Tragic Redemption

The use of tragic redemption is perhaps one of Shakespeare's favorite literary devices. He uses it beautifully in plays such as Othello and Hamlet, and perfects it in King Lear. At first glance, these plays seem void of any element of redemption.. In Othello we see a tragic ending in which Desdemona and Othello die ingloriously and without reason except to quench the base desires of Iago. In Hamlet we see the prince of Denmark avenge his murdered father and poisoned mother, only to swiftly die himself. And in King Lear we see an ending that, according to critic Thomas Roche, is "as bleak and unrewarding as man can reach outside the gates of Hell".

I suppose that if one has grown up watching too many Hollywood movies the idea of redemption correlates directly with the movie The Shawshank Redemption in which Andy Dufresne escapes through a river of shit and triumphantly holds his hands to the sky as lightning, thunder, and rain fall from the heavens. In principle, both Shakespeare's use of tragic redemption and The Shawshank Redemption's triumphant victory scene are the same. Each character has fallen to a depth unimaginably foreboding, but they all depart with an achievement/redeeming quality essential to the wholeness of their characters.

In Othello we see a man of unequaled integrity and inner strength succumb to the seeds of doubt planted by Iago, and as a result he kills the woman he loves. The tragic redemption comes into play after Othello learns of Iago's treachery and Desdemona's innocence, and in response he ends his own life. His death shows the audience that he would rather die than live a life permanently stained with the horror of what he'd done. Balance is restored in the end with Iago's death sentence, though his actual death is never observed..

The use of tragic redemption in Hamlet is slightly different than within Othello. The satisfaction of revenge is achieved as we witness the fall of all of Hamlet's adversaries, but cruelly, we are robbed of the promise and satiety of Hamlet's reign over Denmark. His death, like Othello's, seems unworthy of his life, but after falling from such heights he also achieves a measure of redemption before his end. He concludes his life with these words to Horatio:

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,

Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind

me!

If thou didst eve hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story.

(V.2.325-332)

And with this speech we know that Hamlet's name will be restored, bringing both sadness for his death and contentment at the knowledge of his redeemed honor.

In King Lear, the audience is provided no such comforts in the notion of redemption. To the untrained eye, one sees a man who witnesses the deaths of everyone he once loved, and ultimately die himself, void of love and worth. A death in vain. Upon reading King Lear one naturally poses the question, what was the point? But I argue the point was to perfect with the utmost subtlety the use of tragic redemption.

Lear reveals himself in the beginning of the play as a man blinded by ignorance. By the end of the play he can at last see the truth. As it is eloquently summed up by an unknown author on an English Literature forum I stumbled upon, "Shakespeare shows that it is Lear’s suffering that leads to his learning and his subsequent redemption. Prior to Lear’s painful banishment, he is a pampered, flattered king living a false life, full of false love. It is excruciating for Lear to face that his life has been 80 years of lies, but in order to learn the truth, he must first suffer through the pain, and as Shakespeare clearly shows, it is better to learn through suffering than to remain comfortable and ignorant. Therefore, Lear’s life is worth all of the agonies it incurs; after all, it is only after Lear begins to suffer that he truly begins to live."

The Sublime (according to Me, Shelby, and Wikipedia)

According to Wikipedia the sublime is the quality of greatness or vast magnitude, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation... According to Shelby the sublime is all of that, but with an extra element of profundity, the sublime's origin. In her presentation she spoke of Caliban's speech in Act 3 Scene 2 of The Tempest,

Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked,

I cried to dream again. (The Tempest, 3.2.134-142)

The hideous Caliban produces one of the most eloquent and beautiful speeches in the history of written language. This is what Shelby argues is the core of sublimity. To quote this intelligent young lady, "From the union of these dual qualities of repulsion and attraction, the sublime is achieved."

I argue that sublimity does not have to originate from the base or mundane. There are places in the world that are so magnificent one can hardly believe they exist. For me, one of these places is Zion National Park in southern Utah.

The Subway - Zion National Park

More Zion...

Sublime am I right?? "Of course I am" (Dr. Sexson, 2011)

Now to circle back in support of Shelby's theory, I post the infamous plastic bag scene from American Beauty... Is it ridiculous, or is it truly sublime? One could make an argument for both, but in the context of the film, this scene truly reaches an element of sublimity. And what is this object, but nothing more than a discarded plastic bag, dancing in a parking lot.

The principle in this scene is the same as in Caliban's speech. The sublime can be derived from the most beautiful of things to the most base. I suppose it is the element of surprise from Caliban's speech and the plastic bag scene that resonate with us on a level of such depth.

Final Paper

The Implicit Critique of Love

The act of suffering within Shakespeare’s plays is fueled by love. Gooey, messy, torturous love, and what better way for a gifted playwright to emotionally appeal to an entire species than to use that one subject we all share a subliminal affinity to? I would argue that if one were hard-pressed to ask random passersby what author they most associate with love, nearly all of them would say Shakespeare. But simply because the man is synonymous with love doesn’t mean his portrayal of it is the standard to which all love should be held. In fact, Shakespeare’s portrayal of love is not pure and beautiful as many who aren’t familiar with him might think. It is cynical, to the point where one could question if it is not in fact harboring elements of resentment.
In Harold Bloom’s analysis of King Lear in his book Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, Bloom says, “The implicit critique of love, in Shakespeare, hardly can be termed a mere skepticism” (Bloom, 487). This is an elevated way of saying Shakespeare is a skeptic hiding seeds of disparity in arguably every one of his plays in which love, in any form, plays a role. To examine these plays from a perspective other than that of the infatuated audience member is to see that love is in fact the main problematic, and with love comes the inevitable idea of ownership. An example of the destructive effects of ownership is evident within Othello. It is under love’s blind intoxication that Othello kills his Desdemona. One would think the words of the woman he loves would mean more than those of the scheming Iago, but one thing Shakespeare portrays brilliantly in all of his plays is how impulsively we humans act when responding to fear. In plays such as King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline, and Antony and Cleopatra, we see the characters’ fear of losing their object of desire dictating and twisting their fates. Even in Shakespeare’s comedies such as The Tempest, All’s Well That Ends Well, As You Like It, Pericles, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the audience is left with a happy ending, love is presented as a near-ridiculous entity, manipulating characters down paths no person should take.

So the question naturally arises, what is Shakespeare trying to tell us? If he were a true admirer of love we would see the characters in his plays choosing to make wise decisions based on their feelings for the person they care about, rather than making tumultuous decisions based on the fear of losing the thing they love. The image I have come to see is Shakespeare holding up a mirror, and in that reflection is the truth of how lost and absurd we really are. By providing parodies of that which we find normal and accepted behavior, such as a father’s desire to be loved by his children or a husband’s conviction of his wife’s loyalty, he shows the audience how destructive our blind emotions can be.
When one of Shakespeare’s characters loses that thing they most care about, the audience is left with a vacuous sense of nothingness. Though The Winter’s Tale is a comedy, Leontes gives a speech early on in the play that relates to this idea. He is speaking to Camillo about his suspicions of an affair between Hermione and Polyxenes.
Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh? A note infallible
Of breaking honesty! Horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight? And all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.
(Winter’s Tale, 1.2..283-95)

Since Leontes’ suspicions prove to be unfounded in the end, then his proclamation that states his reality is nothing if there is actually nothing going on between Hermione and Polyxenes, tells us on an extrinsic level that his entire world, including his love for Hermione is nothing… Ultimately this undercurrent of ‘nothingness’ leads my trail of thought to two related ideas; the existentialism of playwright Samuel Beckett in plays such as Endgame and Waiting For Godot and also the teachings of Buddhism.

In both Buddhism, and Beckett’s depiction of existentialist doctrine, there is an acknowledgement of the fact that with life, comes suffering. In Buddhism, a set of principles called the Four Noble Truths identifies what Shakespeare seems to be telling us. The first is the truth of suffering, followed by the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. As it is with love, the pursuit of pleasure can only continue what is ultimately an unquenchable thirst. Buddhism claims desire is the ultimate cause of suffering and the only way to escape suffering is to achieve the enlightened state of Nirvana. Beckett indirectly displays an understanding of these ideas in his plays, but unlike Buddhism, and I would argue Shakespeare as well, his intention is not to guide people towards an escape from all of this. He simply provides the spectacle and lets the audience make of it what they will. In Endgame, the characters Hamm and Clov are seemingly trapped in a purgatorial existence in which there are no answers, no dilemmas, simply impossible desires that only reveal how lost the characters are. For instance, in one scene from Endgame, Hamm tells Clov to check outside with the telescope. Clov does and replies back, “zero”. Clov asks why they go through the farce everyday, and Hamm answers that “it is routine”. Other instances include Hamm’s contemplation of what to dream about if he could ever sleep, and the continual question of “What time is it?” followed by the response, “Same as usual”.

Clearly Beckett’s understanding of mankind’s cycle of suffering is comparable to that of Buddhism and Shakespeare, though as I said before, his intention is not to guide us towards an alternative. In contrast, I believe Shakespeare does want to guide his audience, however indirectly. He portrays love from the perspective of someone who seems to grasp the temporality of all things. If he were available for comment I believe he would tell us that every moment is fleeting. We enter a world in which doom and suffering is inevitable and to escape this fact requires an escape from the whole system. To love another is to open oneself up to loss and the eventual mortality of everything. Shakespeare understood this, as does Buddhist doctrine, as does Samuel Beckett, but realistically it will never be the fate of mankind to reject the present moment’s pleasure in favor of avoiding eventual suffering. For how advanced mankind is we rarely exercise the willingness to learn from our mistakes, a fact Beckett understood too well. He produced a memorable quote in one of his novella’s titled Worstward Ho! that pertains to this discussion brilliantly. “Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

In Response to Lisa's blog "I'm happy. Really happy"

Lisa, your last post goes along perfectly with the movie I just put up titled 'Music and Life'. Watch it. Love it. Learn from it. It basically summarizes everything you had to say about the pursuit of happiness being the antithesis of happiness. Everything we need to be happy is right here! Simply to exist is a gift in itself... Our minds are becoming one.

Music and Life - Alan Watts

For some reason I can't load videos into my blogs unless I do it separately. Technology... This video is the one I reference at the end of my last blog titled 'There Is No Spoon'

Sesame Street - Monsterpiece Theater "Waiting for Elmo"

There Is No Spoon

After perusing some of the class's recent blogs, I saw Jon's most recent post titled "Something on Nothing". This idea of nothingness in Shakespeare keeps resurfacing and the more I think about it, the more BLOODY BRILLIANT I find it. Shakespeare was a brilliant cynic, immortalizing his notion of nothingness not only in his individual plays but in his works as a whole. In the same way that the Bible is perceived as one literary work, though it is full of countless individual writings, so can the complete works of Shakespeare be viewed as one piece of literature. When viewed through this lens, Shakespeare becomes an almost God-like figure, a creator and destroyer of worlds. How many heroes have been born and killed at the whims of Shakespeare? How many villains?

To quote either James or Nathan, I'm not sure who gets the credit, time isn't linear, but circular. Just as a rock tossed in a pond creates ripples, bouncing from bank to bank, so does the creation of characters such as Hamlet, Othello, Iago, and Lear cause affectations through time. The fact that they have never existed in organic form merely makes their presence more powerful. Their fates are forever sealed on paper and the only key to their liberation lies in the decomposed brain of William Shakespeare... It doesn't matter if one takes value from the eternal suffering of King Lear or from the Disney High School Musical ending of Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare shows us that no matter how much torture, pleasure, sadness we endure, beneath it all will always be a void of nothingness. In that sense, Shakespeare shows us that the mere fact of harboring any emotion is a gift in itself. To feel pain is better than to feel nothing at all, is it not? Depends who you ask.

As I already mentioned in my presentation and previous blog, Samuel Beckett is another playwright who understood this sense of nothingness. Waiting for Godot is one of the most painfully existential plays in existence and captures this idea beautifully. Until reading Jon's blog I had no idea the most brilliant and rewarding production of Waiting for Godot was performed by muppets in a routine Sesame Street show. Here it is again for those who haven't seen Jon's blog already.


http://youtu.be/ksL_7WrhWOc


If only I had the patience and self-discipline to communicate all of the ideas 'Waiting for Elmo' creates. Here are a few.
- Elmo is not only an absent character, he represents an unrealized state of existence for the two muppets waiting for him. Once Elmo arrives to play with them, the two muppets know they'll have achieved this desired state.
- By perpetually waiting in a constant state of anticipation, the blue muppet and red muppet are oblivious to anything around them that could in fact have more worth than a play-date with Elmo.
- The tree's eventual loss of patience and abandonment of the muppets shows how blind they have been waiting for something that will never arrive. There was already so much around them, such as A TALKING TREE. I would much rather play with a talking tree than Elmo.
-With the tree's departure the audience of toddlers now realizes how silly the muppets have been waiting for nothing. They now understand that in essence, waiting for anything at all is, in a way, an existence of 'nothingness' because we have all already been provided with everything we need to be happy.

This realization leads me to another video I've stolen from a classmate. Nick Axeline showed this video for his final paper presentation in Bible as Literature way back in the year 2009 AD. I immediately became eternally attached to it.

http://youtu.be/ERbvKrH-GC4

Ultimately Shakespeare, Beckett, Buddhism and other wisemen are telling us the same message. There is no spoon. (please watch The Matrix in order to understand this reference)

The Extremely Relevant Sonnet

Damn the clouds, always drifting place to place,
As if we crickets have nowhere to be.
Water rushes down as it does from space,
And we poor crickets wonder how to see.

"Fairwell young cricket" the cloud says to me,
"Cloud you are lost and surely are forlorn,
Why else would you weep on my family,
And then disperse for somewhere else to mourn?"

The cloud departs, preparing for a storm,
To weep on other crickets like myself.
"How sad" I think to be a cloud so torn,
Lost among clouds like books on a shelf.

A young cricket has no time for such thoughts,
Just as a tiger has no room for such spots.

Notes and intro to 'Measure for Measure'

This play is a comedy.
Measure for Measure is centered around the fate of Claudio, who is arrested by Vienna’s temporary leader, Lord Angelo, for impregnating Juliet, his prostitute-girlfriend. The Duke of Vienna has taken a supposed leave of absence, when in reality he has disguised himself as a friar and remained in the city to watch over things. The Duke chose Lord Angelo as his temporary replacement because of his strict and moralistic character, which Angelo immediately imposes on the city of Vienna by making brothels and unmarried intercourse illegal. After Claudio’s arrest, his sister Isabella, who is also a nun, begs Lord Angelo to have mercy on her brother. Angelo refuses but suggests an alternative; that if she agrees to sexual intercourse with him, he will let Claudio live. Isabella is faced with the decision of sacrificing her honor for her brother’s life, or allowing Claudio to die so that she can retain her chastity. For comedy’s sake the Duke intervenes and saves the day with the oh-so-sexual and effective bed-trick and then proceeds to ask the noble Isabella to marry him.
Themes to pay attention to in this play are largely centered around the nature and limits of state intervention and about the appropriated degree of sexual regulation in society. It also addresses the age-old dilemma of justice and law enforcement. There is a Latin phrase from the Roman poet Juvenal that I stole from a Dan Brown novel somewhere that goes, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?”, or, “who will guard the guards?” that seems to be relevant to this play.

Some random morsels of information about this play: The title Measure For Measure comes from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:2, “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” meaning be prepared to be judged in the same way that you judge others. The play is argued both as pro-Christianity and as evading Christianity. According to Harold Bloom, he says, “I scarcely see how the play, in regard to its Christian allusiveness, can be regarded as other than blasphemous” And according to Frye there are three well-known folk tale themes: the disguised ruler, the corrupt judge and the bed trick.

Final Paper Topic

The topic for my final paper is going to be an extension of my previous blog, which addresses the question, what is Shakespeare trying to tell us? Suffering acts as the driving force through Shakespeare's plays and all I want to know is why.. Is that too much to ask? I hope not.

The Implicit Critique of Love

As Bloom tells us in 'Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human', "The implicit critique of love, by Shakespeare, hardly can be termed a mere skepticism." (487) As we read play after play, the "mere skepticism" of love becomes an overwhelmingly apparent idea. Without having read Bloom's text I wouldn't have been able to tangibly identify this idea, but NOW there's a literary world waiting to be uncovered. Ultimately we must face the question, what is Shakespeare trying to tell us?

In King Lear, the overbearingly love-starved Lear tortures himself and the audience with his paternal desire to be loved and appreciated by his family. To borrow from Bloom, "Love is no healer in 'The Tragedy of King Lear', indeed it starts all the trouble, and is a tragedy in itself." As King of Britain and father of three daughters Lear has the sense of entitlement one might expect from someone in his position. His notion of love is nearly inseparable from that of ownership, and with the bequeathment of his kingdom to his daughters, he assumed he could spend the remainder of his days surviving simply off of the love of his family. As we fast forward to Lear's demise his loss of ownership over his kingdom has left him with nothing as he realizes the possession of his daughters' love was always imaginary and he now has nothing left.

Similarly in 'The Winter's Tale' love harasses, poisons, and ultimately leaves the audience with a vacuous sense of 'nothingness'. Leontes's speech in act 1, when his jealousy is about to lead him down a dark road, exemplifies this idea.

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh? A note infallible
Of breaking honesty! horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
that would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.
(1.2.283-95)
Since we know that everything he claims to have seen between Polyxenes and Hermione was false, the only tangible thought we can take from this speech is that it all means nothing. He says, "Is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing, the covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, my wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, if this be nothing."

The more Shakespeare I read the more I believe he and Samuel Beckett would have got along disgustingly well together. If we break down Shakespeare's plays to their central ideas, we can easily interpret that all of this suffering caused by love and the loss of ownership can be avoided by avoiding the matter all together. But clearly that's easier said than done, and what Shakespeare has done is hold up a mirror to show us how truly ridiculous we really are. But unless we are willing to remove ourselves from this cycle of suffering and attain a boddhisatva sense of enlightenment, we are doomed to repeat our mistakes. Beckett knew this and used it as dramatic inspiration in plays like 'Waiting for Godot' and 'Endgame'.


As Beckett says in his novella titled Worstward Ho, "Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."