The Drama of the Portrait Book

*** Notes as of Jan 2014 **
Approaching Shakespeare's work is a dangerous work. Even a cursory dip often confounds my implicit trust in a universal order or basic moral framework. To watch Othello is to feel the fragility of nobility and intelligence turns into a murderous act in the name of honor and honesty; to watch Lear is to question the parental demands for filial demonstration of love; and to watch Macbeth is to remember the resemblance of ambitious men and women puffed up by ego and enabled by spousal allegiance. Without a guide to approach this massive body of work is to be left either with unintelligible confusion or swallow a particular interpretation or adaption as the original intended work.

Shakespeare is unscalable, un-reducible, refused to be tamed by neat closures and rounded personalities. There are too many dark spots in the good people while too many shiny wit in the bad ones. We are charmed by Iago's one-liners more than Othello's straight talking. Macbeth has the best summary of human life when he is at his peak of ossified evil-doing. Shylock's anger rings louder than Portia's righteous ruling. What is the order of the world? What is justice? How to understand human nature, marbled both in civilized virtue and intelligent vices? Most importantly, how and where we are to look for such knowledge?

I need guides to take in even small doses of this jumble of work. Centered in this book, is the discussion of knowledge and skepticism applying to self, minds of others, causality, and universal order. Six plays are used as case studies: A midsummer night's dream, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, and Tempest. Four are unqualified bleakest tragedies, while the two comedies laden with much stings and venoms.

At the acme of these plays lies the a non-teleological view of causation. This means that there is no cosmic justice to explaining catastrophes or events. One damned thing after another. Rationality resides only in human minds in a limited degree, while nature has no rationality except for basic biological and mechanical principles. Why bad things happened to good people? Well, there is no "why", just "did". The implication of this lack of cosmic moral order is profoundly disturbing for conventional thoughts in the spiritual realm. Deaths of Orphelia, Desdemona, innocent bystanders, or not-that-deserving minor villains have made such points painfully evident.

The next issue is the myth of a constant "self" independent of situations. In a flash, Hamlet morphed from an intelligent thinker to a rash killer in Gertrude's closet, while Titania falls in love to the ass-eared Nick Bottom. Most alarmingly and convincingly, we watch Macbeth from a hesitant and much goaded killer calcifying into a mass-murdering tyrant, while Othello spiraling down from a noble and intelligent general to a raging wife-killer.

Last, how much we can know others? Psychology talks about "theory of mind", common coding theory, linguistic and gestural signaling to communicate our thoughts. Yet even with soliloquies and professed speeches, we don't really know self and others. In the hands of deft manipulators such as Iago and Prospero, languages can drop hints leading a susceptible mind to deadly deeds, or creating storms and chaos. The opacity of our mind can not be overcome by words and actions; "common coding theory" does not encompass the willful self-delusions where good appears to be bad (desperately good Desdemona) and bad appears to be good (wit and adept Iago). The author suggest that the most serviceable way to think is that there is no single "self". There is no unified self that is immutable to all situations. Instead, we act and perform, often entirely sincerely, for the situation.

Shakespeare left us in the world of "negative capacity". A world without the comforts of having a unified self, having capacity for knowledge acquistion, and justice for bad deeds. I learned that the word to describe is "aporia".

A few memorable quotes from various plays:

Macbeth ' wooden even with the news of Lady Macbeth's suicide, simply stated the most bleak and nihilistic view of human life:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

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.

It is hard to be optimistic and confident after any of these tragedies. We are left with much less assurance of who we are, how to believe others, and deduce the works of cause and effect. Yet Shakespeare continues to fascinate me through different interpretations and adaptions, observed with a changing self, providing much markings for positive and negative capacity. I shall return to this book again in a year or so to revisit my thinking.

(Notes about what is a tragedy:
Such tragedies are not caused by accidents (like a bridge broken by wind), but by the mismatch of the full-fledged character with the riped situation. Without Iago and his perfected skill in malicious villainy, Othello's core of jealousy still exist with full potentiality. The author argues for the mismatch of character/situation as the root of such tragedies instead of just "a flaw in character" as classic theater theories proposed. Also, there are two character/situation mismatches: affective and cognitive, where Hamlet uniquely display the former mismatch. He knows what need to be done but he can't seem to psyche hims up to do it. Othello and Lear are both fooled so there is the cognitive aspect. )