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FATHER AND SON RELATIONSHIP IN HAMLET

Shakespeare loves to explore the pernicious effects that parents have upon their children. Everywhere in his plays, parents have an unhealthy role in the lives of their children.

The Montagues want their son Romeo to draw a sword and carve Capulets up into pieces. The Capulets control and bully Juliet. When the chips are down, and Juliet reveals that she is married to the Montague that has killed her cousin, she falls to her knees before her father and cries, “Good father, I beseech you on my knees / Hear me with patience but to speak a word.” He responds to her desire: “Hang thee, young baggage! Disobedient / wretch!/ I tell thee what—get thee to church a Thursday / Or never after look me in the face.”

Despite the fact that she is already married to the man she loves, her father commands her to either marry Paris, or relinquish her role as his daughter. After the Nurse, the woman who has truly raised Juliet in her mother’s absence, begs with Capulet not “to rate her so,” Juliet’s father raises the threat of disinheritance to a terrible height. Either Juliet gets to a church to marry Paris or

Hang, beg, starve, die in the streets

For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee,

Nor what is mine shall never do thee good.

And even the Nurse, Juliet’s substitute mother, abandons her at the most critical moment in her life, telling her to ditch Romeo and marry Paris.

King Lear obviously treats his family like a tyrant. His children are subjects who must jockey for position and preferment in his court. The love challenge at the opening of the play derives from the sibling rivalry that he had unwittingly nurtured. As a result, he has been instrumental in turning his two daughters, Goneril and Regan, into the jealous and rapacious monsters that they are. Lear reaps what he has sown in his family as the two daughters have no problem in divesting their father of his kingly role, and dispatching with him as if he is  a tedious old retiree who has become a burden to the family. As a result of Lear politicizing love in his own family, Cordelia becomes the pathetic figure, a vessel collecting all of the poison that the father had concocted.

Henry IV believes that his son Hal was born as a curse on his existence. He wishes that a fairy could have switched him at his birth with Hotspur, a man whose business is war. His father wants Hal to be a bloodthirsty warrior. There is no doubt in my mind that Hal fled the kingdom when his father deposed Richard II to seek out a different father figure in Falstaff. Yet, the influence of his father dominates as Hal grows in Eastcheap to become a far more subtle and craftier schemer—he has learned more than his father imagines how to be ruthlessly political. The father draws the son back to the kingdom and the dreadful destiny to wear his crown. Learning from his father how to wield authority—to “pluck” honor from the world as his father had deposed Richard II—Hal ascends to the thrown and “deposes” his loving friend Hal from his sphere of life.

Although critics tend to see Hamlet evolving out of Julius Caesar, I have always felt that its closer relative is Henry IV. In his ambivalent relationship between the two father figures in his life, Henry IV and Falstaff, Hal foreshadows Hamlet, whose soul is at the mercy in a struggle between the Ghost of his father and his uncle turned step-father, Claudius.

I have grown to believe that Act 1 of Hamlet revolves around that favorite high school theme everything is not what it seems. But in ways that are far different than the intrigue of court conspiracy that spurs the guards to believe that there is something rotten in Denmark and generates the cloak and dagger atmosphere of the play.

“In Act 1, the play spurs us to ask the plot driven questions, how did King Hamlet die? why is he reappearing as a ghost dressed in his armor? why did Gertrude marry his brother, Claudius, so quickly?

“But I don’t think Act 1 is primarily about the conspiracy in the Danish court, the preparation for Norway’s imminent invasion, and Hamlet’s struggle for political and divine justice. I believe that Shakespeare makes the first act quickly revolve around the young prince’s struggle to understand not only his relationship with his recently deceased father, but the various ‘fathers’ in his life. Hamlet has to read and interpret the identity of his father: King Hamlet? Father Hamlet? Dead Warrior? Dead Father? Taskmaster? And now he is further forced to interpret his new father: King Claudius? Uncle Claudius? Father Claudius? Murderer-Father-Claudius? Mother-Lover Father Claudius? Incestuous Father Claudius? Satyr? Perhaps, I dare say, Hero?

“Ultimately, I think that Hamlet struggles over which father is his Legitimate Father . . . his true Father. When Claudius turns to Hamlet after his address to the court, he says, ‘But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son,’ Hamlet utters in an aside his first line of the play:

A little more than kin, and less than kind.

Right away, Hamlet feels urged to judge which father figure he owes allegiance and love . . . Look at how much is packed into this one short and sardonic line. Kin and kind come from the same root, meaning familiar, related by blood, kindred. At the same time that Hamlet says that Claudius is a little too close to home and he is not very nice—the double meaning of kind—he also claims he doubts his legitimacy to both fatherhood and the throne. The word ‘king’ comes from the word kin, as the ancient kings were the head of their family, or the clan.

“We are led to believe in the beginning that the protagonist—the good-guy, the hero—is the murdered father and king, a man for whom a dreadful injustice was committed and from whom was stolen a kingdom and a wife. We do not know that Claudius murdered King Hamlet until the end of the very long Act 1, and that delay allows Hamlet time to ponder the various fathers in his life based upon his own observation, his own feelings untainted by the Ghost’s visit. The tragedy and injustice of King Hamlet’s death, which Hamlet feels so horribly when we first meet him, incites from us innate sympathy. Of course Old King Hamlet was the good guy! Of course Claudius, Polonius and, to an extent, Gertrude are the bad guys! We root for Hamlet to rise up above the rabble, standing firm in his suspicions and recalcitrance, and to bring justice to the crimes committed—to save his father’s honor, to rescue his mother from the clutches of sin, and to put his house and his kingdom back in order.

“We have every reason to believe that we should sympathize with Hamlet’s grief and harshly judge Claudius and Gertrude’s apathy toward the recent death. Hamlet has been in grief over his father’s death for well over a month, and we stand behind his sorrowful defiance to wear black clothes for the duration. Hamlet’s grief inspires his mother’s concern, as she tells him, ‘Do not forever with thy vailed lids/Seek for thy noble father in the dust.’ But we cheer Hamlet on to stick up for his father, the good-guy, the fallen hero when he denies that death ‘seems’ common. We feel that Hamlet is justified to feel suicidal depression because of his mother’s lack of despair and her hasty marriage to Claudius. And we have every reason to hiss at Claudius when he responds to Hamlet’s grief with a lecture imploring him to get over his father’s death. ‘You must know your father lost a father/ That father lost, lost his,’ exhorting Hamlet to ‘throw to earth/This unprevailing woe, and think of us/As a father.’

“But what if those attractive and romantic values for which we cheer on Hamlet in Act 1—his moral reprehension, his piquant suspicion, his defiant sorrow and alienation from an odiously apathetic family and court—were not derived from any sense of injustice in his family in the way that the play leads us to believe?

“The only vision we have of Hamlet’s father is his Ghost, the foreboding remains of a battle weary figure whose ‘hour is almost come/When I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames/Must render up myself.’ The Ghost hardly offers Hamlet or us a vision of a healthy or loving father, let alone a hero. What are all of those ‘foul crimes’ for which he had not the opportunity to repent? There is no warmth or love when Hamlet reunites with his resurrected father in the darkness and fog atop the ramparts of Elsinore in Act 1. Instead, the Ghost-Father conveys to his pained and bereaved son

a tale . . . whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand an end

Like quills upon the fearful porpentine . . .

List, list, O list!/ If thou didst ever thy father love.

“ ‘O God!’ ” Hamlet cries. There is no ‘I love you’ on the lips of old King Hamlet. There is no fatherly concern for his son’s life. In Act V, Hamlet utters the only words of familial love in the entire play when he holds up the skull of his childhood court jester that the Gravedigger unearths while he is digging the grave for Ophelia.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr’d in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft.

We do not usually carry with us an image of Hamlet laughing as he rides the back of a joyful man, engaged in one of a thousand playful romps. Instead, the Hamlet we know is a young man who has been asked to commit murder by a dead father.

“Hamlet must own his father’s past, to ‘revenge his foul and most unnatural murther.’ It’s a task which Hamlet must bear not only from that moment on, I believe, but from the moment he was born to live under a father who rode on his son’s back, and bore far more than a ‘thousand times’ the only thing he bequeathed his son: the burden of his own past, his ‘foul crimes,’ and the task to fulfill a destiny Hamlet does not want. Through the rest of the play, Hamlet must live out torn between eternal, heavenly contemplation and the swift and impulsive thrusting of a sword. ‘Haste me to know’t,’ he responds to his father’s demand for revenge,

that I with wings as swift

As meditation, or the thoughts of love

May sweep to my revenge.

“There are no ‘thoughts of love’ to engage Hamlet in ‘meditation’ in his relationship with his father. Here in a nutshell, I believe we have a paradigm of Hamlet’s struggle to fulfill the demands of his father. Angel-wings of meditation and thoughts of love coupled with the martial action to sweep and to do so hastily to get revenge. Hamlet responds with a grueling oxymoron. How can one have angelic meditation and thoughts of love and sweep to revenge at the same time?”

A student raises her hand. “Doesn’t Hamlet’s statement about revenge suggest how much he loves his father? Isn’t it a sign of great love for Hamlet to seek revenge for his father?”

“There is no love in revenge,” I say. “In drama, revenge always occurs in the context of tragedy because the tragic hero takes divine justice into his own hands. Once a human takes such punishment into his own hands, he has committed an act of hubris. But revenge also destroys the person who enacts it. Murder is murder, in any time and age.”

OUR REVELS NOW ARE ENDED

Our revels now are ended. These our actors

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. The Tempest, Act 4, sc. 1 165 – 175.

Prospero speaks these astonishing lines early in Act 4, after jumping up with a start in the middle of the “masque” he magically concocts for the entertainment of his daughter, Miranda, and her future husband, Ferdinand. It is one of the most famous passages in Shakespeare, and often for the wrong reasons. Many look to this passage as a clear indication of Shakespeare’s farewell to theater, a beautiful and wistful commentary on the magic of the stage that he is about to close. It is an understandable assessment, as I suggested, since this is Shakespeare’s last play, and the play is nearing an end.

Yet, the passage is often quoted out of context, in the manner I presented it above. One forgets that Prospero speaks these lines in the middle of a particular moment, and quoters often leave the first and last several lines out. Prospero has been entranced by his own magical production, the wedding performance he has beautiful faeries perform. After Juno gives the upcoming wedding a blessing, all of the faeries engage in a magical dance–productions all have different takes on how long the colorful dance should go on. But Prospero, evidently disturbed all of a sudden, jumps up and makes his production vanish. Both Miranda and Ferdinand comment on how upset Prospero appears. “Your fathers in a passion/That works him strongly,” Ferdinand says, and Miranda responds, “Never till this day/Saw I him touched with anger, so distempered,” which are strong words for the young woman who has spent literally every moment of her life since birth with the man.

Prospero claims he had gotten so wrapped up in the performance–the masque he has created from his daughter–that he forgot Caliban’s plot with Stephano and Trinculo to overthrow him and take his daughter from him. Yet, folks, this could hardly be the real reason that Prospero becomes so disquieted. It hardly seems, based upon the evidence in the play, that Caliban would be that much of a threat to Prospero. He has been able to stop Caliban in his tracks many times before, and he has been able to completely stop all of the conspirators with one spell.

Something else has disturbed the powerful, white magician. Yet, notice how Prospero begins the famous passage I quoted above, the lines often left out when scholars use the soliloquy–he speaks to Ferdinand, attempting to sooth the look of discomfort in his eyes.

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,

As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.

And then Prospero speaks the lines I quoted above. In essence, the “our revels now are ended” passage is a sort of fatherly pep-talk to his future son-in-law. And odd one, certainly, but he directs his words at Ferdinand nonetheless. Prospero is certainly saying a good-bye of sorts. I would argue that he is very aware of time–as he is throughout the three to four hour course of the play–and knows that the moment is nearing when he will forsake his powers in order to forgive and free those who had conspired to take his throne. He also knows that time is nearing when he must relinquish his daughter to Ferdinand, and give up the little oasis-nirvana he has created out of the island over the course of twelve or so years. The “birdcage” within which King Lear had foreseen living with Cordelia is about to disappear. Prospero is on the verge of releasing everyone–Aerial, his prisoners, his daughter–including himself.

There is a sense with this passage and the final two acts of The Tempest of the anguish of endings, the sense that, no matter what the context, the end of a life, of an era, of a setting, brings anguish and anxiety. Prospero, I would argue, is not only going to lose his little family and relinquish his magic, but his return to Milan will also be his final role before the grave.

Again, the passage above is often quoted out of context–it also leaves out Prospero’s final lines in his speech. He continues to Ferdinand,

. . . Sir, I am vexed.

Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.

Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

If you be pleased, retire into my cell

And there repose. A turn or two I’ll walk

To still my beating brain.

These are not the most comfortable or soothing words. In many of mysteries in Shakespeare’s plays, we never really know what Prospero wants to say to Ferdinand after he takes a walk to calm his nerves in the same way that we will never know what all of the things Hamlet claimed he wanted to tell us just before he dies from poison. The ending–as most endings must be–is both final and irresolute at the same time.

THE TEMPEST: BACKGROUND

The Tempest evolves out of several different interesting contexts. The first context is that, paradoxically, it is the only play that Shakespeare did not derive from a previous source, such as an ancient folktale, Holinshed’s Chronicles, a previous play, etc.

The setting of a maritime adventure and being castaway upon a deserted island is fitting for the period. In the decade in which Shakespeare wrote the play, 1611, the exploration of the world sped up greatly: in the early 1600s, there had been several expeditions to the New World, including Captain John Smith’s settlement at Jamestown, and a highly published shipwreck of a British expedition on an island that we know today as Bermuda (the story, published in numerous pamphlets in London, may have been a source for Shakespeare’s play). The issue of British exploration and colonization of alien worlds was fairly new when Shakespeare wrote the play. Although it is certain that a burgeoning colonial England was on Shakespeare’s mind, he certainly did not think of colonial issues as we do today.

Additionally, this is the last play that Shakespeare wrote. Although he collaborated on two more plays after this–Henry VIII and

Prospero would have been considered a White Magician, one who uses his magic for good, humanitarian and creative purposes, whereas Sycorax would have been seen as a Black Magician, obviously one who uses magic for malevolent purposes.

Two Noble Kinsmen–it is the last play in which Shakespeare claims single authorship. This fact has led to a lot of speculative and, I believe, fairly exaggerated interpretations that the play features Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. Although I think that such interpretations tend to be over-the-top, I empathize with their spirit, and such readings are understandable. The play features a creative figure–a kind of author/playwright-within-the-play–Prospero, who makes everything happen by magic in the play, and who gives up his magic at the end of the play by breaking his wand and drowning his books. Many believe that it is hard not to see an image of Shakespeare relinquishing his creativity–his magic–in the figure of Prospero. Further, Prospero utters several speeches–particularly his beautiful “our revels are now ended” speech in Act IV–that seem to say goodbye to stagecraft. Nonetheless, I feel as if a great deal of this analysis derives from the end-of-career effect: a last work by an author tends to be overdetermined by interpretations of an author’s ending thoughts. It would be interesting to see how The Tempest would be interpreted if Shakespeare had not collaborated on the other two plays.

There have been two dominant strains of interpretation concerning The Tempest.

1. A Play about the Mind. Many see this play (with good reason, I believe) as an allegory about the workings of the human mind. Prospero stands for the Renaissance man, an individual with the power to create and to destroy, to act angelically and to act as a beast. Aerial,  his fairy-servant, a denizen of the air, represents the angelic, cerebral nature in humans, the mind unburdened by the vicissitudes of the body. Caliban, Prospero’s other servant, is obviously a creature of the earth and the ocean, and represents the bestial nature of humans, our more animal self. Both are equally necessary for Prospero: as much as we may value Aerial more, Prospero makes many indications that he needs Caliban, particularly in the end when he calls “this thing of darkness my own.”

As a play about the mind, The Tempest utilizes the Renaissance Great-Chain-of-Being throughout. Shakespeare presents the hierarchy from the angelic to the bestial between Aerial and Caliban, with a full spectrum of low-life and virtuous characters in-between. Ask yourself, despite how you may feel about Caliban, would you rather have him or Sebastian in your daily life?

As a play of the mind, Shakespeare also seems to explore all of the dramatic genres. The play is at once a comedy, a tragedy and a romance.

A map of the world in 1611. For the Americas as a New World, map-making was not that bad in the early seventeenth century.

2. An Allegory of Colonial England. Many understandably see The Tempest as representing the Western world’s increasing exploration and colonization of the world, and its consequences. In this reading, Prospero is generally seen as representing the seemingly good and educated Westerner conquering the savage New World, and enlightening it with his beliefs (his magic). At the same time as Prospero enlightens, he enslaves the original inhabitants of the island. Caliban is, as he claims, the rightful owner of the island, yet Prospero overpowers him and forces him to labor so that he can live in ease. Aerial, too, is a sort-of indentured servant. As payment for freeing him from Sycorax’s twelve year spell, Aerial must serve Prospero for an equal amount of years.

MACBETH: A Meditation upon Meta-Theater.

Before we move on to The Tempest, I want to explore an issue Macbeth himself raises near the end of the play: meta-theater.

Meta-Theater.

Meta-theater essentially means theater about theater. It is when a playwright is self-conscious about theatricality, and makes theater itself central to a play. Meta-fiction is its analog in the short story and novel: fiction that explores itself as fiction (as when a character comes to the awareness that he’s a character in a story–or when an author comments upon the novel he/she is composing in the middle of the narrative, etc.).

Macbeth and Meta-Theater.

Shakespeare revels in meta-theater in many of his plays, frequently making comparisons of life and the stage. Look once again at Macbeth’s final soliloquy.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more.

In this case, Shakespeare has Macbeth muse upon how life is as brief as a stage performance, and how humans are like bad actors, posturing and covering up unease with histrionic gestures and playing a role to cover up how wrong life feels. The analogy is apt for Macbeth: he has been playing various roles in the course of the play, all of which he feels uncomfortable, particularly when he becomes king, and his robes literally feel like an ill-fitting costume for him. Like Hamlet, Macbeth is never comfortable with the “part” he is playing–like Hamlet, Macbeth does not feel he can “spur” his passion to perform his role well.

Midsummer Night’s Dream and Meta-Theater.

Continually in his plays Shakespeare explores the thin boundary between theater and life, art and reality. In Macbeth, that boundary is paper thin, as we saw how the Weird Sisters occupy a strange space in our sense of reality–they seem neither real nor unreal, much like the boarder between dream and wakefulness. Such a similar “liminal” space is explored in Shakespeare’s early comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where everything seems to exist in a tissue thin line between the dreamy light or the moon and the wakeful light of the sun. Bottom, the Weaver, delivers his wonderful soliloquy at the end of Act IV as he is waking up, so that what he says gets garbled between the dream he rises from, and the morning to which he opens his eyes.

King Lear and Meta-Theater.

Shakespeare challenges us to question how much of our conscious life is composed of theatricality, of artifice. In King Lear, we saw the centrality of disguises, the various costumes characters wear and the various parts or roles certain characters develop–Edmund seems to improvise a role in Act 1, and goes on to practice his sinister performances; Edgar puts-on his Tom o’Bedlam costume, and occupies his role to the point that he seems to get literally lost in his part. But theatricality is not limited to those characters who self-consciously take on roles. King Lear does not call attention to his theatrical being like Edgar or Edmund, yet he becomes severely aware of the various roles he occupies in life, and how he must try to take off and put on a different costume.

Meta-Theater and the Metaphysical Question, “Who Am I?”

All of his plays force us to wonder to what extent we improvise parts, put on costumes, play roles in our everyday life. How much of our being, that which we understand as our soul, or character, or personality, is a theatrical construction? How often to we play parts in our daily activities? As one becomes self-conscious of the extent to which one “performs” in life, the concept can become maddening. Shakespeare is not asking us to question, “who am I?” as much as he forces us to question, “who am I pretending to be?” In an existential sort of logic, we come to realize that the question of self-hood does not necessarily develop from who we genuinely are, but who we most poignantly are not.

The Tempest.

The issue of meta-theater becomes central to The Tempest, as the whole play revolves around an exploration of the theatricality of life. The whole play seems to emphasize theater: play-acting, costumes, scenery, magic, music, artifice and entertainment. In one of the many allegorical ways in which we will see one could read this, Shakespeare’s last play, Prospero represents a sort of playwright or artist (the mind of the play) willing the characters to action. Prospero as an artist figure seems to revel in the power he has to create and un-create existence, a power he finally relinquishes near the end of the play, emptying himself of his magic / wizardry, and becoming a mere human.

MACBETH: TEMPORALITY AND PROLEPSIS

No play by Shakespeare probably has as many repeated references to “time” than Macbeth. I have argued that as much as Macbeth is about the Imagination and its dangerous powers, the play is about the temporality–the finitude–of human life. The play constantly evokes the past and the future, while the present seems to exist tissue thin in the middle. In fact, when Lady Macbeth receives her husbands letters in Act 1, she states the issue of time in the play succinctly:

Thy letters have transported me beyond

This ignorant present, and I feel now

The future in the instant.

The philosophical question of how the future relates to the present has plagued philosophers and theologians since the ancients. The most famous meditation upon time comes from St. Augustine’s Confessions where he argues that the present does not exist. As soon as we know something is present, it has already become part of the past. And the future remains the all mysterious, anticipatory and unformed time that continually comes toward us–and, of course, drifts off to the past once again. In his trinitarian theory of time, Augustine believed that we understand time by remembering those things that have passed, seeing those things that are before us, and anticipating those things that are yet to come. In this way, the past always “indwells” the present, and both the past and the present unite to help us to anticipate and to bring the future (which is where God exists) into our being. For Augustine, Christianity is, in the end, future-oriented: it anticipates things and events unseen, and waits for the apocalypse, which we can never know in the present, and which is not part of our past.

Macbeth suffers and agonizes over Time, its nature, its effects. No matter how much he hopes that he could confine his actions to an instant, Macbeth realizes (before he kills Duncan) that time always continues to unfold and bears the consequences of action.

If it were done when ’tis done, the ’twere well/

It were done quickly. If th’assassination/

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch/

With his surcease success: that this blow/

Might be the be-all and the end-all, here . . .

But upon this bank and shoal of time. We’d jump the life to come.

Compare this with Augustine, or any twentieth century philosopher ruminating upon the nature of time, and you’d come up with fruitful interpretive results!

Interestingly, at the end of the play when Macduff marches about with with Macbeth’s severed head, he observes, “The time is free.”

But really Macbeth is the one who has been freed of time, which tortured him minute by minute in the play. Macbeth’s tragic punishment from Act 1 of the play is that remains always haunted by his past actions that are constantly imposing upon his present existence, and both threaten and make him dread always the future. Note that all of his murders following killing Duncan have to with the safety of his future, with his hope that he can keep any possible future from occurring. Hence, killing Banquo and Macduff’s children kills a possible future lineage. One can say that Macbeth engages an epic struggle against time–but, like a tragic hero who fights nature, he is destined to lose that battle. Time cannot be eliminated.

Macbeth’s final soliloquy–and his most famous–is a weary, forlorn poem about time. Hearing the news of his wife’s death, Macbeth says:

She should have died hereafter. There would have been a time for such a word.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/

To the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

In Macbeth’s dramatic context, the speech makes sense (we should not confuse the soliloquy with being Shakespeare’s philosophy on life): he expresses his feeling that life is utterly meaningless, brief and incoherent. We are all fools trudging toward another “tomorrow” and toward our own death. Macbeth’s tomorrow, which he hoped to be the joy of a hereafter never came. Instead, he has found himself stuck on a rack of present-tense time, suffering.

The speech is reminiscent of certain writing that surrounds apocalyptic despair, which makes sense. Macbeth is spent by this point in the play–he has lost any hope for victory. Like a Senecan figure in Roman theater, Macbeth appears resigned to death.

SOME PAPER TOPIC IDEAS: KING LEAR AND MACBETH.

Some General Topics to Consider for your Paper(s).

King Lear.

1. King Lear’s journey to self-knowledge considering his humanness. His fall from King and his rise to Man / Father. What does he learn? Has he gained recognition? Why does Shakespeare destroy him at the moment in which he learns his humanity?
2. The image / metaphor of blindness in the play. How is King Lear blind? Why is Gloucester physically blinded? How does the dichotomy between sight and blindness – vision and obscurity—function in the play? Do the characters come to “see”?
3. Disguises. Explore a character and his / her use of a disguise. How does the disguise function? What does the character learn in his disguise? How does the character gain power and knowledge from his disguise? What might Shakespeare be saying about disguises in our own lives? How do we “put on” a costume and a role in life?
4. Identity. Use one or two characters to explore the issue of identity. How does the character suffer from a crisis of identity? How does the character construct, develop and discover his / her identity?
5. Tragedy. Examine the ending of the play. Do you agree with 18^th century critics who claimed that the ending was reprehensible? Do you think that Lear and Cordelia should have survived? Does the play end in a vision of absolute-zero, of annihilation, meaninglessness, nothingness? Or is there some sense of hope and redemption?
6. Rising and Falling. Explore some of the various images / dynamics of ascents and descents in the play. Perhaps use the “cliffs of Dover” scene as an example. How do characters fall in order to rise once again? How do characters ascend to a different vision of the world? Why does Edgar willfully bring himself to the lowest position possible? What does he learn when he discovers that as long as we can say “this is the worst,” things could get even worse?
7. Christianity. How does the play fit into a uniquely Christian world-vision? Or does it? How does this play contrast to ancient tragedies, such as Oedipus the King?

 

Macbeth.

1. The Weird Sisters. How do you think we are supposed to understand the role and presence of the “witches”? What is their function in the play? Do they exist, or are they a figment of Macbeth’s imagination.
2. Imagination. How is Macbeth a victim of his own imagination? What might Shakespeare be saying about the power of the imagination? It’s limits and limitlessness, its beauty and its danger?
3. Lady Macbeth. Examine her role in the play. What does she mean by “unsex me”? How responsible is she for the atrocities Macbeth commits in the play? Is she the mastermind behind the bloodshed? How might she relate to other dark figures of Shakespeare, like Iago or Edmund? Is Shakespeare making any kind of comment on powerful female figures? Perhaps consider the rampant characterization of powerful women as Lady Macbeths in our current world.
4. Time. Examine Macbeth’s anxious relationship to temporality in the play. How may he be trying to kill “time” as much as he tries to kill life in his desire to reach the top.
5. Power. How does the play explore the corruption of power? Why does everything quickly fall apart the moment that Macbeth assumes the throne?
6. Sympathy. Macbeth is the so-called “tragic hero” of the play. But he is certainly unlike most tragic heroes. One of the rules concerning the tragic hero is that we must like the character, even  a little bit, and we must feel both sympathy and empathy for their situation. Like King Lear, Shakespeare challenges our response to the tragic hero in Macbeth. Do we feel any sympathy for Macbeth? In any sort of odd way, do we like Macbeth?
7. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Examine Macbeth’s final and famous soliloquy in the play. What about himself and life does he speak? How are Macbeth and the rest of us poor players, strutting and fretting our hour on the stage? Is life like a theater? Our we like poor actors on a stage?

MACBETH: INTERPRETATION AND TEMPORALITY

A play that explores superstition and the uncanny the most of any by Shakespeare, it is also historically the most unlucky play in performance. More actors literally “break a leg” in this play than in any other. There have been more onstage accidents associated with this play than any other in history (and some more off-stage and bizarre accidents amongst people involved in the play), including a famous actor playing Lady Macbeth, who decided that she could best convey her sleepwalking sequence in Act 5 by closing her eyes, which resulted in her falling into the orchestra pit and breaking her hip.

Although some would argue that there truly is something spooked about performing this play, the more likely explanation is the nature of the play itself. Almost the entire play takes place at night, and performances enhance the darkness, making it more difficult for characters to find their way around the stage.

But I would also suggest that the ruthless brevity, the sense of contractedness to the play adds to the difficulty it endures in performance. It is Shakespeare’s shortest play, which has raised a great deal of speculation that parts of the text are missing. I’m of the camp, however, that argues that the play is meant to be short and swift because of the dominant theme of the ruthless nature of time that runs throughout the play. And I will make this assertion for you all to bracket off for the moment, and which I will return to: Macbeth does not just want to kill humans, he wants to kill time.

No sooner has the play begun than Macbeth is suffering a mental breakdown. If one imagines the witches as symbolic of mental aberration, they are the dark, controlling force of the ID working beneath not just the surface of Macbeth’s life, but all our lives. I argue otherwise that the witches exist with the same substance as Hamlet’s Ghost. First of all, notice that, although we always call them “the witches,” they are only referred to as so once in the play. In the play they are known as the “weird sisters.” It is important to know that the word “weird” is an Anglo-Saxon derivation of the word Wyrd, which means “fate.” The weird sisters are integral to Macbeth’s sense of contracted time. Everything the weird sisters utter is couched in equivocation. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” “Double, double, toil and trouble.” In fact, like “nothing” in King Lear, “double” is one of the key words in this play. To be doubled is to be equivocal. Three tends to represent stability, a trinity, whereas Two represents duality or duplicity. The characters and us, the audience, are being told to not trust everything we see or hear. In short, the weird sisters force upon us immediately the necessity of interpretation.

As soon as Macbeth comes off the battlefield, where supposedly he was up to his knees in bloods, and had disembowled and beheaded his enemy, he and Banquo run into the weird sisters. Equivocation rules as they cannot tell if they are women or men. They seem to be women, Banquo comments, except that they have beards.

Working as the voice of Wyrd, or fate, the weird sisters hale Macbeth as Thane of Cawdor,” and then as “king hereafter!” Macbeth is instantly mesmerized by the fantastic prediction, since at the moment he is only the Thane of Glamis.” Even Banquo notices right away the change in Macbeth’s mental stability, “Good sir, why do you start and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?” (1.3. 50). Notice the use of “fair,” and remember that fair is foul.

Angus, Ross and Banquo all notice how distracted Macbeth becomes, as he stands off by the side and talks to himself. Yes indeed, such a prediction that Macbeth will soon raise up in the ranks and then become king should make him feel astounded, as Banquo claims, but Macbeth’s soliloquy tells another story, of a man haunted by the prediction.

This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,

Why hath is given me earnest of success

Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

Against the use of nature? Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings.

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man

That function is smothered in surmise

And nothing is but what is not.

In this first soliloquy, we can see what is so unsettling about this play. First the rampant equivocation. If this is a bad omen, Macbeth asks, why does he feel so drawn to it with excitement? If it is a good omen, why is he so terrified? And then the soliloquy leaps (there are many such leaps in thought, as the word “leap” and “vault” are prevalent in the play) to Macbeth contemplating murder. But this is more than contemplating murder. He suggests that he has already decided to commit murder–what horrifies him, he claims, is not murder itself, but the “horrible imaginings” that come between the thought and the action. The whole play becomes dominated by Macbeth’s desire to “kill” the space between thought and action, for the act of murder to happen in and instant, propelling him to the future he desires. Macbeth has what is called a proleptic imagination. He imagines where he wants to be, and functions as if he has already arrived there. We saw the proleptic imagination in Henry IV, Part 1. In Act 1, Prince Hal already sees himself sitting on the throne, and has already vaulted over his father and banished Falstaff in his imagination–in as sense, Hal is the king before he assumes the throne.

Then Macbeth’s soliloquy ends with the dominant theme of equivocation in the play: “function is smothered in surmise/And nothing is but what is not.” We’ve seen this equivocation at the heart of identity in other plays. Edgar’s “Edgar I nothing am.” Iago’s, “I am not what I am.”

From the moment Macbeth steps off the battlefield and is given a vision of the throne, he becomes enthralled by his imagination–he becomes driven to reach the telos of his existence in and instant, and becomes propelled to murder both those who stand in his way, and, unbelievably, time (which is ultimately in his way) itself. One of the things that makes Macbeth (a serial killer) sympathetic nonetheless is the fact that his actions seem somewhat out of his control–he comes across swept up in what I would call an emotional temporality. Consider the fact that he does not seem to be that hungry for power–he’s not a Richard III, or an Edmund, or a Prince Hal. Macbeth himself wonders why the prediction of his power would horrify him. And when he returns home behind the letter of events he sends his wife, he wants to back down from partnering up with her to murder the king. Lady Macbeth, however, cajoles her husband to follow through on their dark plans by questioning his manhood. So I would assert to you all that Macbeth is a mass-murderer whose heart is not really in murder.

PRELIMINARY IDEAS ON STARTING TO THINK ABOUT A PAPER

How to Write a Paper on Shakespeare or any other Difficult Work of Literature by Focusing Your Topic.

The plays of Shakespeare can be the most difficult works on which to write an interpretive paper. But you can make your task a lot less onerous by conducting a lot of pre-writing. And you may actually discover that composing an essay on any difficult piece of literature can be enjoyable. Additionally, if you can find a way to focus your writing concerning Shakespeare, I believe you have made a big step toward writing about any other piece of literature.

1. Before you start writing a paper on Shakespeare, you need to make sure that you have narrowed your topic or idea. I always emphasize to my students the importance of narrowing their ideas in such a way that they are looking at specific things upon which they can focus and expand upon in their writing. By coming up with a focused idea or thesis, you avoid several pitfalls that occur when writing a paper on Shakespeare, or any other difficult piece of literature: plot summary, writing about the entire play or book without a central thesis, needlessly digressing, and wasting a great deal of time and energy. You also avoid becoming overwhelmed and loathing the writing experience. Even if a teacher or professor supplies you with topics from which to choose, you will always need to come up with a way in which to focus your ideas and develop a thesis or focused argument.

1. Spend some time making a list of all the issues, problems or ideas in the play that interest, bother, fascinate or confuse you. At this point, you do not need to think in terms of a thesis or a focused topic. You are just brainstorming. Write down a list of things that fascinate you in the play. I will use Hamlet as an example. In your brainstorming about Hamlet, you might come up with things like, Hamlet’s indecisiveness; Hamlet’s relationship with his mother; the play-within-a-play; Ophelia’s madness; the corruption of power; the fear of death; the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, etc, etc.

1. After you have come up with a list of things that interest you in the play, choose the one that you know, without a doubt, will sustain your interest, and on which you could write passionately. When you have to interpret something as complex as a play by Shakespeare, never choose to write about something that does not interest you. Even if Shakespeare does not interest you in the least—even if you hate reading Shakespeare—there is always something in one of his plays about which you could be passionate. This is because Shakespeare was a genius at writing plays that had specific ideas and actions, but which could also always represent universal ideas and problems with which we can all identify.

1. Now that you have chosen a general issue or idea on which you want to write, you need to focus it down into something specific and manageable. I believe that a great deal of students have a difficult time writing about Shakespeare—and get bad grades—because they fail to take this next step in the pre-writing, brainstorming process. For example, suppose you decided you are most fascinated with Hamlet’s indecisiveness. This is a gigantic topic. If you just went ahead to write about Hamlet’s indecisiveness, you would end up covering the entire play. You would become overwhelmed, and resort to plot summary. Since your topic is so general, you would end up writing a very general and vague paper. And this is death for an academic paper. I always know I am in for a bad read when I get a paper from a student with a title like Hamlet, the Moody Dane.

Once you have a general issue that interests you, you need to conduct more brainstorming. Start to write down another list of all the specific aspects you can think of concerning the issue you have chosen. To return to our example, Hamlet’s indecisiveness. You might write down: Hamlet cannot act upon revenge because he feels ambivalent about his father; Hamlet hesitates for so long because he wrestles with moral issues concerning revenge; Hamlet takes revenge too personally, and his selfish desires impede his progress; Hamlet unconsciously resents his father . . . whatever it might be, you must find some sort of angle or perspective that is more narrow and specific than your general idea. Write down every specific aspect of your general issue that you can. I hate to say it, but such brainstorming will probably require you to re-read parts or all of the play.

1. Narrow the scope of the text with which you will work. Once you have narrowed your general issue to a specific aspect, you should find between one and four places in the play that you can focus on. Go through the play, and find a few passages or scenes that you can interpret in the context of your focused idea. Too many students become overwhelmed because they think they have to write about the entire play, expressing everything they know about it. A professor does not want this in your paper. He or she wants to see that you can take a specific argument, and develop and support it cogently within the limitations of a specified amount of written pages. When you narrow the focus of your topic, you can look at specific places in the play as opposed to dealing with the entire play.

When you are writing an interpretive paper, it is not your job to write about the entire piece of literature. It is your job to support your thesis and to offer specific evidence concerning that aspect of the play that you have chosen to interpret. You should have a mantra running through your head: “I do not need to write about the entire play. I need to write about those places that support the subject of my paper.”

If you look at any five, ten, or even twenty page paper by a scholar of Shakespeare, or any other literary critic, you will see that they focus only on that which helps them to drive home their point. In fact, a good paper on Shakespeare could easily focus on one passage, one soliloquy, even one line. Consider how much interpretive material you could write concerning the simple line, “To be or not to be” alone. A famous Shakespeare scholar wrote an entire book about Hamlet by focusing on the first line of the play: “Who’s there?”

1. Consider writing on a topic concerning one of the minor characters in a play. In Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark is a gigantic character. He is the subject of more scholarship than any other character in literature. Like King Lear, Macbeth or Falstaff, Hamlet dominates the play. Focusing on a major character in a play by Shakespeare can be daunting. Perhaps write about Ophelia, or Claudius, or Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Students often feel relieved when they choose to write about a minor character. A minor character has a more focused presence in a play, and can serve many different functions toward varying themes. Students often discover that by losing the burden of focusing on a major literary character, they feel free to explore an issue with more breathing room.

1. Consider writing about a motif, symbol, metaphor or conceit that runs through a play. There are many motifs that run through a single play by Shakespeare, like the image and reference to poison in Hamlet, the references to cupid in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the word “honor” in Henry IV, or the conceit that life is like a stage that runs through many of his plays. You can focus on one symbol or image in a play, perhaps showing up in one passage, and expand your discussion greatly. For instance, in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, he uses many images of decay, as in his comparison of the world to an “unweeded garden.” Consider how much you could discuss focusing on this one image in this one passage alone.

1. Explore a meta-theatrical or meta-fictional issue. By this, I mean look at an issue concerning literature as a whole in a specific context of the play you are writing about. For instance, perhaps you are interested in the genre, tragedy, in the context of Hamlet. List all of the issues concerning tragedy as a genre you could write about: tragic flaw, the protagonist’s fall, the tragic climax, catharsis, etc. Then, write down specific aspects of the issue concerning tragedy you have chosen. Then, once again, go through all of the options to find specific places in the play to focus upon. Or perhaps you are interested in structure, such as how a play reaches an ending; or how a play begins, as in my example of the guard asking in the very first line, “Who’s there?” There are almost an endless amount of issues and ideas you could come up with. But again, once you have a general idea, you must narrow your focus down to something specific, and one or a few particular places in the play that you will look at.

By spending some time brainstorming your ideas and narrowing your focus, you will have a far less overwhelming experience writing an interpretive paper. Further, since you have spent some time thinking about what interests you the most, you will probably enjoy writing your paper. It might sound like intense work before you even start writing the paper, but I guarantee it pays off in the end.

 

 

MACBETH: INTRODUCTION

Whereas King Lear takes place over a vast landscape and involves numerous characters, Macbeth is a far more compact play, dominated by the figure of Macbeth. King Lear is not only one of Shakespeare’s most challenging plays, but one of the anomalies of his high tragedies in that there are virtually no minor characters. Every character is in some way a major presence, demanding all of our attention; and each character exhibits extremes–none of theme have any emotional equanimity.

In Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, one major character generally dominates the play. Hamlet engulfs the play, speaking more than a third of the lines, all of the characters in some way subordinate to him. In Othello, Iago frighteningly controls the entire play. Although Lady Macbeth herself is endlessly fascinating, all of her actions in some way depend upon her husband’s destiny.

Shakespeare derived the notion of a single character dominating and engulfing a play from Christopher Marlowe, whose antagonists tended to be these larger than life, ferocious over-reachers, like Taumberline, or Faustus. Shakespeare first practiced the use of a major, engulfing character with the outrageous figure of Richard III in that early history play.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth as a sort of tribute to King James, who became the new monarch of England in 1603 after the death of Elizabeth. Both King Lear and Macbeth are plays that mark the end of the Elizabethan era in literature, and the beginning of the Jacobean era. James was Scottish, and he was famously obsessed with the occult. A pseudo-scholar (he is the king who authorized and oversaw the King James Version of the Bible), James wrote voluminously on many issues, including ghosts, spirits, witches and anything else supernatural. Although he could be prescient at times, much of the writing is pretty wild and, at times, gobbledygook. But there is no doubt that the preponderance of ghoulish subject matter and events in Macbeth–and, of course, the Scottish setting–was inspired by the new king of England.

Just as in King Lear, the thunder and lightning that opens Macbeth reflects the tumultuous mood of the play. The difference, however, is that the play foregrounds the supernatural. Although it feels supernatural, there are no supernatural events in King Lear. There is such extreme of emotion in King Lear, it feels as though the supernatural could break out at any moment–ghosts, demons, monsters–but everything in that play exists on a real and existential plane. Macbeth opens with three witches involved in an incantation and brewing a cauldron of spells.

A challenge in the play is to determine how we are supposed to understand the three Witches, of the Weird Sisters. Are they real? a hallucination? symbolic? Like the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, Shakespeare wants us to suspend disbelief and to accept their existence; at the same time, the Witches seem to occupy a supernatural realm. Although, like the Ghost in Hamlet, they do speak to other characters at the beginning of the play, they seem to exist for Macbeth’s benefit / curse.

A large issue to focus on is the ruthless economy, the speed and brevity of the play. All of the action becomes contracted, as thoughts and events seem to occur almost breathlessly, on top of each other. When we first meet Macbeth, he has just come from the battlefield bloodied, weary, but victorious, and right away he meets the witches, who prophecy his rise in power. Instantly, Macbeth is drawn into mental aberration to the point that even his war-mates recognize how distracted he is. The lust for power immediately ignites his darker imagination–more than that, he becomes immediately drawn into the vacuum of his imagination itself, obsessed with its power.

I have often taught how Shakespeare portrays the emotionally damaging and corrupting power of violence and war. Macbeth is a warrior, battle-weary. The description of him on the battlefield in the conflict that occurs before the play indicates his involvement in the brutality and atrocity of war. The play seems to begin with an image of Macbeth mentally succumbing to what we would call today the trauma of war. As in King Lear, the tragic hero in Macbeth appears to be fallen–or at least falling–the moment that the play begins. In the inverse of ancient tragedy, the more that Macbeth falls–falls into insanity–the more that he rises in power. But each role of leadership, including when he becomes king, involves what the play frequently refers to as “borrowed clothes.”

King Lear challenged us to love a figure who we initially disliked. Macbeth poses even more of a challenge in this realm. The play uncomfortably explores the mind of a mass-murderer. Yet, somehow, parallel to the empathy Aristotle claimed we always feel for a tragic hero, we come to sympathize with Macbeth.