powerful speech at the end, which includes these lines:
Thus play I in one person many people.,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king.
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar.
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king.
Then am I kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke
And straight am nothing. But whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.
(5.5.31-41)
The idea of the self as nothing would be revisited by that other doomed king, the aged Lear, many years later. The meta-dramatic theme of the king playing a part will also be revisited in Macbeth's most famous soliloquy. The insights here are powerful and poetic. They do Richard little good, though, for by the end of the scene he is dead -- not, it is worth noting, without slaying two of his would-be murderers.
Is this play a history or a tragedy? The distinction here, as with Richard III, would seem only to place limits on a play that can appeal to traditions in both genres. The major structural irony of the play is that Richard himself in slain by the same means that set into motion the chain of events leading to his downfall. Rumor killed Gloucester -- the rumor that Richard wanted him dead, which is the kind of rumor that inspires ambitious men to action -- and the same kind of rumor kills Richard himself. The irony is not lost on the newly crowned Henry IV, who seems to realize that his own rule will be plagued by dissent and strife. The difference is that Henry will not deal so weakly with threats to his safety. One can believe that Henry has the capacity to be a better king, but will the office of kingship allow it in this new political world? This becomes the matter for the next installment in what scholars call the Henriad, chronologically the first of Shakespeare's two tetralogies in English history, thought the second in composition.
Lion-hearted Richard I may not have boasted a Shakespeare play to his name, but he has plenty else in legend. Richard III, of course, lives in ignominy -- rightly or wrongly, all parking lot discoveries aside. Richard II has languished in obscurity for lo these many years. He's a curious character, after all, though, and worth a second look -- despite the fact that the harder you look, the less there is to see.
The most interesting thing about King Richard's character is his complete ignorance of what an off-putting and charmless blighter he really is. Richard is a character without much character, and he never does much to deserve our sympathy. He doesn't seem to have a sense of identity separate from his title, and when that is taken away from him his only sense of substance comes from bemoaning the loss of what once was his. He has no substance until he realizes that he is nothing. In a way, Richard is Shakespeare's ultimate king because he has no other qualities to interfere in the definition of his character -- he is the pure essence of kingship.
Even within the realm of the play, it's hard to tell what's true about Richard and what's not. Is he really a lecherous debauchee? In his interactions with his queen, he doesn't come off as one. He does, however, bear a callous disregard for the interests of anyone lower than he is -- and that includes everyone, of course. Reckless and profligate he is, a financially imprudent manager of the kingdom, and weak in earning the respect of anyone who has cause to question the wisdom of his decisions. Richard rules without regard to his subjects, and in the medieval worldview he inhabits, this is simply his prerogative. Those in the play who do respect him seem to do so because of his office, and this notion they cling to with a fierceness and determination that goes no little distance in helping a modern audience to understand what the notion of kingship meant at a certain point in history. As Marjorie Garber notes, "the older generation is shown to be impotent and powerless, placing its faith in God and in an old world order" (Shakespeare After All 244). That old world order is about to vanish. Henry Bolingbroke -- later King Henry IV -- is shrewder than Richard in this new world order, and yet, ultimately, almost equally hapless, as the same political machinations by which he topples Richard immediately threaten him, too. Richard II bears witness to nothing less than the invention of politics as we know it, when power ceased to be a right and became instead something that a ruler had to manage, manipulate, and defend from internal threats as well as external threats. The play reveals kingship itself as a communally agreed-upon fiction, a social construction. The title is awarded to the one who does the best job of convincing others that he should be king. When Richard dies, it marks the end of an era in which the privilege of kingship could be taken as a given.
A paradise England was then, but perhaps only a paradise in retrospect. Between the lines, the play questions if it really could have been that perfect if it held within it the mechanism of its own downfall and decline by placing such a hollow man on the throne. Once the illusion of kingly virtue is shattered, it's gone for good, though, and England is left in a precarious place. Two hundred years later, this was the still precarious England in which Shakespeare found himself. The language of the play, though, is continuously retrospective, the language of a paradise lost, and the action is completely downward, or perhaps chiastic -- with Richard falling as Bolingbroke rises. The first elegy of the play is spoken in prophetic form by the dying John of Gaunt, who in the midst of a longer speech declares
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, ...
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
... Is now leased out ....
That England that was wont to conquer others
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
(2.1.45-72)
Fittingly, given the Eden theme here, much of the casual conversation throughout the play is devoted to gardening, to tending plants and making them bear fruit. Richard is no Adam, though; whatever fruit he eats imparts little knowledge, and instead of a line of descent he engenders only a downward descent of fortune. Many of Richard's speeches, increasingly lengthy and increasingly elegiac, would not be out of place coming from exiled Lear's mouth, but Richard, unlike Lear, fails to excite much sympathy.
What Richard does do right and do well is to elegize. He elegizes not only his downward descent from kingship but also the wholeness of the England that was, when the office of the king was enough to unite the kingdom. "Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs," Richard says when he first realizes that all is lost,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills.
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.
(3.2.150-155, 160-161)
Richard's elegies are inevitably part harangue, as well. He's incredulous, outraged, offended; he's histrionic and petulant. Unlike Lear, who finds himself in a situation that is in some ways analogous, Richard never demonstrates remorse, never demonstrates a glimmer of understanding why he has fallen, only that he has: "for I must nothing be" (4.1.210). His most dramatic gesture is to smash a mirror in which he sees a reflection of himself, to prove "How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face" (4.1.302). The action produces a cool and measured rebuke from pragmatic Bolingbroke: "The shadow of your sorrow" -- meaning the sorrow that Richard's imprudent actions have produced -- "hath destroyed / The shadow of your face" (4.1.303-304). The unresolved irony of Richard's character is that he never once seems to acknowledge that his own weaknesses, his own poor decisions as a ruler, are the cause of his own downfall. Still, there are glimmers of an active consciousness, most especially in an exceptionally long and powerful speech at the end, which includes these lines:
Thus play I in one person many people.,
And none contented. Sometimes am I king.
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar.
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king.
Then am I kinged again, and by and by
Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke
And straight am nothing. But whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.
(5.5.31-41)
The idea of the self as nothing would be revisited by that other doomed king, the aged Lear, many years later. The meta-dramatic theme of the king playing a part will also be revisited in Macbeth's most famous soliloquy. The insights here are powerful and poetic. They do Richard little good, though, for by the end of the scene he is dead -- not, it is worth noting, without slaying two of his would-be murderers.
Is this play a history or a tragedy? The distinction here, as with Richard III, would seem only to place limits on a play that can appeal to traditions in both genres. The major structural irony of the play is that Richard himself in slain by the same means that set into motion the chain of events leading to his downfall. Rumor killed Gloucester -- the rumor that Richard wanted him dead, which is the kind of rumor that inspires ambitious men to action -- and the same kind of rumor kills Richard himself. The irony is not lost on the newly crowned Henry IV, who seems to realize that his own rule will be plagued by dissent and strife. The difference is that Henry will not deal so weakly with threats to his safety. One can believe that Henry has the capacity to be a better king, but will the office of kingship allow it in this new political world? This becomes the matter for the next installment in what scholars call the Henriad, chronologically the first of Shakespeare's two tetralogies in English history, thought the second in composition.
Lion-hearted Richard I may not have boasted a Shakespeare play to his name, but he has plenty else in legend. Richard III, of course, lives in ignominy -- rightly or wrongly, all parking lot discoveries aside. Richard II has languished in obscurity for lo these many years. He's a curious character, after all, though, and worth a second look -- despite the fact that the harder you look, the less there is to see.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Macbeth and the Problem of Evil (Or, Why Does the Pot Call the Cauldron Black?)
In Macbeth, Shakespeare grapples with the problem of evil in a way that is more subtle and careful -- and also more enigmatic -- than the way other writers approach this theme. Unlike, say, Paradise Lost, Macbeth makes no attempt to answer our questions about the nature and cause of evil. That Paradise Lost succeeds as a poem is not a testament to the strength of Milton's theodicy -- in fact, it succeeds despite Milton's theodicy, which is primarily a curiosity to a modern reader, and which has been misinterpreted (perhaps deliberately) by our predecessors, most notably the Romantic poets. Blake, of course, claimed Milton to be a closet Satanist, "of the devil's party." This is the kind of pitfall Shakespeare wisely avoided by making his plays character-driven and not idea-driven. Shakespeare is one of our greatest thinkers, yet he eschewed philosophy of this sort. He seemed not to like answers, only questions. Macbeth, then, offers a perfect support for Keats's famous observation about "negative capability" in Shakespeare: "... when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact & reason."
If there is an idea or set of ideas behind Shakespeare's explication of evil in Macbeth, it is more like an anticipation of Hannah Arendt's ideas about the banality of evil. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are hardly banal in any way. But the evil that they do emerges from their character, from their human weaknesses. In Shakespeare, evil is not a character in a morality play, nor a philosopher's caricature of one. It does not derive from a transcendentally signified source and assert its authority. The view of evil as a preternatural force, a view that predominated past eras (and is still present in modern times) and which is present in superficial readings of Macbeth, is not valid ultimately in this play, the Weird Sisters notwithstanding.
Why cannot supernatural forces be the cause of evil here? After all, as one of the witches says, Macbeth is "wicked" -- meaning bewitched. But if Macbeth is bewitched, it is clearly because he has allowed evil forces to enter into his heart, just as Lady Macbeth does with her "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" speech. The witches merely hold up to Macbeth a mirror of his own secret thoughts. As A. D. Nuttall observes in Shakespeare the Thinker, Macbeth's start at the witches' prophecy is "the most economical feat of dramaturgy ever .... Macbeth's start means, 'How do they know that I have already thought about this happening?'" (284). The supernatural power of the Weird Sisters is in knowing Macbeth, not in controlling him. In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber notes that
The witches never say how it is that Macbeth will become king, only that it will happen. If they have some metaphysical control of him, Shakespeare never says so. Banquo does nothing to secure the witches' prophecy to him, yet he does eventually "get kings" -- the witches play no role in this but expressing foreknowledge of the fact. In fact, the witches' only practiced power, despite their talk of curses, seems to be that of prophecy, of knowledge and foresight. Macbeth is certainly played with by supernatural forces, but his actions are fated only in the classical sense: they are a natural extension of the qualities of character that he possesses and therefore an expression of his own being. As Heraclitus wrote, "A man's character is his fate."
All this external wrangling aside, let us take it as a given that Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's actions are evil. What causes these two to commit themselves to evil actions? Iago's evil was described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as "motiveless malignity." The reasons Iago himself gives for his actions are not ultimately very convincing; they are all out of proportion to the evil he inflicts. Richard III was, perhaps, simply evil by nature, a crookback owned by the devil with only the tiniest gleaming of conscience. Iago and Richard are fascinating psychological studies, but neither one provokes much sympathy. But Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do, or at least they should. In his characteristic fashion (that is, offering a bold claim that has the ring of truth to it, but providing little in the way of evidence), Harold Bloom writes, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:
The question then remains: what motive does Macbeth have to pursue evil?
What does not seem to explain Macbeth's actions is a lust for power. Unlike Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Macbeth spends very little time expressing his desire for "The sweet fruition of an earthly crown" -- and in fact he is keenly aware that he is the possessor of a "fruitless crown." Macbeth is a perfect antithesis -- parallel but opposite -- to Tamburlaine. Both are usurpers, yet one, like Ozymandias, lives to bear an imperious frown with which to cow the world and to sneer his cold command, while the other seems not to know what it is at all that he wants from the bargain. The only thing he seems to wish for is to make his wife happy.
Love itself, then, is one explanation, perhaps the most compelling, for Macbeth's actions. Bloom notes (again without providing any evidence) that the Macbeths are "profoundly in love with each other" (518). As evidence, I would offer up Act Three, Scene Two, with its pervasive use of terms of endearment, and with the Macbeths trying their best to gently reassure one another, to soothe each other. We know that "dearest chuck" is the kind of thing that's humiliating to say in public but fair game in the bedroom. That love could lead to evil is certainly not unheard of in Shakespeare. Consider Othello's claim to be "one that loved not wisely but too well." Could the same be said of the Macbeths? Macbeth loves his wife well enough to kill for her. Before killing Duncan, Macbeth resolves to be quit of the matter until Lady Macbeth insults his manliness and prods him into action. Is this compelled subservience or love? (Is there a difference, the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche somewhere asks.) The news of his wife's death causes Macbeth to launch into the most powerful statement of nihilism in the text, a profound meditation on futility and the nature of time. In this context, Macbeth's only motive seems to be his love for his wife -- once she is gone, the whole enterprise is utterly bootless.
Macbeth's overpowering prolepsis may also to some extent serve as cause to his evil deeds. Macbeth bears perhaps the most powerful imagination in all of Shakespeare, so powerful that it is out of his control. Macbeth suffers an inability to distinguish between present and future; he has been disjointed from time. Even in his great soliloquy, upon hearing of the present news of his wife's death, the only terms he has for expressing his reaction are grounded in seemingly irrelevant future modalities: "should" and "would." His wife is dead, and confronted with a situation that epitomizes the pastness of the past, all Macbeth can think about is the future and time in the abstract. Like an Abraham Lincoln speech that is almost completely devoid of first-person singular pronouns, Macbeth's reaction here is curiously both personal and impersonal. Macbeth's "horrible imaginings" mean that he walks about in a kind of fever dream, unable to sleep. His mind, once again, is full of scorpions. The hallucinatory power of the play comes even before the murder. When he sees the bloody dagger, Macbeth surmises, "Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses / Or else worth all the rest." He seems implicitly to side with the latter judgment. In writing about another play (Antony and Cleopatra), A. D. Nuttall notes that "Your sturdy empiricist is usually clear that mental images are unreal." Macbeth is clearly not a sturdy empiricist. Nuttall continues: "... Hume, the arch empiricist, was to discover that the only way he could distinguish percepts from images was by the greater 'vivacity' of the percepts." In Macbeth's case, the percepts pale to the vivid haunts of his imagination. The sense connected to the mind's eye is indeed worth all of the others. Lady Macbeth's description of her husband ("My lord is often thus") when he envisions Banquo's ghost is perhaps a convenient excuse, or perhaps an indication of what we would consider today to be an ongoing psychotic or even schizophrenic condition. Of course, Shakespeare would never have recognized the condition as such, but as Bloom states, "humankind will never stop catching up to him" -- it's not unimaginable that Shakespeare would be sensitive to such mental states before the rest of us were able to define them.
Along similar lines, one might wonder if Macbeth is suffering from a clinical condition that has only in recent decades been acknowledged as a serious source of distress for many combat veterans. Does Macbeth suffer from a pre-modern version of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder? In the first image we get of Macbeth (through the Captain's spectacularly vivid speech), we learn that he has "unseamed" his foe "from the nave to th' chops." The shedding of blood is what Macbeth does best. We are well aware today of the potentially dissociative effects that combat experience can have on the individual. To imagine that this is a modern disorder and not one that could afflict someone in Shakespeare's time (or Macbeth's, or Homer's, for that matter) is to sell humanity short.
As impossible as it seems, Lady Macbeth's motives are altogether more complicated, more difficult to sound.
In assaying her motives, though, we should first note that Lady Macbeth is a woman in a man's world. For comparison, Lady Kaede, the Lady Macbeth-inspired character in Akira Kursosawa's Ran, presents an excellent illustration of a woman at odds in a male-dominated feudal culture. In Kurosawa's garish technicolor phantasmagoria, Lady Kaede essentially masterminds the downfall of entire clans. Her motive is revenge. Shakespeare doesn't give us any such clear motive for Lady Macbeth, but the point can be justly applied. In order to advance herself in this world, Lady Macbeth takes on the sensibility of a man -- or she tries to, but the "compunctious visitings of nature" come to her eventually despite her best efforts. To gain power in such a world as the one she lives in, she might use only nefarious means. She must be unsexed in mind and deed to wield power. This fact alone fails to generate much sympathy for Lady Macbeth, though, just as Lady Kaede in Ran fails to excite any sympathy -- just fascination. Ultimately, there must be more to Lady Macbeth's character.
Lady Macbeth's background is poorly defined in the play, but it gives us much potential for speculation. Holinshed's Lady Macbeth is a widow. What happened to her husband? What happened to her children? Lady Macbeth makes it clear that she has been a mother -- "I have given suck" -- but the only children in the play are Macduff's murdered babes -- a gruesome reminder of Macbeth's own childlessness. (As Bloom wryly but chillingly notes, "Unable to beget children, Macbeth slaughters them.") Given the bloody climate of the play's Scotland, we can guess upon the nature of the demise of Lady Macbeth's previous family. The kind of grief Lady Macbeth might have felt -- from a husband lost, from children lost, from both, perhaps -- might have deranged her. Shakespeare never mentions a former husband, though, and he deviates from Holinshed in numerous ways. But the child, whether Macbeth's or another man's, is referred to, and in the most hideous of fashions, when Lady Macbeth claims to her husband,
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
This most shocking inversion of the stereotypical maternal ethic is Lady Macbeth's boldest speech in the entire play, maybe the boldest speech in all of Shakespeare. Its intensity is such, I would say, that it could hardly be rhetorical. If we attempt to understand Lady Macbeth as a fully human figure and not simply a caricature of evil, the question then is what deep psychic wound, what distress or trauma, could provoke such a speech? Perhaps the answer is right here in the text. Lady Macbeth has nursed a child, and that child is gone now. Is the anti-maternal ethic a psychological protection from the anguish that the maternal ethic once provoked in her? There might be more than gall here; there might be tears as well. This speech might be Shakespeare's way of offering a brief but compelling insight into Lady Macbeth's character.
Thanks to the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the DSM, we now know that women can and often do suffer serious psychological disorders accompanying motherhood. Once again, Shakespeare was not a modern clinical psychologist, but he was observant of human nature. We shouldn't assume that just because there wasn't a label for these conditions the symptoms didn't exist. As with Macbeth's potential case of schizophrenia or PTSD, Shakespeare might have understood something about this aspect of human experience long before the rest of us caught on.
One of the qualities that makes Shakespeare so great is his understanding that the mind is a complicated terrain and that motive is often mysterious and opaque even to oneself. He understood the fragmented nature of consciousness. He understood the nature of long suppressed desires. Lady Macbeth's character is not so well developed as is her husband's, and so we must necessarily speculate here, but what we do know is that Lady Macbeth, too, eventually suffers for her evil deeds, and this is what humanizes her. Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman and the doctor both know what she has done, and they pity her even as they are horrified by her. Perhaps we, too, might view her with the same mixture of pity and fear, the hallmark qualities that tragedy evokes according to Aristotle's famous definition.
In thinking about the Macbeths, I am reminded of the epigraph to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It's a quatrain from Francis Villon's "The Ballad of the Hanged Men":
Brothers, men who live after us,
Let not your hearts be hardened against us,
Because, if you have pity for us poor men,
God will have more mercy toward you.
(Translation by Craig E. Bertelot, from the UC Davis website; Capote notoriously includes only the original French in his epigraph.)
Villon, a criminal himself, offers us the voices of those about to be hanged for their misdeeds. Evil, depicted rightly, always has a human face, and the perpetrators of evil deeds may indeed be worthy of our sympathy. The problem of evil, though, in the broader sense, will have to remain unsolved.
If there is an idea or set of ideas behind Shakespeare's explication of evil in Macbeth, it is more like an anticipation of Hannah Arendt's ideas about the banality of evil. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are hardly banal in any way. But the evil that they do emerges from their character, from their human weaknesses. In Shakespeare, evil is not a character in a morality play, nor a philosopher's caricature of one. It does not derive from a transcendentally signified source and assert its authority. The view of evil as a preternatural force, a view that predominated past eras (and is still present in modern times) and which is present in superficial readings of Macbeth, is not valid ultimately in this play, the Weird Sisters notwithstanding.
Why cannot supernatural forces be the cause of evil here? After all, as one of the witches says, Macbeth is "wicked" -- meaning bewitched. But if Macbeth is bewitched, it is clearly because he has allowed evil forces to enter into his heart, just as Lady Macbeth does with her "Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts" speech. The witches merely hold up to Macbeth a mirror of his own secret thoughts. As A. D. Nuttall observes in Shakespeare the Thinker, Macbeth's start at the witches' prophecy is "the most economical feat of dramaturgy ever .... Macbeth's start means, 'How do they know that I have already thought about this happening?'" (284). The supernatural power of the Weird Sisters is in knowing Macbeth, not in controlling him. In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber notes that
The witches
never directly suggest a course of action, nor do they tell Macbeth to murder
Duncan. It is his own “horrible
imaginings” and his wife’s prompting that move him in the direction of
action. (707)
All this external wrangling aside, let us take it as a given that Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's actions are evil. What causes these two to commit themselves to evil actions? Iago's evil was described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as "motiveless malignity." The reasons Iago himself gives for his actions are not ultimately very convincing; they are all out of proportion to the evil he inflicts. Richard III was, perhaps, simply evil by nature, a crookback owned by the devil with only the tiniest gleaming of conscience. Iago and Richard are fascinating psychological studies, but neither one provokes much sympathy. But Macbeth and Lady Macbeth do, or at least they should. In his characteristic fashion (that is, offering a bold claim that has the ring of truth to it, but providing little in the way of evidence), Harold Bloom writes, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human:
Macbeth suffers intensely from
knowing that he does evil, and that he must go on doing ever worse. Shakespeare rather dreadfully sees to it that
we are Macbeth; our identity with him is involuntary but inescapable. … Macbeth terrifies us partly because that
aspect of our own imagination is so frightening …. (517)
Macbeth is an embodiment of our own guilty feelings, amplified. Never mind that we're not killers nor usurpers. Because we recognize Macbeth's feelings as legitimately human -- as how we would feel if we had done such deeds -- we cannot fully condemn him. To do evil is one thing. To simply be evil, however, is an oversimplification. Shakespeare, the colossus of the early modern era, lived with one foot in a world that believed in demons and witches and another foot in a world that would create science as we know it, realism, and psychology. He gives us a Macbeth -- and eventually a Lady Macbeth -- who suffer, who feel guilt, who feel, and the sensitive reader or playgoer can never be fully against such characters. The Macbeths are tormented, and they are psychologically real. "Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife": has anyone on earth ever suffered so much guilt for his own willful wrongdoings? When the Porter claims to be porter of hell-gate, perhaps this is what his speech unwittingly suggests -- that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth will straightaway begin the torment that they will suffer for their sins. The question then remains: what motive does Macbeth have to pursue evil?
What does not seem to explain Macbeth's actions is a lust for power. Unlike Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Macbeth spends very little time expressing his desire for "The sweet fruition of an earthly crown" -- and in fact he is keenly aware that he is the possessor of a "fruitless crown." Macbeth is a perfect antithesis -- parallel but opposite -- to Tamburlaine. Both are usurpers, yet one, like Ozymandias, lives to bear an imperious frown with which to cow the world and to sneer his cold command, while the other seems not to know what it is at all that he wants from the bargain. The only thing he seems to wish for is to make his wife happy.
Love itself, then, is one explanation, perhaps the most compelling, for Macbeth's actions. Bloom notes (again without providing any evidence) that the Macbeths are "profoundly in love with each other" (518). As evidence, I would offer up Act Three, Scene Two, with its pervasive use of terms of endearment, and with the Macbeths trying their best to gently reassure one another, to soothe each other. We know that "dearest chuck" is the kind of thing that's humiliating to say in public but fair game in the bedroom. That love could lead to evil is certainly not unheard of in Shakespeare. Consider Othello's claim to be "one that loved not wisely but too well." Could the same be said of the Macbeths? Macbeth loves his wife well enough to kill for her. Before killing Duncan, Macbeth resolves to be quit of the matter until Lady Macbeth insults his manliness and prods him into action. Is this compelled subservience or love? (Is there a difference, the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche somewhere asks.) The news of his wife's death causes Macbeth to launch into the most powerful statement of nihilism in the text, a profound meditation on futility and the nature of time. In this context, Macbeth's only motive seems to be his love for his wife -- once she is gone, the whole enterprise is utterly bootless.
Macbeth's overpowering prolepsis may also to some extent serve as cause to his evil deeds. Macbeth bears perhaps the most powerful imagination in all of Shakespeare, so powerful that it is out of his control. Macbeth suffers an inability to distinguish between present and future; he has been disjointed from time. Even in his great soliloquy, upon hearing of the present news of his wife's death, the only terms he has for expressing his reaction are grounded in seemingly irrelevant future modalities: "should" and "would." His wife is dead, and confronted with a situation that epitomizes the pastness of the past, all Macbeth can think about is the future and time in the abstract. Like an Abraham Lincoln speech that is almost completely devoid of first-person singular pronouns, Macbeth's reaction here is curiously both personal and impersonal. Macbeth's "horrible imaginings" mean that he walks about in a kind of fever dream, unable to sleep. His mind, once again, is full of scorpions. The hallucinatory power of the play comes even before the murder. When he sees the bloody dagger, Macbeth surmises, "Mine eyes are made the fools o' th' other senses / Or else worth all the rest." He seems implicitly to side with the latter judgment. In writing about another play (Antony and Cleopatra), A. D. Nuttall notes that "Your sturdy empiricist is usually clear that mental images are unreal." Macbeth is clearly not a sturdy empiricist. Nuttall continues: "... Hume, the arch empiricist, was to discover that the only way he could distinguish percepts from images was by the greater 'vivacity' of the percepts." In Macbeth's case, the percepts pale to the vivid haunts of his imagination. The sense connected to the mind's eye is indeed worth all of the others. Lady Macbeth's description of her husband ("My lord is often thus") when he envisions Banquo's ghost is perhaps a convenient excuse, or perhaps an indication of what we would consider today to be an ongoing psychotic or even schizophrenic condition. Of course, Shakespeare would never have recognized the condition as such, but as Bloom states, "humankind will never stop catching up to him" -- it's not unimaginable that Shakespeare would be sensitive to such mental states before the rest of us were able to define them.
Along similar lines, one might wonder if Macbeth is suffering from a clinical condition that has only in recent decades been acknowledged as a serious source of distress for many combat veterans. Does Macbeth suffer from a pre-modern version of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder? In the first image we get of Macbeth (through the Captain's spectacularly vivid speech), we learn that he has "unseamed" his foe "from the nave to th' chops." The shedding of blood is what Macbeth does best. We are well aware today of the potentially dissociative effects that combat experience can have on the individual. To imagine that this is a modern disorder and not one that could afflict someone in Shakespeare's time (or Macbeth's, or Homer's, for that matter) is to sell humanity short.
As impossible as it seems, Lady Macbeth's motives are altogether more complicated, more difficult to sound.
In assaying her motives, though, we should first note that Lady Macbeth is a woman in a man's world. For comparison, Lady Kaede, the Lady Macbeth-inspired character in Akira Kursosawa's Ran, presents an excellent illustration of a woman at odds in a male-dominated feudal culture. In Kurosawa's garish technicolor phantasmagoria, Lady Kaede essentially masterminds the downfall of entire clans. Her motive is revenge. Shakespeare doesn't give us any such clear motive for Lady Macbeth, but the point can be justly applied. In order to advance herself in this world, Lady Macbeth takes on the sensibility of a man -- or she tries to, but the "compunctious visitings of nature" come to her eventually despite her best efforts. To gain power in such a world as the one she lives in, she might use only nefarious means. She must be unsexed in mind and deed to wield power. This fact alone fails to generate much sympathy for Lady Macbeth, though, just as Lady Kaede in Ran fails to excite any sympathy -- just fascination. Ultimately, there must be more to Lady Macbeth's character.
Lady Macbeth's background is poorly defined in the play, but it gives us much potential for speculation. Holinshed's Lady Macbeth is a widow. What happened to her husband? What happened to her children? Lady Macbeth makes it clear that she has been a mother -- "I have given suck" -- but the only children in the play are Macduff's murdered babes -- a gruesome reminder of Macbeth's own childlessness. (As Bloom wryly but chillingly notes, "Unable to beget children, Macbeth slaughters them.") Given the bloody climate of the play's Scotland, we can guess upon the nature of the demise of Lady Macbeth's previous family. The kind of grief Lady Macbeth might have felt -- from a husband lost, from children lost, from both, perhaps -- might have deranged her. Shakespeare never mentions a former husband, though, and he deviates from Holinshed in numerous ways. But the child, whether Macbeth's or another man's, is referred to, and in the most hideous of fashions, when Lady Macbeth claims to her husband,
I have given suck,
and know
How tender ‘tis to love the babe that
milks me.I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.
This most shocking inversion of the stereotypical maternal ethic is Lady Macbeth's boldest speech in the entire play, maybe the boldest speech in all of Shakespeare. Its intensity is such, I would say, that it could hardly be rhetorical. If we attempt to understand Lady Macbeth as a fully human figure and not simply a caricature of evil, the question then is what deep psychic wound, what distress or trauma, could provoke such a speech? Perhaps the answer is right here in the text. Lady Macbeth has nursed a child, and that child is gone now. Is the anti-maternal ethic a psychological protection from the anguish that the maternal ethic once provoked in her? There might be more than gall here; there might be tears as well. This speech might be Shakespeare's way of offering a brief but compelling insight into Lady Macbeth's character.
Thanks to the poetry of Sylvia Plath and the DSM, we now know that women can and often do suffer serious psychological disorders accompanying motherhood. Once again, Shakespeare was not a modern clinical psychologist, but he was observant of human nature. We shouldn't assume that just because there wasn't a label for these conditions the symptoms didn't exist. As with Macbeth's potential case of schizophrenia or PTSD, Shakespeare might have understood something about this aspect of human experience long before the rest of us caught on.
One of the qualities that makes Shakespeare so great is his understanding that the mind is a complicated terrain and that motive is often mysterious and opaque even to oneself. He understood the fragmented nature of consciousness. He understood the nature of long suppressed desires. Lady Macbeth's character is not so well developed as is her husband's, and so we must necessarily speculate here, but what we do know is that Lady Macbeth, too, eventually suffers for her evil deeds, and this is what humanizes her. Lady Macbeth's waiting gentlewoman and the doctor both know what she has done, and they pity her even as they are horrified by her. Perhaps we, too, might view her with the same mixture of pity and fear, the hallmark qualities that tragedy evokes according to Aristotle's famous definition.
In thinking about the Macbeths, I am reminded of the epigraph to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It's a quatrain from Francis Villon's "The Ballad of the Hanged Men":
Brothers, men who live after us,
Let not your hearts be hardened against us,
Because, if you have pity for us poor men,
God will have more mercy toward you.
(Translation by Craig E. Bertelot, from the UC Davis website; Capote notoriously includes only the original French in his epigraph.)
Villon, a criminal himself, offers us the voices of those about to be hanged for their misdeeds. Evil, depicted rightly, always has a human face, and the perpetrators of evil deeds may indeed be worthy of our sympathy. The problem of evil, though, in the broader sense, will have to remain unsolved.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Romantic Tragedies for Young and Old
Romeo and Juliet is, of course, Shakespeare's testament to youth and beauty. The vision of love that it presents is idealistic and pure, doomed to fail because the world is too, too harsh for such purity. Antony and Cleopatra, by contrast, is a testament to mature love -- or what oft passes for love among grown-ups. The vision of love that it presents is cynical and desperate, doomed to fail because the individuals who practice it are, through and through, corrupt. Romeo and Juliet are innocents who live in a fallen world. Antony and Cleopatra are themselves fallen. Give me Antony and Cleopatra any day.
The curious and distinctive feature of both plays is the two-fold focus of each, as indicated by the titles. Othello doesn't share the billing with Desdemona, nor does Macbeth with his Lady Macbeth -- though I suspect that if Lady Macbeth asked him, he would do it. Hamlet, of course, would be incapable of sharing the spotlight with Ophelia for even an instant. Romeo isn't Romeo, though, without Juliet, and Antony without Cleopatra is an altogether different sort of fellow -- witness Julius Caesar, whose Antony is fascinating and complex, a great manipulator and (like his later counterpart) something of a cipher, but no fool for love, certainly, and no bacchanal neither. The Antony of Julius Caesar is unquestionably Roman: rational, pragmatic, masculine, with a compelling sense of duty. The Antony of Antony and Cleopatra is only partly so -- and only when he is outside of Egypt or outside of the influence of Egypt. He has had an encounter with the non-Roman world, with the luxurious East, and with femininity. He has been converted, to some extent at least. In Egypt, instead of restrained Roman stoicism and self-control, he encounters, in almost mystical fashion, license and passion. He seems to have been unprepared for this experience. He goes native, almost a prefiguration of Kurtz but in the romantic sphere.
Antony and Cleopatra is a notoriously messy play, a long one, to boot, with entanglements, reversals, changes of heart. What does love mean in such a context? The goal, I believe, in most of Shakespeare's plays is to express depth of feeling, but in the first three acts (and part of the fourth) here, that goal is distant and seems of little interest to the playwright. The romance here is hardly romanticized. The modern corollary of Antony and Cleopatra is the punk rock spectacle of Sid and Nancy or the junkie dependency of Drugstore Cowboy. Antony and his famous lover are strung out on each other, drained by each other, narcotized. Of course, Sid and Nancy take it deeper down into the gutter, but like them Antony and Cleopatra are outrageous, out of bounds, creatures of the night who patrol the streets for entertainment. They don't create their own rules -- rather, they defy rules of any sort. A. D. Nuttall called this relationship "all splendor, all style." There's no substance here, which is precisely the point. Clean-cut Antony goes to Egypt and gets his hair spiked. Someone should tell Sofia Coppola to direct.
Love between Antony and Cleopatra is inconstant and inconsistent, proceeding in fits and starts, entangled in politics and practicalities. For Antony, there is always the pull of Rome. Romeo would have allowed no compromise to enter into his love. Antony, by comparison, practices a kind of romantic realpolitik, and his cynicism is most apparent in his choice of marriage partners: Fulvia and then Octavia, but never Cleopatra. To the marriage of true minds, however, he admits no impediments, so long as that marriage remains of the mind -- and of the body -- but nothing on paper. In The Tempest, Prospero gives us marriage as a means to an end, but at least he had the decency to see to it that his daughter fell in love with the man he would have her marry. Antony and Cleopatra seems altogether to condemn marriage as a sham. Comedy itself is indicted, then, and tragedy reigns. Shakespeare has never been more cynical on the subject of marriage.
And to compare Juliet and Cleopatra -- those two at opposite ends of the virgin-whore dynamic. The sweetness of Juliet's virginity proves the intimacy of her connection to Romeo, her only lover for all eternity. Cleopatra has been around the block a few times, of course, most notably with Antony's former boss, the mighty Julius, but she is no less the goddess, and the widespread awe and admiration her beauty and majesty inspire is a wonder to all:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. For vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her where she is riggish. (2.2.276-281)
So says Enobarbus. He speaks for Antony, since Antony himself characteristically has few words to speak his own state. As for Cleopatra, lips serve consistently as a metonym for all aspects of her self: her words, her body, her kisses -- and therefore her sexuality, her femininity. "Eternity was in our lips and eyes," she says of her relationship with Antony in Act 1, Scene 3, beginning her elegy almost from the very start. What Cleopatra comes to represent is mystical and non-Western cult of femininity. She represents perhaps Shakespeare's most daring venture into the non-Western world. Antony is unmanned by her, but it is also true that her suicide is (asps aside) in the grand and dignified Roman style. She has learned as well as she has taught.
The goal in the earlier acts of the play seems to be something different from the Shakespearean standard, which I have characterized as depth of feeling. Instead, we have a character study and an examination of realism in human behavior. Along these lines, Antony and Cleopatra is uniquely successful in the Shakespearean canon. It is precisely when the affair is nearly over that it turns from a fractured event into the stuff of myth. Initially, it's a self-mythologized tale, with Cleopatra herself elegizing both Antony and her love for him, and it matters little that the words that she uses only partly match up to the reality of what we saw happening in earlier scenes. It's a convincing job she does of telling what it all means, and even Caesar falls for it, and most audiences will, too, I suspect. No one could argue that Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare's best play, but it is a stand-out in some ways, not least of which is the audacity with which Cleopatra steals the show in Act 5.
Of course, Shakespeare can give us other visions of love among the grown-ups. There are Egeon and Emilia from The Comedy of Errors, at the beginning of the bard's career, and Leontes and Hermione from The Winter's Tale, at the other end. But those are the loves of comedy and romance. The latter relationship is certainly fraught with the heavy weight of Leontes' unwarranted mistrust and jealousy, but it is true in the end and achieves a kind of renewed purity through the couple's rediscovery of each other. The Winter's Tale is a fantasy, Shakespeare at his most optimistic, less concerned with a convincing vision of reality than with a fanciful vision of how things ought to be.
The curious and distinctive feature of both plays is the two-fold focus of each, as indicated by the titles. Othello doesn't share the billing with Desdemona, nor does Macbeth with his Lady Macbeth -- though I suspect that if Lady Macbeth asked him, he would do it. Hamlet, of course, would be incapable of sharing the spotlight with Ophelia for even an instant. Romeo isn't Romeo, though, without Juliet, and Antony without Cleopatra is an altogether different sort of fellow -- witness Julius Caesar, whose Antony is fascinating and complex, a great manipulator and (like his later counterpart) something of a cipher, but no fool for love, certainly, and no bacchanal neither. The Antony of Julius Caesar is unquestionably Roman: rational, pragmatic, masculine, with a compelling sense of duty. The Antony of Antony and Cleopatra is only partly so -- and only when he is outside of Egypt or outside of the influence of Egypt. He has had an encounter with the non-Roman world, with the luxurious East, and with femininity. He has been converted, to some extent at least. In Egypt, instead of restrained Roman stoicism and self-control, he encounters, in almost mystical fashion, license and passion. He seems to have been unprepared for this experience. He goes native, almost a prefiguration of Kurtz but in the romantic sphere.
Antony and Cleopatra is a notoriously messy play, a long one, to boot, with entanglements, reversals, changes of heart. What does love mean in such a context? The goal, I believe, in most of Shakespeare's plays is to express depth of feeling, but in the first three acts (and part of the fourth) here, that goal is distant and seems of little interest to the playwright. The romance here is hardly romanticized. The modern corollary of Antony and Cleopatra is the punk rock spectacle of Sid and Nancy or the junkie dependency of Drugstore Cowboy. Antony and his famous lover are strung out on each other, drained by each other, narcotized. Of course, Sid and Nancy take it deeper down into the gutter, but like them Antony and Cleopatra are outrageous, out of bounds, creatures of the night who patrol the streets for entertainment. They don't create their own rules -- rather, they defy rules of any sort. A. D. Nuttall called this relationship "all splendor, all style." There's no substance here, which is precisely the point. Clean-cut Antony goes to Egypt and gets his hair spiked. Someone should tell Sofia Coppola to direct.
Love between Antony and Cleopatra is inconstant and inconsistent, proceeding in fits and starts, entangled in politics and practicalities. For Antony, there is always the pull of Rome. Romeo would have allowed no compromise to enter into his love. Antony, by comparison, practices a kind of romantic realpolitik, and his cynicism is most apparent in his choice of marriage partners: Fulvia and then Octavia, but never Cleopatra. To the marriage of true minds, however, he admits no impediments, so long as that marriage remains of the mind -- and of the body -- but nothing on paper. In The Tempest, Prospero gives us marriage as a means to an end, but at least he had the decency to see to it that his daughter fell in love with the man he would have her marry. Antony and Cleopatra seems altogether to condemn marriage as a sham. Comedy itself is indicted, then, and tragedy reigns. Shakespeare has never been more cynical on the subject of marriage.
And to compare Juliet and Cleopatra -- those two at opposite ends of the virgin-whore dynamic. The sweetness of Juliet's virginity proves the intimacy of her connection to Romeo, her only lover for all eternity. Cleopatra has been around the block a few times, of course, most notably with Antony's former boss, the mighty Julius, but she is no less the goddess, and the widespread awe and admiration her beauty and majesty inspire is a wonder to all:
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies. For vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her where she is riggish. (2.2.276-281)
So says Enobarbus. He speaks for Antony, since Antony himself characteristically has few words to speak his own state. As for Cleopatra, lips serve consistently as a metonym for all aspects of her self: her words, her body, her kisses -- and therefore her sexuality, her femininity. "Eternity was in our lips and eyes," she says of her relationship with Antony in Act 1, Scene 3, beginning her elegy almost from the very start. What Cleopatra comes to represent is mystical and non-Western cult of femininity. She represents perhaps Shakespeare's most daring venture into the non-Western world. Antony is unmanned by her, but it is also true that her suicide is (asps aside) in the grand and dignified Roman style. She has learned as well as she has taught.
The goal in the earlier acts of the play seems to be something different from the Shakespearean standard, which I have characterized as depth of feeling. Instead, we have a character study and an examination of realism in human behavior. Along these lines, Antony and Cleopatra is uniquely successful in the Shakespearean canon. It is precisely when the affair is nearly over that it turns from a fractured event into the stuff of myth. Initially, it's a self-mythologized tale, with Cleopatra herself elegizing both Antony and her love for him, and it matters little that the words that she uses only partly match up to the reality of what we saw happening in earlier scenes. It's a convincing job she does of telling what it all means, and even Caesar falls for it, and most audiences will, too, I suspect. No one could argue that Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare's best play, but it is a stand-out in some ways, not least of which is the audacity with which Cleopatra steals the show in Act 5.
Of course, Shakespeare can give us other visions of love among the grown-ups. There are Egeon and Emilia from The Comedy of Errors, at the beginning of the bard's career, and Leontes and Hermione from The Winter's Tale, at the other end. But those are the loves of comedy and romance. The latter relationship is certainly fraught with the heavy weight of Leontes' unwarranted mistrust and jealousy, but it is true in the end and achieves a kind of renewed purity through the couple's rediscovery of each other. The Winter's Tale is a fantasy, Shakespeare at his most optimistic, less concerned with a convincing vision of reality than with a fanciful vision of how things ought to be.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Iliad
The Iliad as Both Epic and Tragedy
The Iliad is blunt, forceful -- in terms of plot, it could even be construed as somewhat tedious, with so many reversals and counter-reversals of fortune on the fields outside sacred Ilium. On the surface, it's not as clever as the Odyssey, but ultimately it's the more profound work -- dramatically and morally.
Like it's namesake, the Odyssey is clever, playful. The Iliad doesn't have the wit, nor the complexity of embedded narratives, nor the multiplicity of voices. The framing of the story ends up being its primary genius. This is the story of Achilles' rage, and in recounting this story, Homer achieves one of the most venerable and profound insights into the essence of humanity.
I have to say, I don't much like Achilles at the beginning of the story. His hurt pride doesn't much appeal to me. If there's a war going on and the lives of others are at stake, you'd better do your duty, I tend to think. Never mind the fact that the war in question is not one that I would approve of on my own moral grounds; when you open the cover of the book, you have to buy into the idea that it's worth a ten years' war, and all the bloodshed and expenditure of resources that accompany such an undertaking, to chase after a stolen woman. That is to say, when you open the cover of the book, you have to enter into the Greek perspective -- by which I mean not the familiar take on Plato and Aristotle, washed over with centuries of Christianization, that has come to represent Greek culture in the way we usually think of it, but a more ancient and brutal, more tribal perspective. You have to invest quite a bit of yourself into the poem -- and divest quite a bit of yourself as a reader -- to get at the core of its meaning.
What literature does for us is to enable us to enter the perspetive of someone other than ourselves, and in doing so, eventually, to come to an understanding of our shared humanity. It's easy to read, as I did when I was younger, looking for myself and finding myself quite easily in, say, a Holden Caulfield or a Nick Adams or a Quentin Compson, even. Not that I was exactly any of those characters, but still I could see enough of myself in them, an aspect of myself in each. It's much harder to see myself in Achilles or even reverend Priam.
To read the Iliad, though, is, at least within the framework of the front and back covers of the book, to enter into the Greek worldview, to see humanity from the Greek perspective. To do so means that we undertake the values of warfare and honor. Achilles seems to me petulant and ultimately irresponsible. Others die for his pride. Not that I side with Agamemnon, either -- but it takes me a while to see what is at stake for Achilles when Agamemnon decides to seize the great warrior's war-prize, the girl Briseis. Here's what Daniel Mendelsohn, in an essay that first appeared in the New Yorker in 2011, has to say about the matter:
So, we can see what's behind Achilles' rage. That's still not enough to validate it, though, and that is entirely the point. We don't have to validate Achilles' rage, we just have to understand where it comes from, the values that underlie his feelings and his course of action. Achilles himself will ultimately rue his own rage. In his protest over the loss of a trophy, a slave girl who represents his prowess as a warrior, a person whose humanity is symbolic and whose position is subordinate, Achilles ends up losing his greatest friend and companion, Patroclus, whose humaity is too real and whose position is, in Achilles' own estimation, equal to his own. Mendelsohn again:
What does Achilles learn from his rage, from his subsequent mourning for the loss of his friend Patroclus, from his encounter with the grieving father of his great enemy? One wonders how he feels on the morning of that twelfth day, after Hector's funeral, going back into battle and soon to meet his death. Homer never says, and the story ends with a great set of ellipses. It's true that the ultimate outcome of events has not changed one bit: Achilles will die; Troy will be ruined, Priam and all his blood with it. But I have to agree with Mendelsohn: the acts that take place here are too strong, too much the focus of everything, to be so trivial that there is not a change inside of these two men. Achilles has, for a moment, gained insight into the heart of his enemy. He has been prompted by the gods, no doubt, to release Hector's corpse, but there is little that happens here that has not been prompted by the gods. Achilles has reached out to his enemy in a gesture of kindness, sympathy, understanding. He has reneged on his promise to brutalize Hector's body -- and we have seen just how seriously Achilles takes his promises. He will kill again, but can it possibly be in hatred? The rage has expired from his heart.
It is strange to me that a story so thoroughly Greek -- as opposed to Trojan -- and so thoroughly dedicated to Achilles should end with a focus on Hector's funeral, as celebrated by the Trojans themselves. Then it occurs to me that maybe it is fitting, after all, for Hector's funeral is a testament to Achilles' momentary insight. The nature of that insight, maybe, can't be put into words, which is why Homer doesn't try it, but it has something to do with the universal elements of human experience -- grief, suffering, mortality, acquiescence to fate, the grand futility of all our actions, all of which are summed up in the tragic vision.
Athena
The Iliad is not just a story of humanity, though; it is a story of the gods. Stories of the gods are, indeed, ultimately stories about humanity, too, but in an anthropological sort of way. We tend to divide Greek culture into the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but from reading Homer you get a sense that there is another god (or goddess) who ought to weigh in here -- Athena. I find it impossible to read Homer without gravitating toward her as my deity of choice. Were I to build a temple, it would be to her, but I find myself wondering what exactly it is that she represents. Wisdom, warfare, crafts, yes, but beyond all that she seems to be the most thoroughly Greek of the Olympians (in the sense I described it earlier, not the Greek of the philosophers). She loves the great Greek heroes; she stands by them and embodies their values. Could Homer have been Athenian, and therefore biased? Or was his homeland Ithaca, and thus his ultimate preference for one hero above the others?
Homer
These questions lead to the bigger question of whether "Homer" actually existed or not. As I felt with the Odyssey, I feel instinctively that this text is primarily the result of a single visionary poet who has taken material from the oral tradition and adapted it to his purposes. Again, the genius is in the framing. Homer is not unlike Shakespeare in that the plots were out there in the public domain; what made both writers great was the manner in which they presented that material. There are a limited number of stories. What matters is the storytelling.
The Iliad is blunt, forceful -- in terms of plot, it could even be construed as somewhat tedious, with so many reversals and counter-reversals of fortune on the fields outside sacred Ilium. On the surface, it's not as clever as the Odyssey, but ultimately it's the more profound work -- dramatically and morally.
Like it's namesake, the Odyssey is clever, playful. The Iliad doesn't have the wit, nor the complexity of embedded narratives, nor the multiplicity of voices. The framing of the story ends up being its primary genius. This is the story of Achilles' rage, and in recounting this story, Homer achieves one of the most venerable and profound insights into the essence of humanity.
I have to say, I don't much like Achilles at the beginning of the story. His hurt pride doesn't much appeal to me. If there's a war going on and the lives of others are at stake, you'd better do your duty, I tend to think. Never mind the fact that the war in question is not one that I would approve of on my own moral grounds; when you open the cover of the book, you have to buy into the idea that it's worth a ten years' war, and all the bloodshed and expenditure of resources that accompany such an undertaking, to chase after a stolen woman. That is to say, when you open the cover of the book, you have to enter into the Greek perspective -- by which I mean not the familiar take on Plato and Aristotle, washed over with centuries of Christianization, that has come to represent Greek culture in the way we usually think of it, but a more ancient and brutal, more tribal perspective. You have to invest quite a bit of yourself into the poem -- and divest quite a bit of yourself as a reader -- to get at the core of its meaning.
What literature does for us is to enable us to enter the perspetive of someone other than ourselves, and in doing so, eventually, to come to an understanding of our shared humanity. It's easy to read, as I did when I was younger, looking for myself and finding myself quite easily in, say, a Holden Caulfield or a Nick Adams or a Quentin Compson, even. Not that I was exactly any of those characters, but still I could see enough of myself in them, an aspect of myself in each. It's much harder to see myself in Achilles or even reverend Priam.
To read the Iliad, though, is, at least within the framework of the front and back covers of the book, to enter into the Greek worldview, to see humanity from the Greek perspective. To do so means that we undertake the values of warfare and honor. Achilles seems to me petulant and ultimately irresponsible. Others die for his pride. Not that I side with Agamemnon, either -- but it takes me a while to see what is at stake for Achilles when Agamemnon decides to seize the great warrior's war-prize, the girl Briseis. Here's what Daniel Mendelsohn, in an essay that first appeared in the New Yorker in 2011, has to say about the matter:
... the seizure of the girl is an intolerable affront; as the furious Achilles puts it [in Stephen Mitchell's translation], it makes him "a nobody." ... This is the crux of the poem. For, as Achilles later reminds his fellow Greeks, he has been allowed to choose between a long, insignificant life and a brief, glorious one: if he stays to fight and die in Troy, it is precisely because he doesn't want to be a nobody. Agamemnon's insult makes a mockery of his choice--it empties his short life of what meaning it had. (See pp. 106-107 in Mendelsohn's collection, Waiting for the Barbarians.)
So, we can see what's behind Achilles' rage. That's still not enough to validate it, though, and that is entirely the point. We don't have to validate Achilles' rage, we just have to understand where it comes from, the values that underlie his feelings and his course of action. Achilles himself will ultimately rue his own rage. In his protest over the loss of a trophy, a slave girl who represents his prowess as a warrior, a person whose humanity is symbolic and whose position is subordinate, Achilles ends up losing his greatest friend and companion, Patroclus, whose humaity is too real and whose position is, in Achilles' own estimation, equal to his own. Mendelsohn again:
The means and effects of [Achilles'] transformation are what make the Iliad the first genuinely tragic narrative in the Western tradition .... The harrowing scenes of grief that follow [Patroclus' death] demonstrate a truth that Achilles grasps too late: his reputation wasn't, after all, the thing he valued most. That the insight is inseparable from the loss is what gives the poem its wrenching grandeur. Pathei mathos, Aeschylus wrote ... we "suffer into knowledge." (Waiting for the Barbarians, pp. 110-111.)Thus the Iliad is epic but also tragedy, and nothing gets at the soul of humanity more than tragedy. Achilles' ability to identify with the suffering of his antagonist's father is as profound a moment as you will find anywhere in literature, short-lived as the moment may be. Priam's ability to identify with his son's killer is equally profound. We understand the humanity of others when we understand their suffering. Achilles has isolated himself in his rage, separated himself from his allies and countrymen. When he reenters the war, it is not as a representative of the Greek army. He's not fighting the Trojan War, but his own war of vengeance. His Myrmidons are behind him, but they are hardly significant. When Achilles reenters the world of social relations, it's stunning that he does so not with his fellow Greeks, but with the very king of the Trojans himself. This is his first compact, his first ritually joined relationship with another living being, after the expiration of his rage.
What does Achilles learn from his rage, from his subsequent mourning for the loss of his friend Patroclus, from his encounter with the grieving father of his great enemy? One wonders how he feels on the morning of that twelfth day, after Hector's funeral, going back into battle and soon to meet his death. Homer never says, and the story ends with a great set of ellipses. It's true that the ultimate outcome of events has not changed one bit: Achilles will die; Troy will be ruined, Priam and all his blood with it. But I have to agree with Mendelsohn: the acts that take place here are too strong, too much the focus of everything, to be so trivial that there is not a change inside of these two men. Achilles has, for a moment, gained insight into the heart of his enemy. He has been prompted by the gods, no doubt, to release Hector's corpse, but there is little that happens here that has not been prompted by the gods. Achilles has reached out to his enemy in a gesture of kindness, sympathy, understanding. He has reneged on his promise to brutalize Hector's body -- and we have seen just how seriously Achilles takes his promises. He will kill again, but can it possibly be in hatred? The rage has expired from his heart.
It is strange to me that a story so thoroughly Greek -- as opposed to Trojan -- and so thoroughly dedicated to Achilles should end with a focus on Hector's funeral, as celebrated by the Trojans themselves. Then it occurs to me that maybe it is fitting, after all, for Hector's funeral is a testament to Achilles' momentary insight. The nature of that insight, maybe, can't be put into words, which is why Homer doesn't try it, but it has something to do with the universal elements of human experience -- grief, suffering, mortality, acquiescence to fate, the grand futility of all our actions, all of which are summed up in the tragic vision.
Athena
The Iliad is not just a story of humanity, though; it is a story of the gods. Stories of the gods are, indeed, ultimately stories about humanity, too, but in an anthropological sort of way. We tend to divide Greek culture into the Apollonian and the Dionysian, but from reading Homer you get a sense that there is another god (or goddess) who ought to weigh in here -- Athena. I find it impossible to read Homer without gravitating toward her as my deity of choice. Were I to build a temple, it would be to her, but I find myself wondering what exactly it is that she represents. Wisdom, warfare, crafts, yes, but beyond all that she seems to be the most thoroughly Greek of the Olympians (in the sense I described it earlier, not the Greek of the philosophers). She loves the great Greek heroes; she stands by them and embodies their values. Could Homer have been Athenian, and therefore biased? Or was his homeland Ithaca, and thus his ultimate preference for one hero above the others?
Homer
These questions lead to the bigger question of whether "Homer" actually existed or not. As I felt with the Odyssey, I feel instinctively that this text is primarily the result of a single visionary poet who has taken material from the oral tradition and adapted it to his purposes. Again, the genius is in the framing. Homer is not unlike Shakespeare in that the plots were out there in the public domain; what made both writers great was the manner in which they presented that material. There are a limited number of stories. What matters is the storytelling.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Akira Kurosawa's Ran
The title promises chaos. It does not fail to deliver.
Ran cobbles together elements of King Lear and Macbeth to spectacular effect, proving the universality of Shakespeare's vision. At the same time, Ran is wholly original, the work of an auteur whose vision had grown and changed as he entered the final phases of his career. Unlike the aging Lord Hidetora, however, Kurosawa does not lose his finely wrought command of the situation. We have, I suspect, inspiration from traditional Noh theatre in the sometimes elaborate formality of the the acting. This formality is offset, though, by scenes that unfold more naturally, scenes in which human actions take place with a kind of inevitability as far beyond our ken or control as the clouds that brood dramatically but affectlessly over the battlefields and heaths of the film. The director himself, after decades of staying true to black and white, takes on the primary color palette in its most fundamental form, catching up on technicolor with a vengeance. Besides the red, yellow, and blue of the flags of the Ichimonji clan, we have blood that washes over the whole film in streams, rivulets, flood beds that usually run dry but not now. Blood doesn't just flow here; it spurts, jets, sprays across the frame. The stylized unreality of it is pointed, deliberate. Thus there is another element, that of horror. The pale, ghastly flesh of Lord Hidetora as he confronts the reality of his sons' mistreatment of him reflects the nightmarish quality of his experience. The film is heavily stylized but also bears elements of realism. We are watching something foreign but at the same time Shakespearean in its universality. The experience is, I imagine, not so different from that of sitting in the Elizabethan theatre.
Unlike King Lear, though, we have no Edgar to emerge victorious and restore a new order even as the protagonist, the exemplar of the old order, dies. Ran is much more nihilistic than Shakespeare's bleakest. In keeping with its Elizabethan antecedent, Ran does at the end briefly give us a sense that family bonds can be meaningful, after all, but then snatches that sentiment away from us. There is no justice in the universe, says King Lear, unless we impose it upon the world ourselves through our wills. Edgar will do so in Lear. Ran instead leaves us with a parting image of the gods' blindness and impotence. The only order that ever was in this world was written in blood, and this is the inevitable result of it.
I had the great fortune of viewing this film once on the big screen at AFI's Silver Theatre in Maryland. The colors were vivid, terrifying, magnificent. There is a powerful but brutal beauty to this film, the kind that only a master at his peak can produce.
Ran cobbles together elements of King Lear and Macbeth to spectacular effect, proving the universality of Shakespeare's vision. At the same time, Ran is wholly original, the work of an auteur whose vision had grown and changed as he entered the final phases of his career. Unlike the aging Lord Hidetora, however, Kurosawa does not lose his finely wrought command of the situation. We have, I suspect, inspiration from traditional Noh theatre in the sometimes elaborate formality of the the acting. This formality is offset, though, by scenes that unfold more naturally, scenes in which human actions take place with a kind of inevitability as far beyond our ken or control as the clouds that brood dramatically but affectlessly over the battlefields and heaths of the film. The director himself, after decades of staying true to black and white, takes on the primary color palette in its most fundamental form, catching up on technicolor with a vengeance. Besides the red, yellow, and blue of the flags of the Ichimonji clan, we have blood that washes over the whole film in streams, rivulets, flood beds that usually run dry but not now. Blood doesn't just flow here; it spurts, jets, sprays across the frame. The stylized unreality of it is pointed, deliberate. Thus there is another element, that of horror. The pale, ghastly flesh of Lord Hidetora as he confronts the reality of his sons' mistreatment of him reflects the nightmarish quality of his experience. The film is heavily stylized but also bears elements of realism. We are watching something foreign but at the same time Shakespearean in its universality. The experience is, I imagine, not so different from that of sitting in the Elizabethan theatre.
Unlike King Lear, though, we have no Edgar to emerge victorious and restore a new order even as the protagonist, the exemplar of the old order, dies. Ran is much more nihilistic than Shakespeare's bleakest. In keeping with its Elizabethan antecedent, Ran does at the end briefly give us a sense that family bonds can be meaningful, after all, but then snatches that sentiment away from us. There is no justice in the universe, says King Lear, unless we impose it upon the world ourselves through our wills. Edgar will do so in Lear. Ran instead leaves us with a parting image of the gods' blindness and impotence. The only order that ever was in this world was written in blood, and this is the inevitable result of it.
I had the great fortune of viewing this film once on the big screen at AFI's Silver Theatre in Maryland. The colors were vivid, terrifying, magnificent. There is a powerful but brutal beauty to this film, the kind that only a master at his peak can produce.
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