Shakespeare on the nature of life
Preliminary questions
Can we compare life to a dream? If not, what are the differences between the world created in our dreams, and the “real” world?
In English we have a famous children's nursery rhyme, which goes:
“Row row your boat,
Gently down the stream,
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a dream.”
Why do you think this nursery rhyme has remained so popular? What does it say about life, and how we should live it?
What are the characteristics of our dreams? Give examples.
Have you ever had the experience of a lucid dream? How did it make you feel?
Do we know why we dream? What are the most popular theories about this?
Look at the following passage from Freud's classic The Interpretation of Dreams:
“In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state. Further, I shall endeavour to elucidate the processes which underlie the strangeness and obscurity of dreams, and to deduce from these processes the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or co-operation is responsible for our dreams. This done, my investigation will terminate, as it will have reached the point where the problem of the dream merges into more comprehensive problems, and to solve these, we must have recourse to material of a different kind….
Let us compare and contrast the manifest and the latent
dream-content. It is true that there are dreams the manifest content of which is of the most painful nature. But has anyone ever tried to interpret these dreams -- to discover their latent thought-content? If not, the two objections to our doctrine are no longer valid; for there is always the possibility that even our painful and terrifying dreams may, upon interpretation, prove to be wish-fulfilments.”
What language does he use to describe dreams? Do you agree with him?
6. There is a famous play by Pirandello called Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which the actors in a play are lost as they don't have an author to write their lives for them. The implication is that our lives are simply a work of literature written by someone else. It is a branch of literature known as metafiction which draws attention to “the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text.” (Patricia Waugh) How would you feel if you knew that you were merely a character in a book? Or a play or film? What does it say about our lives that it is a work of fiction? Or a work of art?
William Shakespeare: Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
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.
The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1
You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Textual Questions
Here we have two of Shakespeare's most famous definitions of the nature of life. Are there any similarities between the two? What is life specifically compared to in the first extract, and in the second? What language is used in each passage? What is the tone in each passage?
Could an argument be made that actually both these texts are talking not about life, but about death? What is the connection between the two here? How is death described in the first passage, compared to the second?
What is the significance of the idea that life is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? What is Shakespeare trying to say here, and do you agree with him? Compare it to Freud's description of dreams. What theme are they both discussing, using the same key word?
Given what we discussed about the nature of dreams, do you agree with Shakespeare's assertion that we are only “such stuff as dreams are made on”?
Gregory Bateson was one who disagreed with this idea. As he put it: “My own slight experience of LSD led me to believe that Prospero was wrong when he said “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” It seemed to me that pure dream was, like pure purpose, rather trivial. It was not the stuff of which we are made, but only bits and pieces of that stuff. Our conscious purposes, similarly, are only bits and pieces.” (Steps to an Ecology of Mind) What do you think he means about conscious purpose? Why does he believe that it only makes up a part of our lives? Do you agree with him?
The comedian Bill Hicks also describes his experiences on LSD in the following anecdote:
“How about a positive LSD story for once? Wouldn't that be newsworthy, just once, to have your opinion shaped by information rather than scare tactics and superstitions and lies? “Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.”
Is this acid experience similar in tone to either of the passages in Shakespeare? Why do you think that the world of dreams and the world of drugs are often closely related? Do you think Shakespeare was on drugs when he wrote his plays?
Another famous section from Shakespeare is the following:
“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
How does this relate to the lines in Macbeth? And the idea in Pirandello's play? What does he mean when he says that we all have our exits and entrances? Does each of us “play many parts” in our lives? What exactly does he mean by this?
In these lines from The Tempest Shakespeare created an idiom that is now used in everyday language. Do you know what it is?
There is a metafictional device used in the lines from The Tempest to indicate to the audience that they are at the theatre watching a play. Can you spot what it is? Does it break the illusion of the theatre when we are made aware that the play is just a play? Or do we indulge in what Coleridge described as a “willing suspension of disbelief” when we read a book, or watch a play or film? Do you, for example, agree with the following passage, in which a writer reminds his readers that everything in the novel is just make-believe:
“I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and “voice” of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does… I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I would have you share my own sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind, any more than you control—however hard you try, however much of a latterday Mrs. Poulteney you may be—your children, colleagues, friends, or even yourself.”
Do you agree with him that we don't have control over our own lives? Or other peoples? In literature we use the same word to describe the narrator of a novel as we do to describe God: omniscient. What is the significance of comparing the novelist to God?
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