![]() ![]() They would have touched his audience far more deeply than they touch us today. We, who have moved so far from Shakespeare's world, need to be reminded of these things. But the patterns of moral responsibility are necessary to give the action its perspective, and it is these patterns of the destructive as well as the creative force of love and the dependence of fate upon the passionate will which most contemporary criticism neglects or denies. ![]() ![]() The pattern of the action, given shape by Friar Laurence's warnings, Mercutio's satiric ebullience, and the Prince's scattered judgments, revolves around two of the most attractive young lovers in all literature. To prove his point Burton quotes, alongside lines of Ovid and Virgil, the concluding couplet:ĭoes this mean that Burton and the spectators in his day, or that Shakespeare himself, looked upon the play as an edifying lesson in how not to conduct oneself in love? I hardly think so. If this passion continue . . . it makes the blood hot, thick, and black and if the inflammation get into the brain, with continual meditation and waking, it so dries it up, that madness follows, or else they make away themselves. From love, writes Burton ,Ĭomes Repentance, Dotage, they lose themselves, their wits, and make shipwrack of their fortunes altogether: madness, to make away themselves and others, violent death.ĭoting love does not, to use Dowden's phrase, "exalt and quicken the inner life." On the contrary The word of one contemporary playgoer, at least, has survived to assure us that the theme of the play is not amor vincit omnia but that "Death is the common Catastrophe" of those who love unwisely. A new Bodleian exhibition, curated by Dr Kathryn Murphy, Associate Professor in the English Faculty, and a team. His final words on Romeo and Juliet are as follows: Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621, is a compendious and labyrinthine study of this universal condition, which attempts to metabolise all relevant ancient and Renaissance scholarship on behalf of the reader. Dickey also argues that Shakespeare's audience would have understood that the love of Romeo and Juliet was excessive and therefore dangerous. Regarding Romeo and Juliet, Dickey argues that it would seem natural to an Elizabethan audience to see Romeo's unrequited passion for Rosaline treated in a comic way, because that was the way such passion was usually presented in the drama of Shakespeare's time. Thesis: The general thesis of the book is that a correct understanding of Shakespeare's love tragedies - Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, and Antony and Cleopatra - requires an understanding of Elizabethan thought about love. After a 100+ page introduction in which Burton gives an overview of melancholy and his approach to it, the first Partition covers the causes and symptoms of melancholy, the second details the cures of melancholy, and the third explores a particular branch of it, love melancholy, followed by a section on religious melancholy. San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1957. Not Wisely But Too Well: Shakespeare's Love Tragedies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |