Asrat Junita

LITERARY CRITICISM

“Ritual Aspect in Shakespeare’s Dramas is Related to

European Civilization”

Compiled By:

Name : Asrat Junita

NPM :136224023

ENGLISH OF LETTERS

FACULTY OF LITERATURE

UNIVERSITY OF MUSLIM NUSANTARA AL WASHLIYAH

NORTH SUMATERA

MEDAN

ACADEMIC YEAR 2014

RITUAL ASPECT IN SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMAS

Considered by most literary critics as England's greatest poet and playwright, after doing various odd jobs and some acting, he began adapting and altering existing plays and eventually moved onto producing original work. In all he wrote thirty-seven plays ranging in subject matter from the death of Julius Caesar to light-hearted comedies set in imaginary circumstances. The plays fall into three groups; Historical, Tragedies and Comedies.

Hamlet, the prince of Denmark whose father, the king, has been murdered by Hamlet's uncle who takes over the throne. Hamlet finds out about it and vows to revenge his father's death. However, he is unable to make the decision to actually kill his uncle and keeps delaying it until numerous tragedies occur. Only when Hamlet himself is dying is he able to finally do what he first intended. The next two extracts are to show Hamlet's troubled frame of mind. In the first (which is a soliloquy) he contemplates suicide as a means of resolving his dilemma. The second shows Hamlet talking to his one trusted friend, Horatio, and contrasts his own personality with that of his friend.

Four of Shakespeare‘s plays deal with non-white characters: Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, while in The Merchant of Venice we have non-Christian characters. Aaron and Othello are North-African Moors, Cleopatra is Egyptian – though her belonging to the African race is only superficially hinted at; Caliban‘s race is not very well defined, readers understanding him as a savage from the recently lending Jew of Venice.

This provides much thrills for readers of fiction, as well as theatre audiences. William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a good example of this human trait. Brutus achieves his aim of killing Julius Caesar through betrayal, while Mark Anthony gets the support of the masses through a speech marked by deceptive turns.

SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMAS IS RELATED TO EUROPEAN

William Shakespeare literary training and artistic materials came from a common European culture shared by most artists and thinkers of his time. The subject matter of his plays derived from the recent or legendary past of diverse European countries, the shared folktales, romantic stories and chivalric narratives with which his contemporaries were acquainted, as well as the mythological lore and the history of Classical antiquity written and rewritten by Greek or Roman authors. His literary craft was not just native English or British, but was above all filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that deserves to be recognized as essentially

European.

The afterlife of Shakespeare’s works was an intrinsically shared European affair at first, and it would be wrong to continue to read the earliest reception of the plays and poems in Europe as a collection of isolated narratives about how individual countries became acquainted with Shakespeare. The history of the way in which “Shakespeare” spread across Europe brings together the energies of all national European cultures across the centuries. This applies to the strolling player circuit which accounted for the earliest dissemination of Shakespeare across northern Europe, where his plays were performed in English both at foreign market places and at the continent’s imperial courts.

We close this discussion of why and how it was that Shakespeare wrote so many of his plays that he set not only in England or Scotland alone but a majority in Italy and many other European counties.

One obvious reason for Shakespeare choosing locations for his plays in continental Europe rather than in Britain is that such plays that insulted, denigrated, traduced and ridiculed important English people, and who were in positions of power in England, having high status and influence, would likely be rejected and refused a permit to be shown on the stage immediately by the Monarch's Lord Chamberlain, and its author warned against criticism and ridiculing such important English people.

CIVILIZATION 

It was in the nineteenth century, which we now call the heyday of European imperialism, when historians shifted their focus from historiography to philosophy of history. Under the legacy of Kantian transcendentalism and  Hegelian dialectics, which saw spirituality and teleology as the essential mechanisms of human civilization, nineteenth-century European historians conceived history to be a linear process of progression and evolution. Such proclivity toward totalizing abstraction, in conjunction with the dominant ideology of colonialism and imperialism, inevitably entailed the metamorphosis of European history and culture into History and Culture, producing a plethora of metahistorical narratives with overarching designs and self-sufficient rules. It was during this emergence of a Eurocentric historicism that the Renaissance was brought to the fore of historical hermeneutics viewed as an age of departure from 'the Dark Ages,' and as a center of reference in the progress of European civilization, wherein the Renaissance signified the liberation of humanity from the tyranny of Christian monotheism and the unprecedented expansion of intellectual and cultural horizons. Just as Greco-Roman antiquity had been for Renaissance Europeans an object of nostalgic reminiscence bearing images of the golden age, so the Renaissance for nineteenth-century Europeans stood for what Jacob Burckhardt has called "the discovery of the world and of man" or "the revival of antiquity".

SOURCES

  

A.   RITUAL ASPECT and SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMAS :

1.      English Language Literature - LETRAS - Prof. Daniel Derrel Santee - UFMS 2010

2.      REFLECTION ON DRAMA AND THEATRE BY PROF. OSSIE O. ENEKWE

3.      Shakespeare, William. Julius Caesar. Ed. H.M. Hulme. Harlow Essex:Longman, 1959.

4.      Shakespeare's "Shrieking Harbinger" by Clifford Darrow Stetner

5.      Cambridge University Press

6.      Edward B. Koster, William Shakespeare 1616–1916 (The Hague: G.A.Kottmann, 1916).

7.       Dr. Erin Sullivan, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham.

8.      European Academic Research.

9.      Shakespeare Quarterly

10.  Shakespeare and the Drama of His Time, and: Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century.

B.   EUROPEAN :

1.  Dennis Kennedy, “Shakespeare and the Cold War”, in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe.

2.  Wells (Newark, NJ: Delaware University Press, 2003), 163–79.

3.  For additional discoveries, see Manfred Pfister’s contributions to Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Vienna: Braumüller, 2004).

4.  (http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1410461/)

5.    For a chastening historical account of Europe’s self-proclaimed ideals and their myth-like status, in Myths of Europe, (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007).

C.   CIVILIZATION :

1.      Sanders, N. editor. Othello. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003.

2.      Spencer, T. J. B. "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans." Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957): 27-38.

3.      Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

4.      Scammell, G. V. The First Imperial Age: European Overseas Expansion 1400-1715. London: Harper Collins Academic, 1989.

5.      Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. San Diego: Academic Press, 1974.