Literature I Teacher: Ana Iriarte REASONS FOR STUDING SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeares ability to summarize the range
of human emotions in simple yet profoundly eloquent verse. We use his quotations. He wrote great stories and poems. He is one of the greatest writers and nowadays his texts have a huge impact in our lives. Shakespeare invented his share of stock characters, but his truly great characters particularly his tragic heroes are unequalled in literature. INTRODUCTION Our object will be called dramatic apresiation to increase our understanding and enjoyement of shakespeare works. THE SUSTANCE OF SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY Shakepeare in writing tragedies represented a certain aspect of life in a certain way. The hero is the prominent character, so the tragic story is concerned primarly with the death of this person and secondly with the troubled part of his life. The suffery and calamity are exeptional. They are essential ingredients as a rule unexpected and contrasted with previous happiness or glory. They affect the hero. The tragic emotions the written texts show us are:
PITTY: the propotions of this ingredient vary
greatly. HUMAN SYMPATHY: it is related with the emotion of pitty. FEAR: this ingredient will not diminish but will be modified accordingly. Shakespeare was always concerned with people of high degree like princes, kings, leaders, or members of great houses whose querrels are of public moment. The fate of them affect a hole nation or empire, and when they fall from the greatness to the dust, it produces a sense of contrast between powerlessness and omnipotence, fortune or fate. Also the hero is a person of high degree or of the public importance, but always fail to reach tragic dimensions. The calamities of tragedies do not simply happen, nor are they sent, they proceed mainly from actions of men. We see a number of human beings placed in certain circumstances, and we see, arising from the cooperation of their characters in certain actions. This actions beget others, and those others beget others again, until these series of inter-connected deeds leads by an apparently inevitable sequence to a catastrophy and a we sed the hero is always contributing in some measure to the disaster in which he perishes. The story of action of a shakespearean tragedy has the deeds as the predominant factor and these deeds are actions in the full sense of the word.
We can assume that acts or ommisions
throughly expressive of the doer. So the center of the tragedy may be said with equal truth to lie in action issuing from character, or in carcter issuing in action. The main source of these deeds is character. Character is destiny and there is no doubt that is an exageration. ELEMENTS OR FACTORS THAT ARE TO BE FOUND IN THE ACTION. ABNORMAL CONDITIONS OF MIND: for example insanity, somnambulism, hallucinations. But these conditions are never introduced as the origin of deeds of any dramatic moment. THE SUPERNATURAL: for example ghosts and witches who have supernatural knowledge. This element cannot be explained away as an ilusion in the mind of the characters. It does contribute to the action and is an indispensable part of it. It is always placed in the closest relation with character. CHANCE OR ACCIDENT: it will be any occurence (not supernatural) which enters the dramatic sequence neither from the agency of a character nor from the circumstances. It is an appreciable influence at some point in the action. SORT OF CONFLICTS IN THE TRAGEDY OUTWARD: action is the center of the story. The conflict is concived as lying between two persons or two groups and the hero is the leading figure. We may say that tendences, ideas or principles are the combatants. And at least as much as the conflict between the groups or the two characters, is the conflict within one of them. INNER: it is in the heros sole. For example forces that act in the human spirit, whether good or evil, doubts, desires, scruples that drives the mans soul. Those forces are shown in conflict. As a rule the hero is torn by an inward struggle and here Shakespeare shows his most extraordinary power. CHARACTERISTICS OF TRAGIC HEROES He is the protagonist of the story and is an expetional being. He is of a noble status and is public important. His actions or sufferings are of an unusual kind. He needs to be good but he possesses a human tendency to make errors. Because of his position, his actions usually have far reaching effects. He often has a distorted perception of reality. He is the leading figure and always gets pitty, human symphaty and fear from the audience. Some of them have genius. He tend to have flaw. For example: procastination, delate or non-action. His nature is exeptional. And generally raises him in some respect much above the average level of humanity. The protagonist always acepts his mistakes but he becomes estranged from the world around him. TRAGIC TRAIT One of the tragic trait is that is that some tragedies end in death, destruction or in chaos. The principal characters fail to reach tragic dimensions or seem destined to end tragically. In some circumstances, the heros tragic trait is his greatness nad it is fatal to him. He errs and his errors brings on him ruin. The fatal error is of different kinds and degrees. It involves no concious breach of right or is accompained by a full conviction of right. For example: in Hamlet there is a painful conciousness that dutty is being neglected. In almost all the heroes we observed a marked one- sidedness, a predisposition in some particular direction; a total incapacity of resisting the force which draws in this direction; a fatal tendency to identify the whole being with one interest, object, passion or habit of mind. This is for Shakespeare the fundamental tragic trait. CENTRAL FEELING CONNECTED WITH THE TRAGIC IMPRESSION It is related with the feeling of waste. The pitty and fear which are stirred by the tragic story seem to unite with a profound sense of sadness and mistery and is due to this impression of waste. Also there is the idea of fatality and glance at some of the impressions. The fault is being the sole of suffering. The blindness and helpessness of man would hardly suggest the idea of fate which means that a man is terribly unlucky. The characters contribute to the feeling of fatality and make us think of the action and suffering of the person as somehow arbitrary fixed before hand without regard to their feelings, thoughts and resolutions. THE ULTIMATE POWER IN THE TRAGIC WORLD It is FATE, which implies that these order is a blank neccesity totally regardless alike of a human will and of the difference between good an evil or right or wrong. On the contrary others describe the name of fate as a moral order and its necessity as a moral necessity. It brings into the light those aspects of the tragic fact which the idea of fate throws into the shade. POETIC JUSTICE Tragedy is the exhibition of a reaction. The tragic suffering and death arise from collision, not with a fate but with a moral power. This perception produces a feeling of acquiescence in the catastrophe. And finally this view seems quite able to do justice to those aspects of the tragic fact which give rise to the idea of fate. The moral order acts not capriciously or like a human being, but from the necessity of its nature by general law. In our opinion poetic justice means that prosperity and adversity are distributed in proportion to the merit of the agent. So, each character deserves the punishment or prize accordingly with their attitude in the tragedy which is also related with the moral values. PLACE STRUCTURE AND TIME STRUCTURE The place - structure depends upon no exact location of scenes The action of Hamlet is concentrated at Elsinore The story abounds in journeys Some journeys are treated in a superfluous way . Ex. Horatios journey form Wittenberg The double dramatic purpose is plain Here is a tragedy of inaction; the centre of it is Hamlet, who is physically inactive too The concentration at Elsinore of all that happens enhances the impression of this inactivity, which is enhanced again by the sense coming and going around Hamlet of the busier word without. The PLACE itself acquire a personality, and even develops a sort of sinister power; so that when at last Hamlet does depart from it and we are left with the conscience-sick Gertrude and the guilty King, the mad Ophelia, a Laertes set on his own revenge, we almost seem to feel it. Shakespeare adopts a unity of place He turns TIME to dramatic use also, ignores or remarks its passing, and use clock or calendar as it suits him Ex. The play open the stroke of midnight. The first scene is measure out to dawn and gains importance by that. In the second within a month give past events convincing definition, and tonighttonight a specific imminence to what is to come The conduct of the action changes , and with this the treatment of time Hamlets resolution has pale, his purpose has slackened. He passes hour upon hour pacing the lobbies, reading or lost in thought. So Shakespeare also for a while tacitly ignores the calendar If the fact is explicitly stated that two months separate one scene from the last, that breaks our sense of a continuity helps to sustain illusion, and so hold us attentive. The reason for ignoring time is that Hamlet is ignoring it, and he want to attune the whole action to Hamlets mood. When less the tension of the action, the clock must be restarted, a phrase is made to serve. The use of time has begun again with Hamlet s fresh impulse to action (tomorrow) The time measure is only used to validate the dramatic speed, even as was timelessness to help slow the action down Shakespeare used gaps in time By setting a certain time for an action, the tension automatically increased. Falsifying hint of time give a sense of completeness to the action Shakespeares true concern is with TEMPO, NOT TIME He uses time as an auxiliary Time scheme:
1. Classic: this involve the ignoring than any
plain falsifying of time. The drama is concentrate upon one capital event 2. The normal modern method. It suggested realism in time, appropriate to a scenic theatres realism of place 3. Shakespeares freedom in time: it is the natural product of his stages freedom is space, the sense of time is uncertain WE HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT! YUDIT NADAL DANIELA CATTERINUZZI MACARENA FERNANDEZ JUAREZ ANALIA