Among those authors that have contributed to “the great works of the Western imagination”, the position of Shakespeare is well known and assured, however much his plays require allowances that need not be granted to other authors, whether they work in drama or in poetry or in novels. Other great works are complete in themselves, benefiting from an exquisite unification of their parts though a generic device of the author’s own choosing. The device of a journey through hell and then purgatory and heaven supplies a unity for the stories Dante, the character, has told to him and the various awful settings in which those often first person narratives take place. Indeed, the device, the architecture of the afterlife, is the most memorable conceit the author Dante leaves us with, far more telling than the stories of major and minor miscreants and the poetry of the description of those people and places. For his part, Chaucer crafts tales that are gems of multilayered meanings and intersections of plot motifs and narrative devices, those arranged in a format, the journey of travelers, which need not strain for unity or overall dramatic structure, even if one can claim that, indeed, there is an arc in “The Canterbury Tales”, moving them, one might say, from concerns of everyday life to matters of the soul. Certainly, Milton is always full of his own Miltonic seriousness, clearly a presence that combines the author’s personality with a form for his artistic presentation. Mark Van Doren found this a weakness. Milton never gave you a breather, was always high minded. Van Doren liked Cervantes for taking time to provide bathroom breaks for his characters. I like the redactors of the Old Testament who never let on to whether their characters (Ruth, David, Joseph) ever themselves caught on to the complexity of their own motivations and their own situations. That is the unity of tone, more important than is the intermittent presence of God, that holds the narrative books of the Old Testament together.
Read MoreWhy Jane Austen Loves Romance
Love stories about the adventure of courtship and love are so popular, such a standard sub-genre of the genre of domestic histories, that people think it has always been the case. Yes, there are sexual and lustful couplings as well as fits of passion in the Bible and in Greek and Roman romance but there was something new that happened in the early Nineteenth Century, rightly beginning with what is called the Romantic Period, that does engage people with love and courtship as being a pivotal matter, as is elaborated by Goethe’s Werther, by Mozart’s trilogy of “The Marriage of Figaro”, “Così Fan Tutti” and “Don Giovanni'', all dedicated to the idea that love was revolutionary in that it unsettled social relationships and also made love independent of ordinary social relationships, nevertheless until that time everyone understanding that people were still attracted to but opposed to the lovers in Dante because the two are entwined but wafted about by the currents of the wind, and so therefore not the right way to be. Jane Austen, for her part, is preoccupied in every one of her books with how people will create a marriage out of elective affinities, as Goethe put it, rather than for some other reason or to deal with some other subject so as to fill out a novel. Jane Austen could have written about the improvement of agriculture, as was indeed a social development in the area of which he lived as well as a theme of the time, or the state of politics, about which her mentor William Shakespeare had more than dabbled and whose contemporary perturbations, as with the Warren Hastings Impeachment, Austen had followed. But instead she did focus on this new found topic of romance, which just a few generations ago Samuel Johnson had only gingerly advanced the idea that people should consider how well they can get along with the people they marry rather than just the fact that they might carry with them property or wealth or social position. And here Jane Austen is presenting the aim of her stories as treating marriage as people so deeply emotionally involved with their spouses so as to be the be all and end all of their purposes in life, however much the pursuit of romantic happiness has to overcome many hurdles of disparate wealth or personality. The pursuit of happiness, that Eighteenth Century idea, had been limited, in the early Nineteenth Century, to the pursuit of romance. How did this happen to a person remarkably circumspect about the traditions of society and who embodied a Conservative political philosophy which led her to believe that people, like as not, were better off to marry to people of their own class rather than try to cross over as spouses with people of different social backgrounds?
Read MoreEmpiricism in "A Winter's Tale"
Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” starts out with a scene that the audience takes will be a leisurely exposition of who is who. It begins with fulsome praise by a resident king to a visiting one, and then shifts to an even more fulsome praise by the resident queen to the visiting king. And then the audience begins to notice something, or has been prepared to notice it by having prepared for this visit to the theatre by reading the text (something, it need hardly be said, that was not done in Shakespeare’s day, though that would have meant an appreciation of the scene rested solely on its stagecraft). The mutual statements of love become much too fulsome, crossing some kind of line into being inappropriate. The Queen’s husband no longer likes what he hears and you see him and hear him in a few lines deliberating about what is going on and coming to the conclusion that his wife has indulged in adultery with his best friend. He turns on her and denounces her and that is what sets the play in motion: a set of suspicions that are turned into a conviction and which he then proceeds to act upon, making plans to murder the erstwhile cuckold maker. A lot has been compressed into that scene and it sets an audience reeling, wanting to know how things will further escalate and unravel, and there are enough surprises ahead, enough plot twists, to satisfy anyone’s sense that good plays often are continually turning the tables.
Read MoreShakespeare's Greatest Melodramas
The great works of Shakespeare from “Julius Caesar” to “Antony and Cleopatra” (with the obvious exception of “Twelfth Night”) have been largely understood as tragedies, either of what Auden would call the Christian variety, in which case we understand the central characters as suffering from a fatal flaw which dooms those around them as well as themselves, or as tragedies of the Classic variety, in which case we understand the central characters as caught up in existential situations beyond their control, those including the warp and woof of nature, social relations, and the emotions of jealousy and ambition to which all people are subject, not just the tainted few. That construction of the plays is certainly true enough and, following Aristotle, in both cases people are shown as pushed beyond endurance so that they emerge scourged of pity and terror, justly having become aware of their own human, social and metaphysical limitations, the audience morally improved for having observed and grasped and engaged in these lives.
There is another way to look at this set of great works. Rather than looking at the plays as tragedies, these plays can be considered melodramas. That term need not be treated as a designation of something less than a tragedy, a tragedy manqué, in which the playwright has either not fully developed the tragic nature of his characters or where the playwright settled for placing characters in social situations where they go on too long about what are, after all, the relatively trivial travails of life, and generally exhibit their less than noble characters. The distinction between melodrama and tragedy is not so easily drawn. Lear goes on rather long windedly and his problems are indeed the social problems that are created by an old man coming to live with his relatives. Why does he have to keep all those knights with him in his daughter’s castle? He just has the pathetic conceptions of past grandeur that may descend on any old person. That is no reason to go off to the heath and bemoan his fate. Get a grip on yourself and get thee off to a nursing home.
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