I gave a lot of thought to the writers who wrote the plays we dealt with this week. Each and every one of them represents a stage of refined psychology; each and every one of them mixes history with the supernatural, but one more issue I want to raise is the question of suicide. In the Greek trilogy of Oedipus, people commit suicide because they cannot live in shame or without their loved ones. Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and even Hamlet all pose questions about suicide: Macbeth, when given the option to live a life of shame, throws himself into a battle he cannot win; Hamlet, in a very existentialistic speech, decides against suicide, because he says that death is much scarier than life, because it is unknown; Joe Keller’s and Willy Loman’s suicides mock the life they lived, or, to be more exact, show that for some time they have been living a lie. Both of them die after they have failed morally and financially, but while Joe Keller understands that, Loman dies still delusional.
When I was dealing with the issue of characters a couple of weeks back, I asked in the characters’ ID how would your character die, and I guess that a good death is something each character should hope for, I guess only now can I figure out why, because a suicide mostly occurs when the world becomes unbearable, our way of life seem to end and death is more tempting than life. in act I Scene IV of Macbeth, when Malcolm reports to the King about Cawdor death, he says:
Nothing in his life Became him like the leaving it. He died as one that had been studied in his death, to throw away the dearest thing he owed as ’twere a careless trifle (ll. 2 – 11)
This week we shall deal with those who throw away their most prized possession, as Characters, Personas or in real life, and we shall ask what makes death by suicide so appealing to some, what is the breaking point in which one stops believing that tomorrow will be another, brighter day, and what we can learn from it.
Weekend – To be or not to be
The sound and the fury
There is a strong link between Sophocles and Shakespeare. In the Hebrew version of Wikipedia the theme of Sophocles’ plays is described as follows:
In Sophocles’ plays, the plot revolves around a hero, who due to unusual circumstances, which are to some extent born of the hero’s character, doom his fate. The plot is tangled and is characterized by a lot of activity and tension. The hero, who is the main motif in the play, belongs to the higher classes and his destructive element seals his fate. Sophocles is using a lot of secondary characters; he does not believe in fate (unlike the Greeks of his day) but in free choice, and one can understand that without the hero’s tragic flaw the tragedy wouldn’t have occured.
I guess one can see this paragraph as the basis for the Shakespearian play. I’m not saying that the writers are identical – the times are different, and when I think of the Shakespearian play, which is filled with humor, arspoetica, thoughts of the human condition and cruelty and madness, I like to think that the Shakespearian play is much more open to a wider variety of human behavior. Where are the mad people in the Greek tragedy? Its different perspective of the supernatural – like in Macbeth – is special because that play is based on historical facts. From what I’ve read it is undetermined which of the supernatural parts in Macbeth belongs to Shakespeare. The refined psychology of the Shakespearian play is in my eyes an important stage in looking at the human character without masks.
What can we learn from the Shakespearian tragedy as a lesson for today?
Shakespeare is not afraid to write about real people even if they are seen as larger than life. Haven’t we all seen a child who is having a hard time accepting his stepfather? Don’t tragedies like King Lear happen every day? Still in his wisdom Shakespeare managed to show us in Macbeth how acting is life, and life is acting. Just before Macbeth is headed to his final battle, he says:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing. (V,v, ll. 24-28)
As you all know these lines have inspired a Nobel Prize winner, William Faulkner, to write his own tragedy. What inspires your writing?