A Little Catching Up

It has been a while since I has posted anything so mostly out of guilt more than having anything particular to say about King Lear, I will take a few moments to make a few remarks.

Firstly, regarding my final paper:
Admittedly, and most Shakespeare scholars might call this sacrilege, I find myself more attracted to the sonnets than to the plays.  As such, I am going to try to gear my final paper towards the sonnets; more specifically, I want to look at the rhetoric of the sonnets, mostly from an  Aristotelian view of logic with perhaps a few more contemporary sources.  Then, hopefully I will be able to take Hugh's essay, and perhaps Turner's (though this one doesn't immediately come to mind with regards to language) and make some comments/connections with regards to the sonnets, rhetoric, and language.

Preliminary commentary on Lear:
"Nothing comes of nothing; mend your reply or mar your fortune."  (Maybe not exactly right; but again, working from memory)
I can't help but to jump right into to Turner's "School of Night": "A plague makes nothing matter..."  Cordelia is the the victim of nothing throughout Lear.  Her words seem to constitute "nothing" and everything at the same time.  "Nothing, my Lord."  We literally see nothing escape from her mouth and this is what initiates the conflict of the entire play.  I feel like this is exactly what Turner meant when he talks about nothing being able to balance a Globe on a scale.

This commentary seems superficial, but it is just what is on the top of my head, I'll certainly have to spend some of Easter Weekend reading over some critical thought on the play with regards to language.

Also, another thought that for some reason just came to mind was the setting of the play: England before the Aristocracy.  I just must ask: why this date? why not anywhere else? why not any other time?   

A Spring Break Story

So perhaps this isn't exactly the type of situation into which we were supposed to insert our memorized lines, but I feel like this is a Shakespearean story worth telling:

One of the first days into Spring Break, I was at my parents' house in Three Forks.  My sister (who is a Freshman here at MSU), myself, and my mother were talking about our semesters.  My sister was whining about how in one of her Freshman Seminar classes she had to memorize some lines from Shakespeare (she didn't mention which) and in response, I mention, "Oh, I can do that."  And from there I start to recite (or perform if you prefer) the first lines of Sonnet 116 and no more than three or four lines into it my sister stops me and says, "We get it, you're weird." And then they continued their conversation while ignoring me as I finished the sonnet.

I've got nothing to write about (I've got nothing about which to write)

I figured that since I just finished reading Northrop Frye's Fools of Time, I would take a few minutes in an attempt to engage especially when it comes to the topic of 'nothing.'  Near the end of his book, Frye says, "The word 'nothing' has two meanings: it is a grammatical negative meaning 'not anything,' and it is a positive noun meaning 'something called nothing.'"  When I read this passage, as I'm sure you're you've already assumed, I was drawn back to Frederick Turner's essay "The School of Night" wherein he explains that if a scale is properly constructed (which involves manipulation of the levers and fulcrum) it can balance The Globe and nothing.  This combination, which, as Frye does, can easily be tied back to a passage from Hamlet, "The king is a thing of nothing," but instead, I want to take it in a slightly different, perhaps, if not as analytically valuable, but certainly more creative avenue.  This positive nominal structure seemed, to me, to be exactly the type of thing Hamlet would use when describing his mental state, especially, if Horatio were to ask him in act five.  I imagine that it would take him little time to come to the conclusion that "nothing" was wrong with him, that "nothing" affected his brain.  While I'm no psychologist, I think it would be safe to say that dreams seem to be a physical manifestation of various "nothings" in the brains; they are made from some things so small and so fleeting, that they could be equivocated with nothing, and when those nothings are on one side of the scale, dreams are on the other.  It seems that what ails young Hamlet, at least part of the problem (for there are certainly other aspects at play), is the dreams that his mind has concocted.  He questions whether the ghost of his father is real and he finds himself trying to put on a mask of insanity (though whether the mask is necessary is debatable).  These dreams, the illusions, or delusions seem to get Hamlet's ball rolling down the hill of madness.  I also can't help but reach back to A Midsummer Night's Dream when Thesius says: "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, far more than pure reason could ever comprehend." (Maybe slightly misquoted, but I'm working from memory here so give me a break.)  I believe that it can be argued that we see Hamlet as both a lover and a madman, but what happens when his madness interferes with his love life?  How seething is his brain now that he had driven his lover to suicide?  What drives the brains of lovers and madmen?  If you asked Hamlet, I think he would say with confidence: "Nothing."

A Note on Procrastination

As the title says, I am going to take this time to expound my thoughts, as well as some others', on procrastination.  First off, I know the deal was that we are supposed to provide a blog entry for every class period.  I haven't been avoiding that purposely, but I find that I will submit considerably more 'engaged' blogs is I postpone writing anything until the end of the week and then composing all my thoughts into coherent entries in which I can fully explain my thoughts instead of posting a handful of half-baked ramblings.
Secondly, I would like to harken back to our class discussion on "Hamlet and Procrastination."  In ending the discussion, it seemed that we ended on the conclusion that Hamlet procrastinates in order to allow for a space for the drama of the play to take place.  At the time, I didn't find too much of a problem with this conclusion because, frankly, I didn't have a better alternative.  But upon further rumination and research I came to see that if this were truly the case, Shakespeare, being as clever as he was, would have written the play in such a way to allow Hamlet the time he needed to be able to be as dramatic as was necessary.  So now, in lieu of this "Procrastination for Dramatic Space" theory, I would like to proffer another theory that I came across while reading  through Hamlet's Enemy, the book Dr. Sexson was nice enough to loan me.  Though I don't particularly care for psychoanalysis, particularly Freudian Psychoanalysis,  I couldn't help but find an important example of reason why Hamlet finds himself procrastinating within the play.  The Freud-Jones Interpretation of Hamlet's situation sheds an alternative light (although, I must admit, it is a shady-psychological light) on Hamlet's dilemma which ultimately leads to his procrastination.  I must take a second here to warn against potential pronoun confusion in the following explanation.  This play and this explanation create for difficult explanation.  The Freud-Jones Interpretation basically has its roots in Freud's Oedipal Complex.  The Oedipus complex, as I'm sure you all know, states that within every male child/adolescent there is an instinctual desire to kill one's father and therefore, with the father being out of the way, marry the mother.  This being the case, especially Hamlet's case, he finds that he has identifies with Claudius.  Instead of being able to quickly take the orders from his father's ghost and to take revenge upon his uncle, he finds himself at a moral crossroads seeing as Claudius has only done what Hamlet himself had wanted to do.  This more complication is further exacerbated by the fact Hamlet's father commands him not to take revenge on his mother.  Hamlet Sr. tells his son that his mother should be left to be judged by heaven.  This frustrates the son because his largest cause for upset is not directed towards his uncle as is most likely to be expected but instead towards his mother.  This is another component of Freud's theory.  After the father's death, the mother's attentions should be directed to the son, and the son should become the sole focus of these affections.  However, the mother overlooks the son and directs all of her attentions towards his uncle.  So because the son identifies with the uncle and resents his mother, he would prefer to take revenge upon the mother, but being directly advised against such action Hamlet finds himself morally frustrated and forced to postpone any immediate action against anyone; hence the procrastination as well as a large component of the conflict of the play.

Perhaps this seems as shady to you as it did to me.  Either way, it offers something new.

Also, one last note about the sonnet.  Below is a version of the point I am at with my sonnet.  It is not complete.  Some of the technical points need modified for it to conform to the specs of a proper sonnet, but here it is:

A field of daisies dance in the wind,
They bow and twist and writhe;
And as I wander slowly by,
I turn and one catches my eye.
It does not stand above the rest
But caught my eye by happenstance;
And all the closer I inspect,
The purest beauty she does reflect.
She smiles up at the sun
and my heart catches fire;
Every petal glistens with fresh dew,
At each one, I fall in love anew.
     My heart has been stolen like never before;
     I can look at another, never more.