Aspen Lafever
English 2030-08
Dr. Dugger
29 November 2016
The Enduring Themes Throughout Shakespeare’s Varying Works
Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor, and he is often
called the English national poet and the greatest writer in the English language and is also considered by many to be the the greatest dramatist of all time. He is known for many different works and depending on those works, many different themes, but he has three main reoccurring themes throughout these works. The first is tragedy, which is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying relief or pleasure in audiences. The second is comedy, a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing conflict. The third is history, the study of the past and particularly how it relates to humans. They are all considered equally important by him and some can even be found in multiple works.
Some examples of tragic Shakespeare plays are King Lear, Othello, and
Macbeth. King Lear, the title character of Shakespeare’s play is depicted as he falls into madness, after he disposes of his kingdom by bequesting it to two of his daughters based on their flattery of him, and it brings tragic consequences for everyone, and is derived from the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological pre-Roman Celtic king. The tragedy is described well by author William Ferguson Tamblyn when he said “Shakespeare does not suggest that “all’s love”; rather Fate, the fiat of Providence, mystery, “ripeness, is all”. But that Love is eternal, an is eternal, and dominant, generally at least, in the “wind of the world’s fate”, is a thought that looms in his tragedy. To his thinking Love has constantly to overcome evil with good. Light and dark powers together weave human character “of chance and strife”, but life is Love’s language, as life is always casting out devils like Goneril and Edmund, and giving homage to angels of loyalty like Cordelia.” (Tamblyn, 63). Othello is about the story of an important Moorish general in the Venetian army named Othello. He has a beloved wife, Desdemona, a loyal lieutenant, Cassio, and, unfortunately, an ensign named Iago who is ultimately untrustworthy and conniving that ruins his life and marriage by any means possible because he’s jealous of Cassio’s position. Given its enduring topics of love, betrayal, revenge and repentance, I see this as one of the most tragic plays that he has written. Macbeth tells a story about a Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a three witches that he will become the King of Scotland. He’s completely consumed with how much he wants it and his wife encourages him, so Macbeth kills King Duncan and takes the throne, but then he feels guilty and paranoid, and becomes a dictatorial ruler and kills many more people to cover up his lies. A civil war breaks out that makes both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth madness, leading to death. Macbeth is seen as an extremely egotistical, but isolated character, especially by literary critic Arthur Kirsch. In his paper, Macbeth’s Suicide, he speaks about it, saying “Macbeth is the most self-centered of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, and not coincidentally, it seems to me, the one with the least amplitude of spirit. All of Shakespeare’s great tragic figures are isolated in a universe essentially of their own imagination and thought, but in none of them is such isolation so inordinate and destructive an expression of egoism as it is in Macbeth.” (Kirsch, 269).
Shakespeare’s comical side is shown well in plays like A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and As You Like It. He uses comic interludes often and his comedies have, in most cases, a seriousness, and sometimes a background with a tragic outlook. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons. These events include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a mix of six amateur actors (the mechanicals), who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest where the play is set. All of the characters fall comically in and out of love in a very short period of time: a single, enchanted midsummer night. When the young lovers, some have been drugged by Oberon’s magic love potion, chasing each other around the wood, falling in and out of love at the drop of some magic love juice. Shakespeare is making fun of how foolish we can all be when it comes to romance. Much Ado About Nothing is about two couples: Benedick and Beatrice and Claudio and Hero. By pretty much just gossiping and rumors Benedick and Beatrice are tricked into confessing their love for each other, and Claudio is tricked into rejecting Hero at the altar on the belief that she has been unfaithful. At the end, Benedick and Beatrice join forces to set things right, and the others join in a dance celebrating the marriages of the two couples. It combines components of rougher humor with some serious thoughts on honor, shame, and court politics and that’s what makes it one of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies. As You Like It is described by Folger’s Shakespeare Library as having “witty words and romance play out against the disputes of divided pairs of brothers.” As You Like It is about a girl who runs away from her very bad uncle. She ends up in the Forest of Arden, where she goes around disguised as a saucy young boy, and bumps into her crush. She convinces him to participate in a fake courtship that ends in marriage. I feel that the comedy is seen in it featuring a cross-dressing heroine who is gutsy and loud and challenges traditional ideas about comedy from masculine stereotypes.
Finally Shakespeare shows a more realistic side with a historical theme that
includes Richard III. His histories helped to define what the genre of history plays is. The histories are pretty much all English history plays, and include King John and Henry VIII and a sequence of eight plays over the Wars of the Roses. The Wars of the Roses have ended and Richard of Gloucester is determined to take the throne from his brother, Edward IV. He turns Edward against the Duke of Clarence, who’s imprisoned on treason. Then he wins the hand of Lady Anne, even though she is following the hearse of the body of Henry VI. He then convinces Hastings and Buckingham that the queen and her people are at fault for Clarence’s imprisonment and he has Clarence murdered. King Edward dies and he slanders his name saying that Edward is illegitimate and therefore can’t be king so they offer the throne to Richard who accepts it while feigning reluctancy. He gets in a war with Richmond and many other nobles and those two armies meet at Bosworth Field. That night Richard is visited by ghosts of his victims and they tell him he will be defeated. On the other hand, Richmond has fairboding dreams and is assured that God and angels are ready to assist him. Richard ends up fighting courageously but is killed by Richmond who then accepts the crown and gets married to Elizabeth of York and solves much of the conflict between the people. Susan Leas speaks to why I would pick this in her article Richard III, Shakespeare, and History by writing “Shakespeare’s Richard III has always been popular as a classic portrayal of villainy. Since Richard III is probably the best known of Shakespeare’s English history plays and is also one of his earliest successes, it is a natural choice for inclusion in a Shakespeare course.” (Leas, 1214).
Shakespeare’s main themes of tragedy, comedy, and history used throughout
most of his works cover a large spectrum of work over his career. They are diverse in that tragedy is much sadder and dramatic, while comedy is an amusing conflict, and history is the study of the events of the past, but Shakespeare writes them in a dramatic and interesting way.
Work Cited
Kirsch, Arthur. “Macbeth’s Suicideâ€. ELH 51.2 (1984): 269–296. Web.
Leas, Susan E.. “”Richard III”, Shakespeare, and Historyâ€. The English Journal
60.9 (1971): 1214–1296. Web.
Tamblyn, William Ferguson. “Tragedy in “King Lear”â€. The Sewanee Review 30.1
(1922): 63–77. Web.