Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00

13 Dec 00 - 10:53 AM (#356352)
Subject: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Peter T.

While awaiting the U.S. Supreme Court ruling last night, a panic stricken American friend of mine phoned me, and said: "At one moment you think that anything is possible, and then the next you think it is all fated. Chaos or conspiracy. It is like some weird Greek tragedy. You feel as if the whole of future history is about to go down one road or the other." Being a pedant, I replied that while I personally thought the situation was more driven by the structure of political power than she did, the feeling she was talking about was really out of a Shakespearean form of tragedy and not a Greek form. Curiously enough, she didn't hang up.

I said, in Greek tragedy, it is always assumed, even before things have happened, that they were fated to happen. The specific circumstances are seen as part of the mocking machinery of the gods. Oedipus never says: why me? When things go wrong in Greek tragedy, you feel everything to be always in the grip of some powerful, inexorable machine.

In Shakespeare, we move towards modernity and the prospect of chaos. Now famously known as the "butterfly effect", in chaos (or complexity theory) an unstable system can be knocked onto radically different paths by very slight shifts in the initial conditions. For scientists, these shifts may or not be randomly interesting; but for the rest of us, when we can suddenly see that our lives may be radically altered by slight changes in the facts around us, the question arises: Why these facts? Why not others? Why have these facts happened, and not others?

Crucially, in Shakespearean tragedy, this sudden awareness of the possibly arbitrary nature of life happens as it happens -- the clock ticks on stage. We can see that the future might be different if we could change the present, and yet we have no control over the very conditions that are affecting decisions in the present, so it all seems at one moment a conspiracy and at exactly the same moment absurdly arbitrary -- this is what haunts Macbeth and many another Shakespearean figure. Why isn't now different? Why don't I have enough control to change now? In Shakespearean tragedy, you feel everything to be in the grip of some powerful, inexorable machine, and at exactly the same moment, you feel everything to be totally arbitrary. So that even if you feel a political conspiracy is happening, how has chaos brought it to the point where such a conspiracy can work? It is far more maddening than anything the Greeks came up with.

"Well," she finally said. "I think it is really baseball tragedy. My mother refused to go to the bathroom during the crucial Yankees-Mets game, and then it got so bad she had to go, and while she was out of the room, the series was lost. I have to go to the bathroom. Bye."

Two minutes later she phoned me back to say that the Supreme Court had handed down their verdict while she was on the toilet.

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13 Dec 00 - 11:00 AM (#356353)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: catspaw49

Yeah, this election really gives me the shits too.

Spaw

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13 Dec 00 - 11:08 AM (#356359)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Mrrzy

That's where I was when I heard John Lennon had been killed - boy, bad news and potties, hmmm.

But I really liked the pedantry, Peter! Sounds like a conversation I would have, if my friends would stay on the phone...

Interesting thought, though - was it fated to be Bush? Was it written in the chads lo these many weeks ago? I ponder...

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13 Dec 00 - 11:09 AM (#356360)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: GUEST,Fibula Mattock

*LOL* Spaw!

Now Peter T, my flatmate is a Classics lecturer, and she's really into chaos theory in a big way. But I can't argue the finer points of her ideas as I usually hear them at dinner parties when I'm fairly drunk.

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13 Dec 00 - 12:17 PM (#356413)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Micca

Or maybe it is because Friday the 13th is on a Wednesday this month???

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13 Dec 00 - 02:42 PM (#356566)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Greyeyes

Interesting points, Peter, but it is a bit of a generalisation to argue chaos theory in Shakespeare. In Julius Caesar Cassius argues:-
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves....

Admittedly there are many references contradicting that position:-
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

And

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

I would interpret this as indicating that the playwrite believed more in a mixture of individuals influencing outcomes themselves (ie catching or missing the tide), coupled with some kind of controlling force in the universe, either random, or divine in some way. It also tends to vary from play to play. Hamlet is heavy with Christian allegory. King Lear, being set in pre-Christian Albion, has little in the way of overtly Christian allusions, but draws heavily on the concept of the wheel of fate or fortune.

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13 Dec 00 - 03:02 PM (#356581)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Peter T.

You are of course right, Greyeyes, but I was making a similar point more drastically. What makes the Shakespearean universe so interesting is that it holds a universe of patterned meaning (in one of the forms you describe, which differs from play to play) and a universe without meaning in the mind simultaneously. This is what gives the scepticism such power and tension. A play like Troilus and Cressida shows the tension at its most abandoned.

I personally believe that he moves towards a resolution of that tension in the late plays by an acceptance of common life (usually displayed in the reconciliation of the dispossessed father with his long lost daughter).

yours, Peter T.

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13 Dec 00 - 03:18 PM (#356595)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Greyeyes

How do you see what could be interpreted as a slipping into "natural" or "earth" magic in The Tempest? I've often wondered if he was getting "soft" towards the end, or just exploring new themes to stop himself getting bored. It's always regarded as one of the most difficult plays, and in this context is certainly very tricky to "nail".

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13 Dec 00 - 04:34 PM (#356655)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Peter T.

I agree, The Tempest is very weird. My guess would be that, unlike the other plays, this in one in which we are set down inside the "workshop" where meaning is created, and so there are all these variations on master-slave, creator-creature, dominion-colony going on. We see different webs in which people are caught, and the webspinner himself. To carry this off in a Christian society, Shakespeare obviously had to shift into natural magic -- he couldn't have God on stage the way Job or Milton does. But it does make the whole thing sort of minor league puppetry -- as opposed to Lear, where you feel that the universe is under investigation -- as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.. Prospero is a kind of minor league god. And, obviously one theme at the end is giving up that kind of power, which could be seen as a renunciation into ordinary life. To be blasphemous, it is a bit like Jesus walking out of the Garden of Gethsemane and settling down with Mary Magdalene as a house carpenter. This seems to be a solution that Shakespeare would see as equally as fine as being crucified and resurrected; and equally as religious. Not that he would have dared say that.

yours, Peter T.

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13 Dec 00 - 04:47 PM (#356668)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: catspaw49

To be blasphemous, it is a bit like Jesus walking out of the Garden of Gethsemane and settling down with Mary Magdalene as a house carpenter

So then you're saying that it might be like George W. walking into the White House and settling down with Tipper Gore as a Genial Buffoon.................

Spaw

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13 Dec 00 - 04:59 PM (#356677)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Peter T.

Not exactly. yours, Peter T.

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13 Dec 00 - 05:31 PM (#356716)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Greyeyes

Spaw, I have no idea what you're talking about, is it from one of Shakespeare's later, more obscure works?

Peter, I love the idea of Prospero as a minor league pupeteer, I can just see Shakespeare intending just that!

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13 Dec 00 - 06:14 PM (#356764)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: catspaw49

Yes Greyeyes, its from "Chad in a Mid-Winter Night," circa 2000. The main characters are pretty dull but the plot line is simply unbelievable.

Spaw

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13 Dec 00 - 06:21 PM (#356770)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Greyeyes

So typical Shakespeare then?

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13 Dec 00 - 06:53 PM (#356800)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: Greyeyes

"Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men."

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13 Dec 00 - 10:40 PM (#356966)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: SINSULL

I favored Lucretius myself.

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14 Dec 00 - 06:46 AM (#357058)
Subject: RE: Stray Thought for the Day: Dec 13,00
From: GUEST,Roger the skiffler

"What fools these mortals be"; "something rotten in the state". Old Stratford Bill had a quote for all seasons!
RtS

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