Yay!

I solved the biggest problem I’ve had with Hamlet since I ever first read it in my senior year of high school.  This is damn amazing and really worthwhile, and solves most of my problems with the ending of the play (always difficult to account for) and may make my thesis sort of actually a very valid intellectual project, rather than just silly but well researched.  Yay!  I’m not going to write down what I discovered, because I don’t want to fuss the surprise, but it’s thanks to Professor Kunin’s good recommendation of research directions and Early English Books Online, which I now think is the best resource ever.

Yep, pretty much.

Defense of Poetry

            Anxiety rests on the idea of poetry, and to a lesser extent literature, and its nature as an art.  Though the novel invited criticism and claims that its new form would allow literature to threaten the agency of the reader, poetry’s history, its claim as the original literary form and power within society, has invited a wealth of commentary regarding its value to the cultures it affects.  Socrates criticizes the poet, claiming that he creators a false reality that is as removed from the original object it represents and that this removed state possesses little value for philosophers who must study truth.  However, at the same time Socrates admits a love for the Homeric epic and for the form of poesy.  Sidney sets out on a Defense of Poesy, which he confusingly also titles Apology for Poetry.  This dichotomy invites the question of whether poetry should be defended or merely apologetically acknowledged.  Regardless of its title, Sidney’s work lauds poetry not only above all other literary forms, but over all other modes of thought, though it criticizes the nature of English and English’s ability to work with poetry in the same way as Latin.  Several centuries later Shelley brings forth the same problem under the same title, as his unapologetic Defense of Poetry claims English and Latin poets as not only superior to all other poets or professionals, but the modern representative of nearly every professional, through their aesthetic and their understanding of human sentiment.  There is clearly a perceived need to account for poetry and defend it as a discipline. 

            The role of the critic within poetry needs to be addressed.  Though many Defense of Poetry’s do not account for the experience of the reader as much as for either the role of the author or the poem itself, the critic is the last party engaging with the poem and is significant as he is also the defender of poetry.  Furthermore, if poetry has an effect on society, it is through the reader it influences rather than through its creator. By not addressing the role of the critic, the poets imply that “critical power is of lower rank than the creative”, which, though “it is undeniable that the exercise of a creative power, that free creative activity is the highest function of man,” the legitimacy of this position is unclear (Arnold 500).  Arnold argues it is “proved to be so by man’s finding in it his true happiness,” but this stance seems problematic, as the happiness of the individual author is fleeting, and though it is potentially a mode by which the quality of a work (or at least the production of a work) can be assessed, it must be of little lasting value.  Indeed, Barthes argues it can be of almost no value whatsoever and only the experience of the reader is important as he operates as the “space in which are inscribed all the citations out of which a writing is made; the unity of a text is not in its origin but in its destination” (“The Death of the Author” 54).  Without a final textual experience, the process of writing is unimportant.  Arnold goes into the complexities of the role of the author, who he does not discount as readily as Barthes, but rather sees as tenuous and subject to a number of potential frailties.  He argues, “the exercise of the creative power in the production of great works of literature or art, however high this exercise of it may rank, is not at all epochs and under all conditions possible; and that labor may be vainly spent in attempting it, which might with more fruit be used in preparing for it, in rendering it possible…Creative literary genius does not principally show itself in discovering new ideas, that rather is the business of the philosopher.  The grand work of literary genius is a work of synthesis and exposition, not of analysis and discovery; its gift lies in the faculty of being happily inspired by a certain intellectual and spiritual atmosphere, by a certain order of ideas, when it finds itself in them; dealing divinely with these ideas, presenting them in the most effective and attractive combinations- making beautiful works with them” (Arnold 500).  It is clear that the critic is not the poet, but rather the effect of poetry; without a critic the poet’s innovation (for it is clear by Shelley’s eventual definitions that it is the poet who innovates, though Arnold has signified innovation as the philosopher’s field) would be lost and so language would lie forever stagnant.

            Though Arnold seeks to explain that the critic is the true discoverer of the new in terms of form and content, he ultimately makes an argument against the author’s creative role in text.  This essentially appeals to Socrates argument presented in Plato’s Republic, which decries poetry as imitative and unoriginal.  Both Sidney and Shelley react against the perception that “all such things [as poetry] damage the minds of those who hear them, unless they have knowledge of what they are really like as an antidote” (Plato 40).  Both react in a manner which is hyperbolic and which perhaps damages their argument, as they attribute to the poet much which is easily refuted.  However, they raise interesting claims about the nature of poetry as well as the role and the reality of the poet.

            Shelley’s history predicts many of the stances he will eventually take regarding the role of the individual poet within literature.  Shelly attends Oxford but is eventually expelled for his radical ideas regarding atheism.  Still a part of the educated elite in English society, he writes a number of treatises against established norms of education, religion, and politics, arguing for the rights and values of the individual.  His well documented opinions regarding the nature of the politician, the citizen’s role within society, and the duty of the individual to others may account for his eventual claim that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as well as much the value he places on poets and their works.  His radical emphasis on the responsibility of the individual coincides with the privilege he places on the author as a major factor in the meaning of poetry and its political function in society.  Furthermore, the overriding thesis that poetry and the individual poets can influence and are responsible for influencing social change clearly coincides with his history of academic protest.

            Throughout Percy Shelley’s Defense of Poetry there is a distinction made between “two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination” (1).  Although this distinction initially appears to be aligned with Arnold and Socrates, who distinguish between the creative and the imitative modes of creation, it is clear that, unlike Arnold and Socrates, Shelley intends to privilege poetry as the creative mode of thought, and argue it results from the observations of the mental action which is merely reasonable.  Reason is essentially defined as observation, as it “may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced, and [imagination], as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity” (Shelley 1).  This initial definition of imagination attributes the creation of imaginary thought to an “author,” or the individual thinking and implies a self-contained quality that makes the imaginative thing, which is separate from the author since he is constrained within his own physical reality, whereas the product of imagination is definitely not physical.  Thus the creation of the non-physical elements in the world is contingent on the presence of an author.  This defends not only the creative identity of poetry as an element in the world separate from the real objects it connects, but more potently defends the author, who is responsible for adding this element to the world.

            The creation and of poetry is complex, and cannot be attributed solely to the author of the work, but lies in some combination of the value of the work once it exists without the author combined with the author’s intent.  Unlike Barthes, Shelley is not seeking to do away with the author.  He elevates the poet before all other human beings, but at the same time seems to acknowledge some genesis of the poem outside the author himself within an imaginative realm that is more universal than any given author.  He attributes imagination with “the principle of synthesis, and has for its own objects forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself” (Shelley 1).  Imagination is a principle tied to an author; only the author can be responsible for the form or imagery of the poem.  However, Shelley sees imagination as part of some “universal nature” that characterizes “existence itself,” an element of a reality for all people that does not rely on the presence of an author.  Poetry transcends reason, which is “the enumeration of qualities already known” and is instead within the realm of “the perception of the value of [known] quantities, both separate and has a whole.”  Reason is ultimately inferior to imagination, as it is “the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit as the shadow to the substance” (Shelley 1).  The conclusion that reason is less significant than imagination as it is insubstantial is a tenuous assertion.  The definition of reason given is that it sees and values forms where imagination values the essentially philosophical connections between forms, making imagination unlike the substance of objects. The conclusion and the legitimization of this paradox provides an access point to the extremity of the definition Shelley is attempting to provide, a definition that depends on the assumption that the world of the mind must be privileged above the physical reality.  Imagination appeals to the substance of mental action.  The significance of objects found in their connection to other objects ultimately determines those object’s worth and substance, but only within a context lacking physical substance to which reason first appeals.  Shelley provides in this sentence the purely mental context of his argument for his reader.  By establishing a paradigm of substance that is not wholly dependent on structures (physical or otherwise) Shelley is free to move forward through an argument of assertions which depend heavily on this contextual premise.

            Having defined imagination, Shelley is free to go on to his subject of poetry, which he identifies as “the expression of imagination”.  The introduction of a need for “expression” implies reliance on an author and, in all probability, an audience to receive this expression.  This definition allows poetry to take on an identity as an expression of the ever-changing state of man’s perceptions and interpretations, a conceptualization of the form that both allows for a great breath of form and significance, but also creates an instability which puts both the author and the work in an unstable position.  Time becomes an issue as, according to Barthes, it inherently must when the notion of the author is associated with literature. Time is potentially a product of the presence of the author.  If the author is removed, time dissolves and allow the text to be conceptualized as pure and without a point of origin, existing perpetually contemporaneously with the reader.  Any significance is created by the individual experiencing the effect of the text itself. Because the author “is always conceived as the past of his own book: book and author are voluntarily placed on one and the same line, distributed as a before and an after,” an inherent timeline is established by the existence of the authorial figure.  When the author is removed, “there is no time other than the speech-act, and every text is written eternally here and now” (Barthes 49).  However, this approach to time is problematic.  The context of the author will always influence the substance of the text, and though the text may be derived purely from imagination, the origins of this imagination, the real images that the imagination functions to connect, will hold critical significance to the form that imaginative figures ultimately take.  Representative and imitative arts, (though they are art and are composed of the “imagination,” a quality not available to the real context outside of art) will always reflect “the social sympathies, or those laws from which, as from its elements, society results” (Shelley 2).  These elements create a “future contained within the present,” and any potential value of a text is found within the origins of the text itself, lying without manifestation but also attributable to the poetry and so the imagination of the poet. 

            The question of the author is tied to the ambiguity of the origins of poetry.  The author has a hand in its creation, but difficulty lies in defining the limits of his role.  If poetry is the result of the expression of imagination, authorship is easy to come by.  However, poetry is not all expression.  It is subject to “a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation” which, though not a mode of distinguishing poetry unilaterally, potentially provides a means of identifying works of high value and “from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other” (Shelley 2).  Those for whom “the predominance of the faculty of the approximation to the beautiful (for so we may be permitted to name the relation between this highest pleasure and its cause) is…in excess are poets” (2).  Significantly, poetry lies in observation and in the ability to differentiate beauty.  Beauty is not merely the pleasure of the aesthetic (as Barthes seems to argue in his book Le Pleasure du Texte), but also a recognition of its cause.  Imagination is the link between objects, as the cause of pleasure and pleasure itself, and in this link lays literary beauty.  Objects themselves should contain an order of beauty, however poetry accesses a higher form of beauty which is the non-visual implied beauty of the language of poetry.  This is consistent with the spoken (or at least written) nature of poetic expression, and in some ways appeals to Socrates’ concern that poetry is mere representation.  Inhabiting an intangible realm, poetry enhances beauty by removing its physical and practical limitations.  The poet not only sees the objects and the link, but can express the whole course of imagination, and perpetuate beauty, creating a new object for the focus of imagination. 

            Poetry plays a role in the evolution of language.  Shelley argues that poetry not only uses language, but is an important aspect of the evolution of language.  The connections poetry makes (which are the beautiful elements in language) establish linguistic norms marking “before unapprehended relationships of things and perpetuate[ing] their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs” (Shelley 3).  In this way poetry allows for the establishment of language, legitimizing the resolution that poetry is necessary for society and for societal evolution, and endowing poets with a phenomenal power.  Any connection made by a poet serves as a potential referent during the continued evolution of language.  This makes the poet the father of all other positions of responsibility within society, and means, “if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse” (Shelley 3).  With a stagnant language social evolution is necessarily limited.  This pairing of poetry with a political consciousness is not unique to Shelley, but Shelley supports more than most a strong sense that the poet is the party responsible for advancement.  If language moves forward, the society cannot help but be exposed to its beauty and thus be advanced.  Likewise, if poetry ceased, a society could not move forward because it would lack the evolved vocabulary to address any new ideas and stagnation would be inevitable.

            The office of the poet is unique and laden with responsibility.  Poets are necessary so society will have the words to address its problems.  Poets create meaning in language through authorship to address problems with which they are concerned, yet not all participants in language are poets.  Some members of society are participating and using the rhetoric established by poets to more complex ends (and yet less significant foundationally) than the poets themselves.  This invites further search for a identity for poetry and for the poet. 

Poetry is concerned with language and with intangible observations about the universe.  Poetic truths are established by the poet and exist once they are observed, but are not inherent in reality.  Language is an appropriate tool for this entirely generative, creative mode of thought, and is able to function in a capacity that allows for the establishment of concrete, real truths and rules of existence.  For this reason “in the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry…every language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry” (3).  Poetry’s nearly infinite capacity for linguistic and imaginative creativity results in the creation of systems within language, like grammar and definitions.  The establishments of such systems are moments of linguistic evolution.  However, once a system is in place, it no longer is an element of the imaginative and creative field of poetry (though it is a product of poetry), but instead works within the less creative mode of simple reason, observation, and order.  This is why poetry must be created perpetually.  As soon as the connections of poetry have been made, they become tools for the rhetoricians, aiding society to express its current state but not contributing to its evolution.  Shelley goes on to expound,

“poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of langue and of music, or of dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion…a poet essentially comprises and unites both those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of the latest time.”   (Shelley 3)

 

A poet cannot predict future events and is not a prophet, but rather a poet “participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not” (Shelley 3).  In essence, the poet’s ability to set the mood of the future or establish the tone of the past through description means he is able to establish history as it is created or reform it after it has been created as he sees fit.  In this way Homer is able to establish his “Odyssey” as a common receptacle of all knowledge and heroics.  The poet is able to bring protagonists to the front of action and attribute to them amazing feats, far beyond the limits of ordinary men.  This new history, through it is the product of imagination rather than observation, has greater significance than the events as they occurred because the poetry captures the popular imagination and replaces the true history, which may never have been reported.  Likewise, the characterization of the future created by a poet, the imagined future that can result only through poetic genesis, has far greater salience to the present than any unimagined future that does not exist at all.  However, this seems to only address a poet’s ability to influence the direction in which society proceeds, and does not necessarily establish poets as law makers or legislators.  While they may be the “directors of the arts of life” and even of the public perception of life, it also seems to be true that, beyond their substantial influence of language and thereby perception, they hold no real sway over the content of society. 

            Poetry is a discipline unto itself, as well as a mode by which culture can advance.  Observing the “system of traditional forms and harmony of language” allows for the establishment of a typical system which “it is by no means essential that a poet accommodate,” but which to some extent he cannot avoid.  Because poetry is an art of that creates and establishes language “every great poet must inevitably innovate upon the example of his predecessors in the exact structure of his peculiar versification” (Shelley 3).  Because of the innovative nature of poetry and the ever shifting structure of poetics “the distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error” (Shelley 4).  This is clear, because if poetry leads to new meanings and forms in language then any linguistic evolution would fall under the purview of poetry.  However, Shelley would further argue “the distinction between philosophers and poets has been anticipated” (4).  Here issues of definition are highlighted.  Poets are certainly concerned with the creation of connections between objects which are observably real.  These connections are, according to Shelley, the products of the poet’s imagination.  This makes them of higher value than real observable objects themselves.  Philosophers should be concerned with truth.  It is this assumption that leads Socrates to decry poets as debasers of truth, creating representations which are not truth themselves, yet Shelley would argue that “Plato was essentially a poet” (Shelley 4).  By considering only the nature of Plato’s language, “the truth and splendor of his imagery, the melody of his” writing, it is relatively easy to classify him as an author (a creator of new truths by re-reporting existing realities with new connections) of an evolving style of language.  He “rejected the measure of the epic, dramatic, and lyrical forms, because he sought to kindle a harmony in thoughts divested of shape and action, and he forbore to invent any regular plan of rhythm which would include, under determinate forms, the varied pauses of his style” (4).  This is all consistent with the dedication to intangible truths and communication through language that must characterize a poet, yet Plato decries the poets as far less significant than philosophers.  Truth, within a poetic world, is cyclical.  All the authors “of revolutions in opinion are not only necessarily poets as they are inventors, nor even as their words unveil the permanent analogy of things by images which participate in the life of truth” (4).  This “echo of the eternal music” of truth and of social evolution means there can be no supreme poets “who have employed traditional forms of rhythm on account of the form and action of their subjects, less capable of perceiving ad teaching the truth of things, and than those who have omitted the form.  Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton are all philosophers of the very loftiest power” (4). Because philosophers must employ language in order to give their philosophy the potency of expression, they are inevitably placed on the same level as the poets, bound by imagery for the expression of intangible ideas.  The discrepancy for both Shelley and Plato, lies in the use of form and images.  Plato and Socrates argue that description creates a removal from reality that is detrimental and removes poetry from philosophy.  Shelley agrees with the creative power of poets, but argues it is here their power lies.  Both Shelley and Plato describe events; Poets merely exercise more imagination in the form of this description but both Plato and Shelley seem to employ imaginative images.  Neither description is the truth itself, and so both are poetry.  The distinction, then, is the poetry with aesthetic value that will influence language, which ultimately seems to be what Plato has done, creating for himself an identity as a poet.

            The role of the author as a god-like figure is important in literature and will always be a question if the author’s is role in the text is considered.  Because the author plays both a creative and controlling role in the evolution of his work, it will always be difficult to separate Genesis from the creation involved in the production of other works of fiction.  The role of the author initially seems to be most god-like in fictional narrative, because the author is creating lives, concerns, and worlds in which his action will play out.  This ultimately is an important distinction which empowers the poet above other authors, as authors create worlds over which they have control, poets create truths which then exist in the uncontrolled “real” world.  Where a fiction is an isolated story, “a poet is the image of life expressed in an eternal truth” (5).  This is what makes an author’s power not that of G-d; the author creates a world that is unreal.  The creative ability over the real that is possessed by the poet, though clearly limited to the creation of beauty and connection between real images, is still the power of creation over the real. 

“There is this difference between a story and a poet, that is a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause, and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.  The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur [and which never in actuality occur]; the other is universal, ad contains within itself the germ of a relation to which motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature.  Time, which destroys the beauty and the use of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should invest them, augment that poetry, and forever develop new and wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains.  Hence epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it.  A story of particular facts is a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful what which is distorted.” (5).

 

Poetry’s ability to create real truths through the narration of “living images” which impact the reality of the reader makes it perpetually salient, and allows it to assert a meaning that outstrips the limited application of the story.  Even though the events narrated in poetry may be fictional, the linguistic evolutions demanded to classify writing as poetry means it will always have a dynamic and tangible effect whereas the effect of fiction is internalized, very real within the world of the fiction but specifically unreal for the reader and observers.

            Ultimately it is not poetry but the poet that are defended.  The creative prerogative of the poet exceeds any of his peers, placing him in a position to modify the past, present, and future more than any other social leaders.  By modifying language the poet changes the tools available to other leaders, creating rhetoric that must be either used or modified by other poets.  Language builds on itself and so poetry builds on the writing which preceded it.  Though this is not necessary, it is the quality of an evolutionary task that it will reference its origins in order to modify and perpetuate forward momentum.  Because of this an understanding of historic poetry is important, and the poet becomes a figure not only important currently and socially, but also genetically and culturally.  Though they are not politicians, poets hold sway over reality that is potentially more potent than philosophers.  A philosopher with a command of language, particularly an effective or revolutionary command, is a poet.  A poet must be a philosopher as philosophy is concerned with truth, and poets are in the business of creating truth through writing, and so are concerned with making assertions over the same matter as philosophers.  Shelley combines this with an apparent creative prowess (in terms of reality) over writers of pure and un-poetic fiction and gives poets superiority over all those who use language.  Sidney has not defended poetry, but rather has defined it as a mode of creating real connections between observable things.  He uses this definition to assert a number of defenses of poets as individuals, a project of empowerment consistent with the philosophies that guide his political and academic career.

Chapters

The chapters in the thesis were going to be: Hamlet, Richard III, Antony and Cleopatra, MacBeth, Nature of Narrative.  I believe they’re now going to be, and this is very exciting:

Hamlet-Successful Narrative Usurptation

Richard III-Failed Narrative Usurptaiton

Non-Protagonist Usurpation- Prophesy, Messengers, and the internal audience

The Nature of Narrative

This organization just makes sense.  Don’t worry, you’re going to love it.  It’s hybrid.

Monologue in Richard III and Hamlet

            Soliloquy, at the turn of the century, is being re-identified, and begins to change in form from a long speech integrated into a dialog, to a mode of expressing the otherwise internal thought process of a character (de Grazia 74).  Still acknowledged as communication between two units, it becomes the dialog between the mind of the character and the audience, rather than a mode of actual exchange between characters.  The issue of soliloquy in Shakespeare’s tragedies quickly becomes one of narration.   This modification is significant to the philosophy of the content of a play; no longer is a play a set of dialog, but for the first time narration can be inserted.  The idea of narration is seemingly inapplicable to theater; theater is by definition dialog between characters, who, through action, demonstrate to the audience what is happening.  The narrator is superfluous.  However, what the audience lacks when there is no narrator is access to the internal world of the characters.  Without narration the audience has the same privilege as any character in the play; they can see only what an observer could in the world of the play.  This is a reduction of privilege from their role as a reader of literature, who is party both to the action of the book as well as to an intimate knowledge of the character’s motivations, as provided by the narrator.  With soliloquy in the form of voiced thought, this intimacy is returned, and the audience becomes re-aligned with the characters in a way in which they have not been accustomed.

            Narration through soliloquy should be inherently of the first person.  The narrator is integrated into a privileged character or characters who are allowed to step out of the world of the play and into the real world of the audience, and explain their actions to the audience.  Because these characters are otherwise bound to the world of the play, they are unable to speak to the motivations or intentions of any of the other characters.  As characters wax philosophical and begin to generalize, their narration becomes less and less representative of the inner-thought of an individual character, and more and more symptomatic of a mood that may be generalized for the play.  For the soliloquy to evolve into a mode of third-person narration that it will eventually become and which will allow drama to involve the audience as intimately as literature involves the reader, the soliloquy must become removed from the substance and plot of the play, and, furthermore, must remove itself from the specific concerns of the individual, and become almost a critique of the play itself, drawing from the art and becoming an artistic commentary.  The evolution of the soliloquy may be demonstrated by an analysis of two prominent soliloquies, Richard the Third’s soliloquy of Act I, scene I, and Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be”.  While both soliloquies are characteristic of the protagonists who recite them, Richard the Third is plot and action based.  It is removed from dialog and is concerned with the audience, signifying it has already moved beyond the soliloquy of dialog, but is still in the first person, concerned with the plans, future, and past of the individual character.  Hamlet’s soliloquy takes on the alternative form of the third-person narrator, the observer of events who may comment on the trajectory of the play, without bringing in concerns that are plot-based.  This is the final evolution of narration in Shakespeare; the narrative voice has entered as an alternative character, concerned with the trajectory of the play but even more concerned with the philosophical implications of the actions of the characters.

            Richard the Third’s soliloquy begins in the near-third person, and involves the audience as equals in “the winders of our discontent” (I.i.1).  Through the constant invocation of the word “our” in the first ten lines, Richard clarifies his role as a narrator, providing the audience with information relevant to the story-line of the play and to them.  Their understanding of the play and their own position is dependent on his soliloquy.  However, Richard will eventually break the empathy he has imposed on the audience by presenting them with their own “winter of discontent made glorious summer” and turn immediately and alternatively from a third-person removed narrator, who exists in the same capacity as the audience, to a first-person narrator, addressing primarily the issue of himself through the term “I” (I.i.14).  Not until line 14 does Richard establish himself in the first-person. Even as he addresses issues less universal with the “he” that regards the amorous affairs of the king, he maintains a third-person status, informing the audience of events from which he, as the narrator, is removed.  With the introduction of “I”, Richard becomes involved in a way the audience can never be, and so integrates himself into the world of the play, and reducing his ability for universal narration.

            In line 28 Richard begins to clarify his role as a narrator.  Between line 14 and line 28 he has introduced his own complains regarding his situation to the audience.  This portion of the soliloquy is a dramatic shift from the universality of the first 14 lines, and almost over-personalizes the narration into a monologue that is so inward looking it is no longer commentary on the play.  However, the introduction of “therefore” marks a very specific mode of narration; it addresses the complaints listed on the part of the narrator and it leads into a resolution.  The word “determined” will contrast with the soliloquy of Hamlet, which will lack any determination whatsoever (I.i.30).  Through determination the narrator assumes a specific role.  The action implied in determination necessarily relegates the character speaking the lines to the first person.  The audience assumes a distance from a character, who will take action as they themselves inherently will not participate in I action but will act as mere observers. The third-person narrator, who offers commentary but cannot take action, is more likely to elicit empathy from the audience for it is in the same position as the audience, removed from the action, and relegated to the role of the critic.  By determining to take action, Richard the Third removes himself from the ranks of the audience to the role of a participant in the play and a recipient of the audience’s sympathy.  In this case, sympathy substantially differs from empathy.  The audience empathizes with those in their position.  When the narrator speaks to them as an observer of events, the audience can equate themselves with this position, and feel the sentiments expressed.  The sympathy of the audience is applied to characters with whom the audience cannot experience. Characters within the world of the play, who can take action in that world, are removed from the audience.  The audience may understand the characters motivations and may analyze the characters actions, but they will never share a role with the character as they will with the removed narrator.

            As Richard reveals the trajectory of the play, he cements his role as a third person narrator.  With the phrase “plots have I laid” he signals to the audience, as a narrator, he can inform them not only of the past but of the future (I.i.32).  He is not merely a character participating in the play, but he is an informer of the audience.  The insight he offers the audience concerns only the information to which he is privy, that concerning himself and his own motivation and planned actions.  He is narrating, but from his own perspective, and not from a perspective that can be universalized.

            The word “if” in line “36”, followed by the concrete self-characterization in line 37 of Richard as “subtle, false, ad treacherous” reinforces his role as an involved first person narrator.  Richard is prepared to provide the audience with specific qualities of his character.  These are traits that, without narration, the audience would establish either through observation of the character’s action or through the commentary, in dialog, of other characters.  Richard gives the audience a clearer perception of his character without requiring them to do any further research of their own.  Yet, he is subject to the limitations of the world of the play.  Although King Edward is his brother, and although he is very familiar with his character, he must insert the mitigating term “if”.  He cannot speak with certainty either to the character of his brother or to the events of the future, because his insight as a narrator is limited to the first-person.  The hypothetical nature of his narration is re-emphasized with the word “should”, which modifies Richard’s picture of what will happen with the reality that it is what will happen if all goes as Richard has planned (I.i.38).  Richard possesses no quality himself that allows him to determine the future; he can only influence the events of the play through manipulation and action as any other character of the play might.

            Richard informs the audience of the prophesy he will plant.  This creates an arc in the monologue, which began as potentially third-person, informing the audience of the history that led up to the beginning of the play, then turns intensely self-reflective and into a timeless account of Richard as a person, and ends with a description of the plot to come.  The ability and willingness to speak to the past, present and future establishes Richard’s role in the play as narrator, while simultaneously engaging him in immediate action within the play, a quality not of a narrator but of a character, uniting his narrative voice with that of his character. 

            The final line of the soliloquy contrasts with the final line of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”. Although both lines introduce the character that is entering to interrupt the soliloquy, Richard the Third introduces Clarence, the character immediately concerned with the plot Richard has just described and that entrance allowing the plot to progress.  Alternatively, Hamlet introduces Ophelia, the entrance signaling a shift in voice and an ending to the unrelated interjection of the narrator.  Hamlet introduces Ophelia with the command “but soft you now”, a command for his narrative to cease (III.ii.88).  By addressing himself as “you” Hamlet separates his narrative voice from the character, so much so that it warrants the use of an alternative pronoun.  In contrast, Richard the Third’s narrative voice is acknowledged as belonging to the character, as it is not an alternative entity but merely “thoughts” which must “dive…down to [his] soul” (I.i.41).  The thoughts are his own, and will remain present with his character, having been located at his “soul”.  Hamlet not only commands the narrative voice in terms of the other, a “you” separate from his own identity, but also through the act of narrating has been so removed from his character’s function within the plot that with the entrance of Ophelia “all [his] sins [are] remembered” (I.i.90).  In his narration Hamlet has emphasized his interpretation of the play so much that now the aspects of the plot must be “remembered”, not only by the audience but by the character involved in the world of the play himself.

            There is a universality to the “To be or not to be” speech unique in the soliloquies of the play and is revolutionary in terms of dramatic narration.  The speech “has no particular relation at all to Hamlet” (de Grazia 76).  Although the other six soliloquies in the play contain similar melancholy sentiment, they are intensely introspective in a way this soliloquy is not.  The soliloquy,

“avoids the egocentric marker ‘I’ – first through infinitive propositions which require no subject and then through the use of a generalized and impersonal ‘we’ and ‘us’.  As there is no marker for Hamlet, so there are no deictics fastening the content to the experience – no spatial ‘here’, temporal ‘now’, or personal ‘he’s’ or ‘she’s’.  In other words, the soliloquy is generic rather than reflexive.  Those who have looked there for Hamlet’s experience have been disappointed, finding, for example, instead of a ghostly revenant, a reference to death as the country from which ‘No traveler returns’ (III.ii.78-80).  As one recent editor concludes, the speech contains no individuating insights, but rather ‘what would occur to ay well-read Renaissance man meditating upon death.’”            (de Grazia 76)

 

The soliloquy takes a different turn from that of Richard the Third even in its generalizations.  While Richard generalizes by aligning himself with the audience, narrating their collective past, notably, narrating specific events in their collective past, bringing the audience into the world of the play in order to be one with the narrator; Hamlet poses questions in the hypothetical, not to the audience, but to the universe in general as the audience would in reaction to the play, asking “whether” and suggesting possibilities and their drawbacks, then meditating thereon.  Where Richard draws the audience into the scene of the play in order to be close to them and narrate to them, Hamlet removes himself from the context of the play and brings himself into the observing role of the audience and critic in order to present narration.

            The “To be or not to be” speech is uniquely, universally applicable within the play.  Unlike the other soliloquies, it “could drift from one position to another.  In Q1, Hamlet delivers it after the ghost’s injunction.  In Q2 and F, Hamlet gives it after he has encountered the players and devised a trap to determine Claudius’s guilt.  In either position, it functions to break dramatic momentum, casting pale thought in the way of swift actions” (de Grazia 76).  This fundamentally reflective quality of the speech, the degree to which it has no bearing on either the plot or character development, makes it uniquely narrative.  Furthermore, it is uniquely third-person.  Existing outside the world of the play, the speech is “autonomous ad detachable” making it into an “anthology piece which…is fit for reproducing ad re-contextualizing” (de Grazia 77).  It exists within the play almost as criticism of the play.  It is neither an aspect of the play or of the character, but rather the melancholy reflections of an observer of the events.

            The reflections of the “to be or not to be” speech are general and unexciting.  The questions asked go unanswered, and by the end of the speech it is still unclear whether there is a greater advantage in being or not being.  This contrasts sharply with the determinations of Richard the Third’s opening soliloquy, and removes the soliloquy from the voice of the character into an uninvolved narrative third person.  From the critical perspective, the soliloquy does begin to move I the direction of accounting for Hamlet’s potential hamartia of delay.  The last line before Ophelia enters addresses both the nature of Hamlet’s character and the meditative and indecisive quality of the soliloquy itself as it concludes that, with contemplation, “currents turn awry and loose the name of action” (III.ii.87-88).  This awareness of inaction is an alternative to the character of Hamlet’s awareness.  It takes the re-appearance of the ghost in Act III, scene iv, to draw Hamlet’s attention to the fact that “lapsed in time and passion” he has “let go by the important acting of [the ghost’s] dread command”, and even this is presented as a question to the ghost, rather than an admonition of known culpability (III.iv.107-108).  The referenced action, lost in the “to be or not to be” speech, betrays a narrator who, like the audience, is confused by Hamlet’s failure to move against his uncle, and who, like the audience, must seek terms in which to account for Hamlet’s profound delay.  

            The “To be or not to be” speech represents a third-person narrator, completely uninvolved with the characters of the play.  Though the speech is delivered by Hamlet, it addresses the general concerns of the play, and presents to the audience the questions to be considered when watching the characters’ actions.  The narrator’s role at this moment in Hamlet is so evolved from its role in Richard the Third as to be nearly incomparable.  Although Richard the Third narrates the actions of the play, this concentration on action permanently restricts him to the role of the first-person narrator.  Hamlet’s ability to step away from the events of the play and align himself with the observer creates an empathy between himself and the audience that allows him to offer commentary and criticism on the philosophy of even his own actions without providing the explicitly personal knowledge of the first-person narrator. Just as Claudius and Polonius watch Hamlet from behind the screen, mirroring the audience who watches him recite, so Hamlet himself reflects on his plight and poses the general questions of the play for contemplation.  This is an evolution in narration that brings drama on par with the rest of literature; commentary on the play can now be given within the context of the play.

Senecan Anger

            King Lear is a play without Providence, but with a strong conceptual understanding and hope there for.  From the beginning of the tragedy, which is instigated by Lear’s failure of judgment, Providence abandons the scene, and although there are many instances when the characters might again call forth reason and thereby gain salvation, but inevitably these opportunities are missed, and the characters move closer and closer to their own tragic ends and their own self-imposed destructions.  Seneca, a stoic, discusses the idea of Providence in an essay thereon.  Initially the essay seems to be inapplicable to King Lear as a play or as a character.  However, as the play proceeds, and as one gains an increasingly clear understanding of Seneca’s definition of Providence, it becomes very evident that the blatant lack of Providence, in a play where almost every character is waiting for the aid of the Gods, is an indication of what is required by Shakespeare’s conceptualization of Providence, and what is lacking in the world of Lear.  Eventually these two understandings of Providence and salvation align, and it becomes evident that what Lear lacks, his hamartia and the curse of the play, is the reason to find his own salvation, leaving his world devoid of any hope for Providence.

            The God’s role in Greek tragedy is a complex one, but, significantly, a present one.  Although, like in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the final fall of every character is due to some human failing and some chain of events that is due to human decisions, there is some element that is predetermined by the Gods.  The tragedy is imposed by the Gods on the human who can’t help but inflict it upon himself.  Providence, in this context, is complex. It is unclear whether humans, once set on a tragic path, could be saved from their self-made circumstance and the tragedy reversed.  Greek tragedy acknowledges the Gods as the imposers of punishment; there is very little sense of any hope for salvation in Greek tragedy.  This closely parallels Seneca’s understanding of Providence.

            Seneca’s conceptualizes “Providence” not as a mode of salvation, but rather as a mode of education.  He seeks to answer the question “Why, if Providence rules the world, it still happens that many evils befall good men”, ad he chooses to “plead the cause of the Gods” (Seneca 3).  By focusing on this question he seems to assume the presence of a Providence, although he also only addresses it in the case of “good men”, any other kind of men not coming into the question.  This poses a problem for King Lear, a play which is distinctly lacking in “good men”, and whose protagonist, though not a “bad” man, is far from model.  When Seneca further clarifies that “a good man differs from God in the element of time only” and that “he is God’s pupil, his imitator, and true offspring, whom his all-glorious parent, being no mild task-master of virtues, rears, as strict fathers do, with much severity” it becomes quickly evident that to be classified as a good man is highly dependent on an extremely strong presence of virtues that Lear cannot claim (Seneca 7).  However, the question of the “good man” deserving providence is interesting within the context of Seneca, who is looking at a Providence which does not save men from harm but rather “harass[es them] by toil, by suffering, by losses, in order that they may gather true strength” (Seneca 11).  Providence seems to identify “good men” as the men worthy of exercising because they are capable of working through hardship and will ultimately benefit from the experience.  This definition seems to leave it up to the men to prove themselves “good” after hardship has been imposed by the Gods.  Lear might almost become “good” where he to escape his self-imposed suffering.  Although his torment has not been imposed by the Gods, but rather is self-imposed by his own foolish and self-indulgent actions, where he to overcome it through a reversal of  his hamartia and an application of reason, he would in so doing deliver himself to his own salvation, and thus achieve a kind of Providence. 

            Whatever the God’s role in Greek tragedy, this role is nullified by Shakespeare.  Where Greek tragedy was familial, and the sins of the father could damn the son, Shakespeare’s tragedies are almost entirely self-imposed.  In the most clearly familial the tragic element of the play is still self-imposed, although the scenario that creates the tragedy may be created by the family. This is exemplified by Romeo and Juliet, where the children’s love is tragic because of the families’ unfortunate (but not tragic) feud, or Hamlet, where Hamlet’s death and the fate of Denmark is tragic because of the unjust (but not tragic) scenario imposed on Hamlet by his parents, or King Lear, where Lear’s fall and death is tragic because of Lear’s tragic (but self-imposed) judgment. In Shakespeare tragedy cannot be imposed by another, there is no inherent set of circumstance that leads to tragedy, but rather a continuous series of steps imposed by the protagonist on himself, that eventually leads to his downfall.  This calls to question the possibility and the idea of Providence. 

                        Lear speaks in the language of faith.  He has faith in his children to act in a way that, if it is not good for his kingdom, at least protects his interests and dignity, and he has an understanding and faith in the Providence that has, to his perception, caused all his problems. 

             The conversation between Lear and Regan demonstrates the degree to which Lear has placed his fate in the hands of both his daughters and the Gods.  By giving away his autonomy and his self-determination, from a Senecan perspective, Lear necessarily removes himself from the preview of Providence, because Providence only takes interest in testing heroes and warriors; Lear’s retirement signals an unwillingness to engage in the education that the Gods take interest in.  However misplaced, the equation Lear creates between the Gods and his daughters creates the possibility for some form of salvationn; if his daughters took pity on him they would be in a position to offer him mercy and to reverse his suffering.  The daughters are not the real cause of Lear’s suffering, however, is poor judgment is, and so, although they have the ability to reverse his plight, he can only reach real salvation by overcoming the real cause of his suffering.  If Lear where saved by his daughter’s mercy, he would still be subject to their will.  Until he has reformed his judgment he cannot overcome his own condemnation.  A failure of judgment begins the tragic events, as the Gods of a Greek tragedy would, and so only a victory of judgment can stop the tragedy once it is underway, although, as in Greek tragedy, the momentum of the play will not be reversed, and the tragic course will eventually reach its fruition. 

                        It is clear that Lear has confused the providence he might hope for from Gods with the mercy he might hope for from his daughters. Within ten lines of referring to his daughters as his “guardians”, a word he uses before resorting to the more accurate term “depositories” he evokes the Gods in a way that will become increasingly characteristic of his soliloquy as he is increasingly aware of his daughter’s betrayal.  The soliloquy in Act II, scene iv provides an interesting picture of Lear’s understanding of his daughter’s role and the God’s role in his fate, but also demonstrates how thoroughly he fails to connect these to an understanding of his powers of self-determination.

            The soliloquy begins as a reaction to his daughters’ determining that he will not have the soldiers he is accustomed to traveling with.  They have, in denying him these men, done nothing but reduce his status; he has neither been rejected himself, nor has any harm been done to him in any capacity but to his honor.  In his horror at being denied his men, he is simultaneously aware of the fact that he is loosing only status symbols.  His understanding that the men are superfluous is important.  Although he sees that there is little “need” that he have accompaniment, he also sees that “man’s basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous” (II.iv.268).  His meaning (in the first part of the soliloquy) is quickly summed up as “allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life is cheap as beast’s” (270-271).  The point that what is needed and what is valuable is important to the play; Lear initially is appealing to his daughter’s mercy to provide him with what is valuable to him, not what is needed.  At some point, however, he will no longer be appealing merely for what is valuable to him, but what he perceives himself as needing; at the point he applies for his needs he will appeal to the Gods.  He chides his daughters for vainly wearing women’s impractical clothing, and then goes on to appeal for what he truly needs, which he defines as “patients” (274).  The desire for patients is Senecan, particularly in the context of a circumstance wherein he might easily be enraged, however to appeal to the Gods for this patients exactly fails to act as the Senecan “good man” would.  Good men “are willing that [bad] things should happen and, if they are unwilling, that they deserve misfortune” and are not good men (Seneca 15).  Good men are happy to engage in struggle as a mode of exercising their ability to reason for “of proof of virtue is ever mild” and the “oftener we engage [the mind] the stronger it shall be” (31).  Appealing to the Gods as soon as his daughters have failed him indicates profoundly Lear’s helplessness.  He is unable to reason for himself, or to help himself escape his situation through reason, and so applies for the Gods for the ability to bear what is upon him.  His error is slight, but it cements his tragedy, as he will be unable to recover himself from the problems he has created.

                        As soon as a “true need” has been identified Lear no longer appeals to his “guardian” daughters (in fact, this need is imposed by his daughters), and instead to “you heavens” (II.iv.275).  Lear quickly reverses his request for patients, an indication of how little he understand his potential power to reverse the situation or how he should proceed from his current state.  He questions whether the Gods have “turned these daughter’s hearts against their father”, something Lear himself clearly did during Act I, scene i, when he declared that he would divide his kingdom according to whichever daughter loved him most so that “largest bounty may extend where nature doth with merit challenge” (Act I, scene i).  Lear (as opposed to a Senecan Providence that would seek to teach him) is responsible for is present straights, and Lear (as opposed to his appealed to Providence) must reverse his situation.

            The soliloquy eventually supports Seneca’s conceptualization of suffering as a mode of building character, as Lear appeals to the Gods to “fool [him] not so much to bear it tamely” and asks to the Gods to “touch him with noble anger” (280).  His wish is quickly granted, and the tone of the soliloquy becomes enraged.  Although Seneca would never have supported moving towards anger as a mode of productivity, Lear begins to contemplate action, which is exactly the Providence that could provide him with a solution to his tragic situation. Within the frame of the speech his daughters have gone from being identified by Lear as “ladies” to being referred to as “hags” (282).  This re-signification of the women is essential; their status is quickly turned from “guardians” to “daughters” whose “hearts” are “turned…against their father” (250; 270).  Understanding the nature of his daughters is the first step Lear takes towards overcoming his own weakness of mind and reaching a Shakespearean salvation through the Providence of reason.  Lear’s hamartia has been his weakness of mind and his inability to understand what constitutes real love from his children; he appears to be summoning both strength of mind and a dedication to just parenting in his request of the Gods.  However, a key realization that he fails to come upon, important for both Shakespeare and Seneca, is that he must save himself with his own mind. 

            The soliloquy in II.iv is the moment when Lear damns himself to tragedy both in Shakespeare’s terms and in those of Seneca.  In the soliloquy he defines what he believes is reasonable behavior; he acknowledges that what he demands from his daughters is not necessary for life but is necessary for dignity.  In so doing he establishes his desire to keep his status as a leader and hero, though he may have given his power to his daughters.  The Gods have no interest in testing a powerless man.  The likelihood of Providence taking any interest in Lear diminishes as he places his daughters in the position of being his “guardians”; in so doing he reverses roles so far as to not only replace Providence with a human, but a human over whom he, the parent, should have control.  He finally re-substitutes God in as a guiding force, and appears to be asking for the correct faculty, according to Seneca, which is not to “shrink from hardships and difficulties, nor complain against fate; they should take in good part whatever happens, and should turn it to good.  Not what you endure but how you endure is important.”  Lear’s mode of endurance is improving but he is still passive and still not clear what he must pursue in order to reverse the tragedy; Lear does not recognize that he must seek reason, a fact that would be very evident if he recognized that it was a failure of reason (rather than Providence) that started the events of the tragedy.

            By the end of the soliloquy Lear has thoroughly disappointed any hope that he might establish himself as a Senecan hero and survive his trials through stoicism.  He resolves, as a stoic should, not to weep, seemingly affirming a reformed nature, but then, in a final invocation he reverses all promise the audience has seen in him.  Finally Lear moves beyond hope in the Gods and resolves that his “heart shall break into one hundred thousand flaws or ‘ere [he’ll] weep”, but then, having no one left to call on but himself or the fool, he declares “oh fool, I shall go mad” (II.iv.289).  Lear fails to recognize the potential value of his judgment, he does not see that it is his failure of judgment that empowered his daughters to put him in the situation he is in.

            The soliloquy is characteristic of the speeches in King Lear, most of which command action from others.  In Act III, scene ii, King Lear is acting out his rage by commanding “blow, winds and crack your cheeks, rage, blow”, and generally commanding violence in nature rather than in action he might take to rectify his situation.  By the end of the play, when it is too late for Cordelia to be saved or tragedy to be overted, Lear begins to take action that is full of rage (not that which a stoic could approve of) and “kill’d the slave that was a hanging” his daughter, and yet is still not totally able to act for himself, and apples to the men around him to “howl, howl, howl, howl” and says that “had [he their] tougues and eyes, [he’d] use them so that heaven’s vaults should crack” (V.iii.260).  Lear doubts even his own perception that Cordelia is dead, and as her death provides the final evidence in the play against the presence of a Providence, he sits in melancholy contemplation thereof.  Providence never arrives in Lear’s world, a world seemingly without providence.  However, this failure of providence an hardly surprise; Unlike the plays of the Greek, where the God-imposed circumstance highlights the folly of the protagonist, Lear’s folly creates his circumstance, and then, like the Greek tragic heroes, condemns him to follow his circumstance through to its most tragic end.  The Senecan “good man” is unfit for tragedy, for the good man will overcome his circumstance and “the greater his torture is, the greater will be his glory” (Seneca 21).  In Shakespeare’s terms, tragedy is not a situation that cannot be avoided, rather it is a situation that is not avoided due to the folly of the protagonist.  This means Providence is inherently inaccessible, as the tragedy will always be imposed by an initial failure of reason or of action, and will always be followed up by subsequent failures, that lead to a conclusion that would have been avoided by the un-flawed “good man”.  This is why the Senecan version of Providence must the source of the problem, rather than the source of salvation, because the good man would never impose a problem on himself as a tragic hero must, “nature never permits good to be injured by good”, he must submit to the Gods to be educated and tested (7).  The tragic hero creates his own tragedy (so in Seneca’s terms creates his own Providential problem), and could offer himself his own salvation, but does not because he is still subject to the same flaw that created the problem.  Lear initially suffers because of his poor judgment and likewise must ultimately die due to his failure to reverse his reasoning.

 

Messengers Ant and Cleo

            Messengers play a prominent role in The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra from the beginning of the play.  Although their prominence fades as the play continues, there is still an unusual emphasis both on delivering messages, the messages themselves, and how the deliverer of messages is treated.  In the last lines of Act I, while Antony is away from Egypt, Cleopatra resolves to write to him every day, even if she “unpeople[s] Egypt” making messengers to deliver her tidings, yet the play opens with Antony’s refusal to receive a message from Rome.  Ceaser is concerned not with the problems of Rome but rather with the problems of the empire, meaning he receives most of his news via messengers.  Cleopatra’s eventual suicide is blamed on “too slow a messenger” coming from Caesar, whose specific goal it was to stop Cleopatra’s suicide and bring her out of Egypt and to Rome.  The play begins with a messenger and ends with a failed messenger (who must return to Caesar with the message that Cleopatra has died). 

            The play opens with a message from Rome, or rather, the play opens with a messenger from Rome who fails to deliver his message.  The first important aspect of the messenger’s arrival is that he comes in upon a scene of romance between Antony and Cleopatra.  This public display of their affection is being staged for the on looking Demetrius and Philo, as well as for the audience, who has been instructed (along with Demetrius) to “Take but good note, and you shall see I him the triple pillar of the world trasforme’d into a strumpet’s fool” and to “behold and see” (I.i.13).  The audience, who has inherently come to the play both to “take but good note” and to “behold and see” is being told the content of the play in these opening lines, where they are also informed that Antony will be behaving foolishly because of his love for Cleopatra.  Importantly, they are not told that Cleopatra will similarly be affected by her love for Antony.  Immediately the audience is given example of just how much a “strumpet’s fool” Antony has become.  Although his repartee regarding his love for Cleopatra is very clever, he, a great general and a Roman, is willing to discuss his love for the Egyptian queen in fanciful terms importantly of conquest. When Cleopatra asks him to “set a bourn how far to be belov’d” Antony responds that to do so he “then must…needs find out new heaven, new earth” (I.i.16-18).  The first messenger enters when Antony is speaking, as he should be, of conquest to demonstrate his ability.  In order to display is love to Cleopatra, Antony would have to set boundaries at the moon and the farthest ends of the earth.  This is fanciful talk about conquest, but it highlights how far Antony has removed himself from his natural position in Egypt, which is that of a conqueror and discoverer.  Antony has so far removed himself from his purpose as to not even recognize that his job is in fact to set up new boundaries.  To do so only in terms of his love is to fail as the Roman that he should be.

            In what Demetrius describes as a “slight” Antony refuses to hear the messenger who has come from Rome (I.i.55).  His reason for not hearing the messenger seems merely to be to impress Cleopatra with his dedication to their love over his dedication to either Caesar, Fulvia (his wife), or to Rome over Egypt.  In so doing he clearly panders to the will of Cleopatra, who tells him to listen to the news from Rome to see if “Fulvia, perchance, is angry; or, who knows/ If the scarce-bearded Caesar have not sent/ His powerful mandate to” Antony (I.i.20-22).  In so doing she twice demonstrates her control over Antony, with reference only to his most recent willingness to “find out new heaven, new earth” in order to demonstrate his love.  She insists that Antony hear the news, for fear either his wife or his ruler (both of whom should have a claim to his allegiance) request some action from Antony, but does so clearly in terms that imply subjugation to either individual is shameful.  Fulvia is perhaps angry, and so hearing the messenger’s news will imply a subjugation to his wife not from love or respect but from fear, and the Caesar is noted for his youth, implying that subjugation thereto is subjugation to an inferior.  However, Cleopatra’s critique does not end at the shame of being subject to Caesar, but also criticizes what Caesar might ask Antony to do, specifically to “take that kingdom, and enfranchise that” (I.i.23).  This is making light not only of Antony’s purpose in Egypt (and the position he holds which makes him her equal as a foreign authority but a voice of Rome), but also belittles what he has just offered to do to demonstrate his love.   She has both negated his poetic reality as well as his real function. 

            Cleopatra goes on to further question Antony’s autonomy as well as his dedication to her in her continued insistence that he hear the message.  This two-fold criticism is very clever, and demonstrates to the audience exactly the power Cleopatra holds as a temptress. The paired criticism of questioning autonomy with his dedication to her is difficult for Antony to overcome; Antony has lost his self-determination, not through his subjugation to Rome, but rather because Cleopatra has the ability to “beck from the bidding of the gods command” Antony (III.iv.59).  To the watching Demetrius and Philo Antony is merely demonstrating his own failure to maintain his own will by sending the messenger away unheard. 

            Cleopatra becomes more and more instant, emphasizing that she is “Egypt’s queen”, and insistently calling for “the messengers” (I.i.29, 32).  The emphasis on her queenship in the same speech as she insists on hearing “the messengers”, who she will also call “ambassadors” highlights the locality of her authority while simultaneously calling to attention the remoteness of the authorities to whom Antony theoretically answers (I.i.48).  It appears that Antony is not subject to Caesar, but rather to the ambassadors of Caesar, who is far enough away to have communicated via ambassadors rather than himself, whereas she, Queen of Egypt is present.  Furthermore, she makes clear that she does not degrade Caesar with her estimation of his age, but rather degrades those who answer to the authority of such a youth.  She calls to attention that Antony “blushest” and concludes that his blush is either “Caesar’s homage” or that “his cheek pays shame when shrill-tongu’d  Fulvia scolds” (I.i.30-32). 

            Antony’s response is very dedicated and he eventually concludes that he will hear “no messenger but” that of Cleopatra (I.i.52).  This resolution is odd as it is essentially treasonous or, at the very least, head strongly antithetical to his duty as a Roman delegate.  However, in so doing, he temporarily satiates Cleopatra’s demands that he qualify his love, and so they can leave the scene.  The still-watching Demetrius and Philo, are alarmed at how little respect Antony has shown Caesar, and, more than this, alarmed that Antony has confirmed the low opinion of him that stands with most Roman citizens who, up until their witness of this, they would have deemed liars.

            The messenger in Act I, scene i, has only one line which is “News, my good lord, from Rome” (I.i.16).  Furthermore, the news he brings is never listened to.  Yet he becomes the subject of the entire scene, and the very simple act of not listening to news becomes the mode by which Antony’s subjectivity to either Rome or to Cleopatra is demonstrated.  The situation highlights Antony’s predicament, as well as the fact that, though he may not always be subject to the will of Cleopatra, he has no recourse but to subject himself to some ruling body.  Eventually he will hear the news from Rome, and it will set the course of the rest of the play, dictating that he must return to Rome and there break ties with Caesar.  This first encounter with the messenger is significant in that it is staged.  The audience is aware, as are Antony and Cleopatra, that the scene is being watched.  Antony and Cleopatra perform for the audience, for Philo and Demetrius, but also for each other.  It is only when they interact with the messengers away from each other that their real attitudes towards the events of he play become clear.  

            The messengers become Antony’s primary mode of self-knowledge and of understanding for his situation.  The first time Antony is without Cleopatra, as well as without the rest of the court or without an audience, he enters hearing the message that has arrived from Rome (which he originally refused to hear).  Importantly, he is in the process of hearing the message as he enters, and it is in fact the messenger who is speaking as they come on to the stage.  The messenger reports that “Fulvia came first onto the field”, a line which is both predictive of the conflict between Antony and Caesar, and a harsh reminder that in his adulterous domestic bliss Antony has left his wife unattended to act in as masculine a way as she sees fit and as he has left ope to her.  He recognizes that his roles in Rome are being threatened and usurped ad that “these strong Egyptian fetters [he] must break, or else lose [himself] in dotage,” a fact he both declares and which is evident in his desire to be appraised with news from Rome  (I.i.124).

            Fulvia is identified specifically as “thy wife” to Antony, emphasizing the degree to which he has lost domestic control.  He seems to be aware that his adultery will have lead to domestic unrest, and can conclude the story without being told that he moved “against [his] brother Lucius” (I.i.98).  However, what news arrives from the messenger and what Anthony seems to be less prepared for is the extent of the political unrest this causes.  The messenger brigs news that “soon that war had end, and the time’s state made friends of them, jointing their forces against Caesar” (I.i.97-100).  The calamity of the conflict, though not predicted by Mark Antony, does not seem to surprise him, and he is quickly able to inquire of the messenger “what worse” could have happened (I.i.100).  This is a surprisingly eagerness for news, particularly bad news, which seems to contrast with a stubbornness against news seen in the previous scene and which seems to quickly demonstrate to what degree the previous interaction with Cleopatra was not a performance for Demetrius and Philo, but for Cleopatra and for himself.     

            Antony’s willingness, and in fact eagerness, to hear the ews from Rome will not only contrast specifically with his previous stance on news, but it will also specifically contrast with the stance taken by Cleopatra later in the play.  Where Cleopatra will deal harshly with the barer of bad news, Antony specifically encourages the messenger to tell him the complete and true state of affairs because “who tells [him] true, though in his talk lay death, [he] hear[s] him as he flatter’d” (I.i.106).  Where the bad news infects the teller” only in the case of the “fool or coward” (I.i.104).  In later scenes this will be demonstratively untrue; bad news will infect the teller when the recipient there of is likely to punish the messenger (because the messenger will be punished but is quite bold).

            As the message continues Antony’s reaction to it becomes increasingly unreasonable; although he would claim that the most critical message will find a friend in him, and although he commands the messenger to “mice not thy words”, he does not allow the messenger any opportunity to give him a full answer, instead composing a hyper-critical scenario wherein the messenger must “name Cleopatra…taunt [his] faults with such full license as both truth and malice have power to alter…” (I.i.118).  It is unlikely that a messenger was dispatched from Rome to scold Antony; the difference in their social ranks makes this extremely improbable.  In reality, though Antony looks on he who tells the truth as he who flatters, he looks on the truth with its full meaning, to wit, he sees his full culpability ad reflection in Fulvia’s behavior in a way that goes beyond merely the potential content of the message (I.i.112).

            Antony encourages the entrance of the second messenger, paired with a statement about a need to break his “Egyptian fetters” (I.i.130).  He seems to understand the connection between news from the outside and his subjectivity to Cleopatra, and is willig to be welcome eve to the worst news if it allows him to move further from her purview.  With this understanding his sentiment that though he desired his wife’s death, he wishes now that she had not died, becomes more reasonable.  Antony contemplates Fulvia’s death paired with an understanding that he “must from this enchanting queen break off”, (I.i.137).  Seeing that “then thousand harms, more than the ills [he] knows, [his] idleness doth hatch,” and what he has been made aware of represents the content of only two messages, and does not speak to all the problems he would potentially know of, where he in Rome itself.

            Antony not only bares but seeks the information brought through messengers; e both requests their messages ad receives them with digity.  In so doing he demonstrates his autonomy from Cleopatra, both to himself and to the audience in a way he could not under the supervision of the queen.  This shows how thoroughly the queen impacts his ability to reason ad to represent his own desires.  Likewise, without Antony, Cleopatra has different self-control.  Although in the first scene she deftly influences Mark Antony’s actions, without him she becomes unable to control her own, as demonstrated by her interactions with her own messengers. 

            Cleopatra also receives a messenger from Rome, this messenger bringing her news of Antony.  Her treatment of the messenger that comes to bring her news of Antony is a stark contrast to the quiet acceptance and interest of Antony.  Cleopatra’s behavior is irrational and confusing.  Upon the entrance of the messenger Cleopatra welcomes “tidings…that long time have been barren”, but immediately begins to assume that the messenger brings news that “Antony’s dead” (I.i.24).  Her rapid assumption of the worst possible new is not so different from Antony’s assumption that his name has been defamed in Rome, except that Cleopatra is not confirmed in her suspicion, and, importantly, seems to tie culpability for this potential news not to his would-be killers, but to the messenger that brings the tidings.  Calling the messenger a “villain” she warns him that such news will kill her, and offers him gold for an alternative message.  This behavior is irrational and without precedent, but what is more surprising is the messenger’s reaction.

            Throughout Cleopatra’s irrational interaction with him, the messenger who brings news of Antony’s marriage stays dedicated to his purpose.  He never reports falsely, although this would clearly be safer, and work better for his interests.  Although Cleopatra wishes “a most infectious pestilence upon” him, he does nothing but ask her to be “patient” (II.v.60).  Cleopatra’s rage is difficult to explain; she is clearly and vociferously violent against the messenger for a wrong done her by Antony, but for a wrong which is surprisingly alarming to her, given her seeming indifference in Act I, scene i.  In the first scene, Cleopatra tempts Antony to find if he has been called home by his wife in anger, now the idea that he has remarried causes her to call this messenger a “horrible villain” and threaten to “spurn [his] eyes like balls before [her]” ad “unhair [his] head” (II.v.64).  She is aware that her actions toward the messenger “lack nobility” and that it is wrong “that [her hands] strike a meaner than [her]self; since [she herself] have given [herself] the cause” (II.v.83). 

            In a sentence that precisely compares to Antony’s declaration that “Who tells me true, though in his tale lay death, I hear him as he flatter’d”, Cleopatra declares specifically that “it is ever good to bring bad news” (II.v.85).  She is so clear that what she dislikes is not the news but the messenger that she argues “give to a gracious message a host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell themselves when they be felt” (I.i.88).  Cleopatra would rather bad news be discovered than brought by messenger, although surely the effect of the news must be the same.  Her relationship with the message itself becomes increasingly strange, as she asks again and again whether Antony has married, although she knows the answer, and although the messenger asks her if he should lie.  She asks again and gain, and keeps receiving the same answer.  Eventually she is so annoyed with the “fault” of the messenger that she orders him out of the room.  However, immediately upon so doing she seeks further information from him, asking her servant Alexas “bid him report” (II.v.112). 

            Cleopatra’s irrational behavior is a specific contrast with that of Antony.  Just as Antony hears the message he originally avoided when he is free of Cleopatra, so Cleopatra looses her wit when she is without Antony to control, and can no longer even control herself.  Her erratic sensibility about the origins of the message, rather than its content or the message itself betrays a focus on pleasure and pain, and the sources thereof, rather than on reality or strategy, as seems to be the case with Antony.  This is consistent with both of their roles in the tragedy. 

Barthes

In trying to define the tirade between the author, narrator, and reader Roland Barthes’ work will be useful.  Barthes seems to focus not on the person responsible for the text, but rather on the responsibility of the creativity of the text itself, almost to a point where it seems the readers job is not to assign meaning to the text (as it is in his “Death of the Author”) but rather to derive the greatest possible experience from the text.  The reader’s ability to do this is contingent on the writers style, but most specifically on the nature of the text and a focus on the detail of description.  This emphasizes the role of the narrator not as the driver of the plot but as the setter of the scene, a role which is new and potentially contentious for the narrator in light of Genette’s definition.

What does Barthes’ Le Pleasure du Texte tell us?  It seems to indicate that the value of the text is the effect has, and therefore lies in the reader.  However, he seems to place responsibility for the effect on the text, indicating a certain self-determination that is unexpected and that supports the precept of this paper, which focuses on the text’s attempts to gain independence from the author.

            The subject of fictional narrative is inherently unreal.  Its interactions with the “real” world of the author and reader come at the expense of the work itself, forcing it into interfaces with a world of detail and aesthetics for which it is unprepared and not entirely intended.  The nature and framework of the reader’s perception are such that detail and realism are important factors for fulfillment of the potential pleasure that may result from interaction with the text.  Roland Barthes explores the necessity and nature of realism in modernist text, and how this realism has evolved over the history of text, in The Pleasure of the Text and “The Reality Effect.”  Through his analysis, it becomes increasingly clear, within the context of the new formula of the text, that a sense of reality is necessary for pleasure and for bliss.  The presence of the detail necessary to achieve realism in text is easily justified (justification is necessary because it would not otherwise be required by the plot or narrative) by the nature of the real.  That which appears to be real is automatically accepted and appreciated because it is real in a context which is otherwise fictional.  Through the addition of this counter-element to the nature of the story, the author creates the potential for bliss.

            In his essay “The Reality Effect,” Barthes explores the modernist tendency to include detail which is not necessary.  He notes effective literature employs “notations (data, descriptive details) which structural analysis, occupied as it is with separating out and systematizing the main articulations of narrative, ordinarily, and up to the present, has left out, either by excluding from its inventory (by simply failing to mention them) all those details which are ‘superfluous’ (as far as structure is concerned), or else by treating these same details as fillers, padding (catalyses), assigned indirect functional value in that, cumulatively, they constitute an indication of characterization or atmosphere, and can finally be salvaged as part of the structure” (“The Reality Effect” 11).  Although there are details in most narrative and certainly most modern narrative that exceed what is necessitated by the plot, and, although it is clear that these details are necessary to the poetry and aesthetics of the text, the nature of these details remains largely unexplored.  Barthes often presents the idea that an overly systematized, functional, stoic text lacks what is necessary to facilitate the pleasure of the audience.  The differential between the pleasure of the text and the forms, institutions, and analysis of the text becomes a significant equation.  Barthes sees only a very slight connection between pleasure, bliss, and the theory of text.  The theory of text can postulate the idea of pleasure in the future, but has little hope of institutional survival because it does not facilitate bliss.  Rather it establishes, “a practice (that of the writer), a method, a research, a pedagogy; on these very principles, this theory can produce only theoreticians, or practitioners, not specialists (critics, researchers, professors, students)” (The Pleasure of the Text 60).  The pleasure of the text cannot be the subject of specialized criticism, research, or investigation because there is not language available to address the subject of textual pleasure in a manner sufficient for the establishment of a specialization.  Because language lacks the subtlety to address issues of pleasure and bliss without coarseness, the critic is driven into a pattern of analysis which is itself course, systematic, scientific, and lacking in pleasure.  In this way the would-be specialist is denied the pleasure of the text in every attempt at analysis, regardless of how elucidating and fulfilling analysis may be.  Thus understanding is inherently, disappointingly separate from aesthetics.  According to Barthes, all that is significant in terms of pleasure is sensually produced, and thereby in some sense aesthetic.  This aesthetic is tied to the realism that immerges in modernist texts, but is differentiated in that the emphasis on detail necessary for realism must be realigned in aesthetics to emphasize the sensual.  

            The notations that allow for realism are difficult to analyze as they exist as “narrative luxury” which “no function (not even the most indirect) will allow us to justify” (“The Reality Effect” 11).  The presence of details that that allows for realism or pleasure but is functionless in the plot therefore interesting.  Description that does not advance the plot lacks significance in traditional, narrative-based analysis, however Barthes redefines “significance” to focus on the pleasure that potentially results from the text as, “meaning, insofar as it is sensually produced” (The Pleasure of the Text 61).  The emphasis placed on sensuality as a means of facilitating both pleasure and meaning in text refocuses what constitutes significant material within the text.  Description and aesthetics come to the forefront of experience.  The “insignificant notation (taking ‘insignificant’ in the strong sense) – apparently detached from the semiotic structure of the narrative – is related to description, even if the object seems to be denoted by a single word (in reality, the pure word does not exist…[but rather is] placed in a syntagm that is both referential and syntactic)” (“The Reality Effect” 12).  The apparently insignificant details of description are responsible for forming the words of the text; individual words lack aesthetics and so significance.  Only through the addition of detail can pleasure and thus meaningful experience be attained from the text.

            The elements of realism in the text are detached from the elements of plot and thus from the fiction.  Although “the general structure of the narrative…appears essentially predictive; to be extremely schematic, ignoring the numerous digressive delays, changes in direction, or the surprises which the narrative conventions add to this schema,” perpetuates the direction of the fiction (12).  Within the narrative of the text there is a constant directionality that facilitates the momentum of the plot.  There are active players in the text, either the reader, the narrator, or the protagonist, who have a stake in the perpetuation of the narrative in that they are ever proceeding forward through the text and maintain an expectation that, in so doing, they will proceed through the plot.  These active players are perpetually offered aspects of plot which satiate their need for movement.  However this movement is paired with the aesthetic in the form of description, which “is quite different.”  Rather than perpetuate momentum, “it has no predictive aspect, it is ‘analogical’, its structure being purely additive, and not incorporating that circuit of choices and alternatives which makes a narration look like a vast traffic control centre, provided with referential (and not merely discursive) temporality” (12).  Barthes privileges description, as he privileges pleasure, as being a feature of higher modes of thought and being a factor which is characteristically human.  While plot-lines are clearly qualities of communication, description, because of its entirely secondary, aesthetic, and unnecessary function, constitutes a mode of art that appeals to the sensual rather than the utilitarian.  Description “appears to be a characteristic of so-called higher languages in that, seemingly paradoxically, it is not justified by any purpose of action or communication” (12).  The singularity of the description in the narrative, its self-contained capacity of isolated aestheticism and detail, requires the critic to question its inclusion, and whether the mere presence thereof warrants significance.

            The significance of detail quickly moves from the merely aesthetic to that which is required for pleasure to be taken from the text.  Thus the detail that initially appears insignificant takes on a role of primary significance, since the purpose of fiction, while tied to meaning, must rest in pleasure.  Barthes argues that, within the context of current and western rhetoric, “description has long had an aesthetic function” that is valuable unto itself (12).  Description, along with poetry and other forms of speech that are not intended to persuade, falls into the “set speech whose goal [is] to excite the admiration of the audience; and this genre, whatever the rituals governing its use… contains the seeds of the notion of an aesthetic purpose in language” (12).  In this way description is tied to the aesthetics of language that Barthes will tie to pleasure, and become as inherently necessary for bliss as the spoken version of language to which Barthes refers. 

            Barthes defines the pleasure of the text in terms of signifiers, placing on the mode of signification the total ability to create pleasure and facilitate bliss.  He calls the pleasure of the text “the value shifted to the sumptuous rank of the signifier,” which places an unusual emphasis on indulgence or extravagancy for a pleasure that is to result purely from interaction with text.  He adds to this the necessity of “writing aloud” for achievement of a pure aesthetic of textual pleasure.  He relates the idea of writing aloud (which is different than either oration or reading) to the ancient aspect of rhetoric the actio, which was, according to Barthes, “a group of formulae designed to allow for the corporeal exteriorization of discourse:  it dealt with a theater of expression, the actor-orator ‘expressing’ his indignation, his compassion, ect.” (The Pleasure of the Text 66).   Barthes, who insists that writing aloud would be necessary for an aesthetic experience of pleasure from text, defines the term as inherently unexpressive, “leaving communication to the text, and rather takes pleasure from it in the form of dramatic inflection, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, and the grain of the voice that can be… along with diction, the substance of an art” (66).  Although it is difficult to understand how spoken writing could not be as or more communicative than the text itself, Barthes clarifies that writing aloud is

Not phonological but phonetic; it’s aim is not the clarity of the messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.  (66). 

 

The degree to which physical, oral expression of the text is unnecessary but aesthetically pleasurable equates with the nature of detail in the text, and begins to outline the argument for realism as a means of deriving pleasure.  Given the assumption that detail adds to the realism of the text and that the value of realism is that it is pleasurable and not merely superfluous, realism and the form of the text begin to meld as aspects of the text which, although not integral to the communication of the purpose of the text, add to the possibility of bliss and thus to the experience of the reader.  Interdisciplinary, the text becomes the phonic entity that is necessary for complete aesthetic experience as the field of linguistics “furnishes a destruction of the Author with precious analytic instrument, showing that the speech-act in its entirety is an ‘empty’ process, which functions perfectly without its being necessary to ‘fill’ it with the person of the interlocutors” (“The Death of the Author” 51).  The sound of text, a perfect aesthetic experience in itself without the association of representative meaning with the body of the text, becomes a means of achieving bliss through textual experience.  This effect is real where the plot of the text will always be based in fiction, making clear the authority of the aesthetic contains a tangible value inherently lacking in the narrative.

            The manner in which detail is integrated in the text either adds or detracts from the sense of the realism of the text.  In modernism realism has become the paradigm by which detail is valued, although this was not always the case.  In earlier periods “description was not constrained by any desire for realism; truth, or even verisimilitude, was of little moment…The only constraints that mattered were descriptive ones; plausibility was not referential, but overly discursive; it was the rules of the discourse genre which laid down the law” (“The Reality Effect” 13).  In this system detail can be added in a manner which is aesthetically beneficial, but which is not ultimately realistic.  As text moves towards its modern form, it increasingly becomes subject to the “tyrannical constraints of aesthetic plausibility,” a move which will ultimately make it more conducive to the bliss of the reader.  As realism increasingly integrates into the ideal of the aesthetic, the reader becomes more comfortable with the text and more capable of interacting with it in a manner that is pleasurable. 

             The plot and momentum of literature does not necessarily reside in reality, and yet reality must be the measuring system against which the significance of all action is defined.  Only in reality is a sensual aesthetic possible.  Barthes explores this and concludes that all real readers have a “hallucinatory relish of ‘reality’” (53).  He extends this to an analysis of what is pleasurable in literature, and concludes that, if not all readers, some readers of literature are “minor hysterics, who receive bliss from a singular theater: not one of grandeur but one of mediocrity” that allows them to place themselves contextually closer to the literature, and thereby attain a pleasure denied to them from a more removed vantage point.  Barthes uses the example of Amiel’s biography and journal, from which editors have cut such details as the weather.  Barthes comes to the conclusion that, while audiences could still relate to the described weather experienced by Amiel on Lake Geneva, the philosophy of Amiel is becoming increasingly obsolete and difficult for audiences to connect to or gain from.  A real human experience that is essentially tactile universal is pleasurable in a way that an argument is not.  Specific writings of an author may be too far removed contextually from the audience to elicited emotion, though they may still be able to read and understand them.  Organic experience, found in realism, allows the audience to sensually experience and thus derive pleasure from the text in a way that remains effective in perpetuity.

            Realism limits the otherwise uncontained description that literature would facilitate.  By using realism as a paradigm for description an “exactitude of reference, superior or indifferent to all other functions, of itself commanded and justified description of the referent, or in the case of description reduced to a single word, its denotation” is created wherein the aesthetic of the text is limited to that which is conceivable by the reader, and which thereby has greater sensual significance to their potential perceptions.  By limiting the aesthetic individual descriptions gain meaning and potency. 

This missing, this interweaving of constraints, has two advantages:  on the one hand the aesthetic function, by conferring a meaning on the set piece, is a safeguard against a downward spiral into endless detail.  For, when discourse is no longer guided and limited by the structural imperatives of the story (functions and signals), there is nothing to tell the writer why he should stop descriptive details at one point rather than another:  if it was not subject to aesthetic or rhetorical choice, any scene would be inexhaustible by discourse; there would always be some corner, some detail, some nuance of location or color to add.  On the other hand, but stating the referent to be real, and by pretending to follow it slavishly, realistic description avoids being seduced into fantasizing (a precaution which was believed necessary for the ‘objectivity’ of the account).  Classical rhetoric had in a sense institutionalized the fantasy under the name of a particular figure, hypotyposis, whose function was to ‘place things before the hearer’s eyes’, not in a neutral manner, merely reporting, but by giving to the scene all the radiance of desire (this was a division of vividity illuminated discourse, with prismatic outlines:  the illustris oratio).  Having proclaimed its renunciation of the constraints of the rhetorical code, realism had to find a new reason to describe.   (“The Reality Effect” 14)

 

Thus a primitive pleasure is founding the dynamics of reality.  By limiting the aesthetic of description with the constraints of reality, the potential for pleasure is increased because the audience is still capable of taking a sensual interest in what is being described; when description goes beyond the capacities of the sensual perception of the reader his potential to attain bliss is reduced and his pleasure is confused.

            Reality has ramifications even for functional analysis.  The role of analysis in the context of detail, and its interaction with pleasure is a point of contention.  Although analysis of detail clearly increases communication and understanding, it equally clearly reduces the aesthetic of the text, changing artistry into science minimizing, the pleasure of the text.  The “irreducible residues of functional analysis… denote what is commonly called ‘concrete reality’ (casual movements, transitory attitudes, insignificant objects, redundant words).  Unvarnished ‘representation’ of ‘reality’, a naked account of ‘what is’ (or was), thus looks like a resistance to meaning, a resistance which confirms the great mythical opposition between the true-to-life (the living) and the intelligible” (14).  Criticism confuses the meaninglessness of the aesthetic, reducing sensual pleasure and adding communication where none necessarily had existed.  These appeals to the “obsessive reference to the ‘concrete’ [that] is always brandished as a weapon against meaning, as if there were some indisputable law that what is truly alive could not signify” (14).  The concrete favors reality, in a manner which is tangible and without inherent significance unto itself, reliant on either the author or the critic to impose meaning.  This “resistance of reality (in its written form) to structure is quite limited in fictional narrative, which by definition is constructed on a model which has, on the whole, no other constraints than those of intelligibility.  But this same reality becomes the essential reference in historical narrative, which is supposed to report ‘what really happened’.”  History is an important model for realism, as the primary example of a system in which details gain significance merely because they are real and happened and can be described in human terms with which the reader can empathize.  History demonstrates “that the ‘real’ is assured not to need any independent justification, that it is powerful enough to negate any notion of ‘function’, that it can be expressed without there being any need for it to be integrated into a structure, and that the having-been-there of things is a sufficient reason for speaking of them” (15).   The implication is that interest is found in mere realism, and from the detail entailed in the creation of realism pleasure can be achieved.

            The degree to which the critic adds to or detracts from meaning and realism becomes an issue.  Although criticism inherently finds meaning in detail and thereby detracts from the aesthetic, the degree to which the critic can interact with the text in order to derive pleasure from it and so give it meaning.  Barthes examines the idea of criticism and the role of the critique, and how this interacts with the role of the artist.  He explores the idea that, through the blending of the two potential genres and professions (art and criticism, artist and critic) there is a threat to the autonomy of art as a discipline unto itself.  The artist’s ability to shift his own signification, from artist to genre-specific analyst becomes problematic; because just as the artist is able to shift his signification to “a film-maker or a painter” he is likewise able to shift back from “a painter, a film-maker, [and] work interminable critiques of the cinema, painting, deliberately reducing the art to his criticism.  He can also “dismiss” writing and become a scientist, a scholar, an intellectual theorist” (The Pleasure of the Text 54).  By so melding disciplines the individual (who can now be called the artist, but should also be called a plethora of other names) will “no longer speak except from a moral site cleansed of any linguistic sensuality” (54).  This allows him finally to re-align his desires away from art, creativity, and pleasure, to embrace sterility, logic, and satiation.

            The critic is tied to the association of the artist with the work.  To assign an Author to a text is “to impose a brake on it, to furnish it with a final signified, to close writing.”  Criticism “undertakes the important task of discovering the Author (or his hypostases: society, history, the psyche, freedom) beneath the work: once the Author is found, the text is “explained,” the critic has won; hence, it is hardly surprising that historically the Author’s empire has been the critics as well and also that criticism is unsettled at the same time as the Author” (The Death of the Author 53).  Thus association with an author inherently removes the text from the aesthetic it would naturally gravitate towards, and begins to assign meaning in a manner fundamental to finding communication in text, but antithetical to the goal of pleasure which is rooted in the sensual.  Because “writing constantly posits meaning,” the only way to achieve sensual pleasure is to find “systematic exemption of meaning” (54).  Thus literature, “by refusing to assign to the text…an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity we may call counter-theological, properly revolutionary,” and inconsistent with the systematized form of literary analysis.  It is this removal from meaning that is necessary for bliss. 

            The problem with this subtle destruction of the artist is that it is “always inadequate.”  Because the destruction of art comes through the re-signification of the artist, the actual dismantlement thereof occurs in a field which is not art, and thereby “becomes impertinent,” gesturing at destruction without achieving annihilation.  If the attempted destruction of art occurs within the context of art, it “equally exposes itself to recuperation (the avant-garde is that restive language which is going to be recuperated).  The awkwardness of this alternative is the consequence of the fact that destruction of discourse is not a dialectic term but a semantic term: it docilely takes its place within the seminological ‘versus’ myth; whence the destruction of art is doomed to only paradoxical formulae (those which proceed literally against the doxa): both sides of the paradigm are clued together in an ultimately complicitous fashion,” in such a way that a structural agreement is created between the contesting and the contested forms of art and criticism (54).

            The result of this subversion of art is not destruction of pleasure, but is instead a new source of pleasure found in the unexpected elements that evade the superficial destruction reeked through the ineffective means of dismantlement made available to the easily influenced artist.  The remnant of the reformation of art is an alternative that is “not directly concerned with destruction, [which] evades the paradigm and seeks some other term.”  This alternative term “an eccentric, extraordinary term” which does not synthesize what outlives the destruction but rather counters the destructive forces with the aspects of art that cannot be predicted by the non-artistic destructive forced.

            Just as the addition of the detail of French Modernism adds to the aesthetic, the realism, and the pleasure of text, this slow destruction of the artist and author adds to the reader’s closeness to the text and facilitates the bliss of the reader.  Barthes characterizes writing as “the destruction of every voice, every origin.  Writing is the neuter, that composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes” (“The Death of the Author” 49).  Barthes removes the author from the details stated, noting that “once a fact is recounted—for intransitive purposes, and no longer to act directly upon reality, i.e., exclusive of any function except that exercise of the symbol itself—this gap appears, the voice looses origin,” and the author no longer takes a significant role in the act of writing.  Thus as the signified details of the text begin to form their own aesthetic reality the role of the author is reduced, increasing the closeness between the text and the reader and facilitating pleasure.  As the realism and anonymity of the text is increased the “prestige of the individual” is diminished, and the text becomes an aesthetic and an experience, rather than the work off the individual author.  Pleasure is increased as it is “language which speaks, not the author…restoring the reader’s place.”  As language becomes pure, self-contained and directed, it returns to the ‘essentially verbal condition of literature” that Barthes champions as a necessary element for the achievement of bliss (49).   

            Time constraints dissolve with the notion of the author in a way that allows the text to be conceptualized more as a purely aesthetic experience for the reader.  Because the Author “is always conceived as the past of his own book: book and author are voluntarily placed on one and the same line, distributed as a before and an after” an inherent timeline is established by the existence of the authorial figure.  When the Author is removed “there is no time other than the speech-act, and every text is written eternally here and now.”  This aligns the aesthetic of the text with the aesthetic of reality, making the text an experience unique to the reader and an experience far more aligned with pleasure than that which was dependent on the already post-dated timeline of the author.  This emphasis on the speech act and the moment thereof reduces interpretation, so that “the speech-act has no content other than the act by which it is uttered” and thus cannot be interpreted and thereby removed from reality into the realm of plot (52).  The scriptor “no longer contains passions, moods, sentiments, impressions, but that immense dictionary from which he draws a writing which will be incessant” this allows pleasure to meld with the text and become organic as “life merely imitates the book, and this book itself is but a tissue of signs, endless imitation, infinitely postponed.” 

            Although Barthes presents life as imitating text, it is important to note that the aesthetic of the text that relates to experience is that of the text itself, and the pleasure thereof, and is not associated with the content of the text.  This springs from the inherent separation between the aesthetic of reality and the plot of the text.  By making the experience of the text in no way contingent on its communication, pleasure is assured and the likelihood of achieving bliss is increased; the text becomes entirely an interaction rather than an exercise in reception.  Because of this the pleasure of the text is distinctly disassociated with the pornographic.  Barthes separates the pleasure that results from text from the strictly sexual pleasure of sexual texts.  The “text of bliss is never the text that recounts the kind of bliss afforded literally” by sexual experience (The Pleasure of the Text 55).  In fact, the simplicity of the goals of pornographic text probably reduces its ability to afford the reader the complex satisfaction that Barthes is attempting to describe in his analysis of the pleasure that potentially may result from textual stimulation.  Specifically, “the site of textual pleasure is not the relation of mimic or model (imitative relation) but solely that of dupe and mimic (relation of desire, or production)” (55).   Because of this the specificity of the pleasure that results from text, the need to distinguish between figuration and representation becomes profound. 

            Figuration “is the way in which the erotic body appears (to whatever degree in whatever form that may be) in the text” (56).  It is the very specific physicality of the forms of the text; the body of the characters or the identity of the characters, without the plot or the morality of the story.  Even the figure of the text itself “can be revealed in the form of a body” and thus be sexualized in a way that is physical. It is not merely the form of the individual elements of the text that form the aesthetic that creates pleasure, but the accumulation of these elements into a realistic experience to which the reader can relate that allows for bliss.

            Representation is figuration encumbered with other meanings beyond its purely physical form.  Barthes calls this “embarrassed figuration” and likens it to “a space of alibis (reality, morality, likelihood, readability, truth, etc.)” (56).   Representation can speak to a number of disciplines at once, and allows writers to employ both the real and metaphorical meaning of what they write.  This allows for communication and the perpetuation of the momentum of the plot, but confuses and potentially reduces the achievability of pleasure from the text.  As the role of the author is diminished the text becomes more purely aesthetic and “the claim too ‘decipher’ a text becomes entirely futile” (“The Death of the Author” 53).   

            Barthes begins a slow equation of the “vraisemblable” and the real which eventually allows for the connection between reality with text (an equation that greatly facilitates the connection between pleasure and text).  In so doing Barthes is redefining the “vraisemblable” which was “for centuries” conceived of as having “no contamination of the ‘vraisemblable’ by the real” (“The Reality Effect” 15).   This led to the tendency, in classical texts, “to functionalize every detail, to produce strong structures, and, it would seem, to leave no notation which is justified only by its conformity to reality.”  Because of this focus on the significance of detail, the old “vraisemblable” had no application to reality analysis and disallowed for the kind of notation common in modernist text.  The new “vraisemblable” accepts “statements whose only justification is their referent,” and allows for analysis of detail purely as an aesthetic connection to realism.  This realignment of the vraisemblable is essential as “realist literature is narrative [and] realism is only fragmentary, erratic, and restricted to ‘details’, and because the most realistic narrative imaginable unfolds in an unrealistic manner” (16).  While the concrete detail “is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier: the signified is expelled from the sign, and along with it, of course, there is eliminated the possibility of developing a form of the signified, that is, the narrative structure itself,” the sense degree to which these details add to the aesthetic is amplified as they become disassociated with narrative elements.  This indelibly connects pleasure and text, as “eliminated from the realist utterance as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ slips back in as a signified of connotation; for at the very moment when these details are supposed to denote reality directly, all that they do, tacitly, is signify it,” making the aesthetic inseparable from language.   In this manner “it is the category for the ‘real’, and not its various contents, which is being signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified, to the advantage of the referent, standing alone, becomes the true signifier of realism.  A reality effect is produced, which is the basis of the unavowed ‘vraisemblance’ which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity” (16).  The function of this new version of vraisemblance directly influences the pleasure of the text, as it facilitates the “intention to alter the tripartite nature of the sign so as to make the descriptive notion a pure encounter between the object and its expression.”  This finally allows for an acceptance of detail as naught but an aspect of aesthetic that allows for pleasure.  Modernism’s disintegration of the sign is present in the realist project, but is accomplished in the name of “referential plentitude,” and inclusion of detail, lessening the significance of the sign as a representation and regressively diminishing the significance of representation in text.  As the sign increasingly becomes not a symbol but merely an object; bliss can be achieved as realism becomes both available and aesthetically pleasurable.

            The reader becomes a filter, through which the “multiple writings, proceeding from several cultures and entering into a dialogue, into a parody, into a contestation” are filtered.  This allows the reader to sift through the otherwise meaningless signified, reacting to that which causes pleasure and finding meaning in that which communicates.  Barthes addresses this as he distinguishes a difference between babble and prattle.  Barthes defines the pleasure of the text in terms of babel, arguing that the man with supreme access to bliss through text is not constrained by the delineation of established language.   Thus while society can not accept any individual who is not similarly constrained by the nature of language, and all those subject to language interpret mixing language as illogical and ineffective as a means of communication, to the reader who is capable of such this versatility enables supreme consideration and pleasure in poetry (The Pleasure of the Text 3).  The reader becomes the “space in which are inscribed all the citations out of which a writing is made; the unity of a text is not in its origin but in its destination” (“The Death of the Author” 54).  Although being identified as merely a recipient of work is dehumanizing in a way that would seem to remove the reader from pleasure, it actually re-focuses both criticism and the text on in a way that is unique and distinctly concerned with the reaction of the reader.  By focusing on the reader a degree of uncertainty is introduced that cannot be present in literature when significance is placed on the author.  Because the author’s existence is tangible and the interpretations based on the acceptance of the author inherently exist within a context, the meaning and reaction to both the plot and detail of the text is limited.  The reader is an unpredictable entity that introduces the instability necessary for the achievement of bliss. 

            As Barthes begins to define prattle and the nature of writing he starts his argument regarding the necessity of unpredictability in bliss.  Prattle is the detail, which is unpredictable because it exists outside the context of the plot (which moves in some logical pattern) and is entirely arbitrary in its inclusion in the text. Only in the moments where the text is entirely unpredictable and at a moment where outcomes and futures are unclear is it possible to convert the pleasure of the reader into the bliss of the reader.  This creates a challenge for the author.  Although in no way a part of the equation of reading which is in all ways an intimate interaction between the reader and the text, the author’s role in facilitating this relationship places burden of mediation on his shoulders.  Barthes clarifies very specifically that the pleasure of the author does not guarantee the pleasure of the reader.  While this seems intuitive given the number of poorly written or unpopular books, it is integral to the establishment of the argument that the relationship that exists in reading is not between the reader and the author, but rather between the reader and the text, and that thus the pleasure or bliss related to text is inherently that of the individual.

            Barthes supports spoken language as a distinctively aesthetic experience and associates the author of the text with the standards that corrupts language, making it predictable and removing from it the tension that is necessary to achieve true bliss from the text.  The writer of the text is forced to employ “unweaned language: imperative, automatic, unaffectionate, a minor disaster of static [which] are the motions of an undifferentiated orality, intersecting the orality which produces the pleasures of gastrosophy and of language” (The Pleasure of the Text 5).  This facilitates the separation of the reader from the text, ostracizing them from any possible bliss, and making the writing experience the single source of satisfaction that can possibly result from the text that has so employed this version of prattling dialog between the author and the signifier of space which is the reader.  In this instance “the reader” is the signification that is a “substitute for nothing,” rather than an intended audience who may potentially also be led to bliss through interaction with the text.

            Barthes explores the reality that it is not language but the use of language to express the exotic ideas of the subversive plot-structures that are most interesting in literary analysis and which are at the forefront of readers’ mind.  However, he emphasizes that the taming-effect of language is necessary because while it “may seem privileged because it is the edge of violence; but it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it destruction which interests it” (7).  Beyond this the mere novelty of the plot in contrast to the inherently universal quality of language makes it strange and interesting in a way that is naturally more exciting (in that the unexpected is exciting, and that clearly the universal is more easily expected than unique elements of a text).  While there may be pleasure to be found in the unsteady world of plot, this pleasure cannot be followed to fruition within the context of the single element which is plot.  Rather it is necessary that excitement unify with a degree of security (found in the universality of language and detail) that allow the reader to be both stable and stimulated in one moment.  The reader does not seek to drown themselves, rather they seek to stand on the edge of the cliff and experience the force of the ocean whilst still affirmed by the context of the ground on which they stand.  Artists may go beyond the syntactical structure of language, but they cannot escape the universality of either the established signifiers or the idea of the signifier as a mode of designation.

             Barthes takes the notion of the break between two types of work a step further when he focuses on Severo Sardury’s Cobra, which he argues goes beyond a break to a competition between the two edges for the attention of the author and the reader.  This, within the argumentation of Barthes, leads to a sense of love and of abundance which allows for the reader finally to reach a state of bliss otherwise unattainable.  Interestingly, Barthes equates the state of overexposure to language to that of children who have been permitted everything.  This de-sexualizes the idea of “bliss,” making it far more akin to hedonism of experience than of sensation.  The over-exposure to experience found in French modernist writing, and the degree of detail associated with realism, is akin to this hedonistic gluttony for aesthetics.  Bliss that results from an overabundance of aesthetics is attainable in the context of realism that is removed from the complexity of plot but which emphasizes specific and plentiful detail in descriptions. 

            Flaubert presents a unique case.  Through the introduction of consistent discontinuities in construction and in subordination, Flaubert normalizes this deconstruction of language, thereby destroying and universalizing it in one sweeping move.  Thus the cut between the two houses of plot and language cannot exist as it has as “there is no longer a language on the other side of these figures (which means, in another sense: there is no longer anything but language); a generalized asyndeton seizes the entire utterance, so that this very readable discourse is underhandedly one of the craziest imaginable: all the logical small change is in the interstices” (The Pleasure of the Text 9).  In creating this relationship between the now non-existent language and the story of the novel, Barthes allows for the narrative to be dismantled.  He argues that this makes the edges of the narrative clear and thus makes pleasure highly accessible.  Although this might initially seem to clash with the subtlety he has required for bliss, it rather accentuates his requirement that the clash between the two entities must lead to the discomfiture of the reader through “controlled discontinuities, faked conformities, and direct destructions.”  Furthermore, the author protects the taste of the text through a sustained mimesis, which never allows the text to parody itself, and sustains the tension of the serious text within the chaos of the devolution of language. 

               While the structure of the plot clearly reduces the aesthetic pleasure of the text and thus minimizes the potential bliss found in the text, the effect of the physical structure of the text is less clear.  Seemingly inorganic, the syntax of text potentially serves realism in that it allows for a basic context through which detail can be expressed.  The nature of the sentence becomes an issue within the context of the hierarchy and conflict within text perceived by Barthes.  Barthes clearly does not perceive the necessity thereof, nor does he necessarily find the structure of the sentence organically aligned with the nature of communication or language.  Barthes argues that language or expression is “eternally, splendidly, outside the sentence” (49).  Thus the sentence, through “predictive syntax” forms language and expression to a structure that is not necessarily representative of what should or would be expressed outside the pressure created by the otherwise formless world.  Given no alternatives for rational expression, the sentence becomes the somewhat unworthy paradigm, creating a formalist structure that is undeservedly highly valued in the hierarchy of language.

            The sentence “implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions” and through this systemization it allows language to reach a “completion” that is not achievable in sentiment.  In this way it is impossible for the sentence to express the more complex thought that it is its purpose to represent.  The idea that the end of the sentence is the goal, and that the sentence is a finite thing, limits writing, which should represent the “thoughts, passion, or imagination” of the writer.  This limitation has created a number of fields of art that allow for pleasure, but only within a false, cultural, and artistic sense.  The “artifact created by rhetors, grammarians, linguists, teachers, writers, parents—This artifact is mimicked in a more or less lucid manner; we are playing with an exceptional object, whose paradox has been articulated by linguistics: immutably structured and yet infinitely renewable” which allows for pleasure, but only within the context of the unnatural (The Pleasure of the Text 50).  The detail of realism avoids the momentum created by the sentence that leads towards an end, instead favoring a de-contextualized, purposeless aesthetic that allows for bliss without the artificial propulsion towards an end moment. 

            Barthes finds that the pleasure of the text is achievable through realism that created through the detail of the text that exists outside and separate from the plot.  This is aided by the conflicts that naturally occur in the text between language and plot, aesthetic and communication, structure and art.  The perfect aesthetic is not achievable, because the text is inherently removed from many modes of aesthetics (such as the spoken) which would be more conducive to achieving bliss and because the nature of the text requires the plot elements that reduce pure formalism by introducing communication.  Through introducing both the extra-plot elements of realism and the conflicting elements inherent in literature, Barthes finds that bliss can be organically achieved through the media of the text.

             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Annotated Bibliography

 

Barthes, Roland.  “The Death of the Author.”  The Rustle of Language.  Trans.  Richard             Howard. New York:  Hill and Wang, 1988.  This relatively short article by             Barthes clarifies the adjusted role of the author in modernism, and gives insight             into the new interplay between the role of the reader and the authorship of the                      text. It is helpful when analyzing how reality, pleasure, and the role of the reader             interact towards the potential bliss that results from textual experience.

 

Barthes, Roland.  The Pleasure of the Text. Trans.  Richard Miller.  New York:  Hill and             Wang, 1973.  Barthes book examines the role of several categories towards the             formation of the pleasure experienced in reading text.  Amongst these categories      are those of the sentence, reality and realism, and the edges of text.  This gives an          early example of Barthes opinions regarding the role of the author and the reader,             and how they interact with detail in the text.

 

Barthes, Roland.  “The Reality Effect.”  French Literary Theory Today.  Trans.  Tzvetan Todorov.  New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1982.  Roland Barthes article gives a very specific analysis of how realism is created through detail that is             insignificant to the plot.  It relates directly to his analysis of pleasure in that it             gives an alternative signification to what is important or “of value” in a text. 

 

Narrative Theory

The next big issue to tackle is defining “narrative theory” and to justify its importance.  This should be a relatively straightforward endeavor (knock on wood) because of work I’ve done in the past.  I intend to rely heavily on the criticism of Gerard Gerard, so that should also be fun.

Messengers

Antony and Cleopatra is a play of travel and of messangers.  The messengers are the first and  most obvious narrators in my analysis.  Although Shakespeare has many more overt narrators, who offer pithy sayings and philosophies of life that are essentially authorial insertions into the text of the play, these are actually poor examples of narration as this project insists that we define it.  This is the narrator as the voice of the author; I am seeking the narrator as the author himself.

The messengers in Antonly and Cleopatra overtly create the story.  Not only would the love affair grind to a stand still without their relay of information, no story would exist at all.  The messangers are creating the plot and providing the substance thereof, without them each character has only life, not interaction and not plot.

This brings up the issue of soothsaying.

Project Design

So.  I’m looking for a universalizing theory of literature, and I’m looking to demonstrate how such a theory can be applied and in so doing apply the theory to the cannonical member in the set of works of English literature, to wit, Shakespeare.

 Narrative Theory addresses the problem of authorship and the problem of responsibility in literature that haunts critics.  The question is in whom does power over the text lie.  Many would argue that the author, as the arranger of the words, holds power.  Yet Barthes argues that the critic, the interpreter of a work applies assigns meaning to the words arranged by the author, and that previous to this assignment the work was valuless.  Althusser puts a huge significance on signification and the power of naming.  However, is it the author who uses the word who assigns a name, or the reader who associates that name with an image who is in fact creative?

My hope, or rather, my focus, is to delve into this problem.  My inclination is to assign omnipotence to the text itself, and to prove that, through the usurpation of a narrative role, that the text is self perpetuating and self creating.  That, without the author or the reader the narrotor could subside and thrive, going forward with meaning in print. 

 The appeal of such a narrative theory is profound, because it romoves text from the purview of the author or the reader, providing all readings with universal validity so long as the originate in the text.  This notion unifys other critical theories by disabling the society of either the author or the critic; neither outside force influences the message of the text itself, and so the text can be taken as its own problem with its own solution. 

 If the narrator is responsible for bringing the text into being, then certainly a narrator must be present in every text.  The tragedies of Shakespeare are interesting.  In drama there is little room for hidden forces.  If the play is to be performed, then some directing force must be aware of every element that will be included.  However, in examining Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, King Lear, and McBeth I seek to demonstrate a narrative element that itself creates the play, and which is seperate from either the viewer or the narrator, which is the text itself. 

Yah, that’s the goal.