LITERARY CRITICISM
Ritual Aspect in
Shakespeare’s Dramas is Related to
European Civilization
Compiled By:
Name : Dini Rizki Lubis
NPM :116224010
EMAIL : dinipane@yahoo.com
FACULTY OF LITERATURE UMN AL-WASHLIYAH
NORTH SUMATERA
MEDAN
SHAKESPEAR’S DRAMAS
An eminent Shakespearean scholar famously remarked that there is no such
thing as Shakespearean Tragedy: there are only Shakespearean tragedies.
Attempts (he added) to find a formula which fits every one of Shakespeare’s
tragedies and distinguishes them collectively from those of other dramatists
invariably meet with little
success.Yet when challenging one such attempt he noted its failure to observe
what he termed ‘an essential part of the [Shakespearean] tragic pattern’;1
which would seem to imply that these plays do have some shared characteristics
peculiar to them. Nevertheless, objections to comprehensive definitions of
‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ are well founded.Such definitions tend to ignore the
uniqueness of each play and the way it has been structured and styled to fit
the partic-ular source-narrative.More generally, they can obscure the fact that
what distinguishes Shakespeare’s tragedies from everyone else’s and prompts us
to consider them together are not so much common denominators but rather the
power of Shakespeare’s language, his insight into character, and his dra-
maturgical inventiveness. 2
Uneasiness with definitions of Shakespearean tragedy is of a kind with the
uneasiness generated by definitions
of tragedy itself; these often give a static impression of the genre and
incline towards prescriptiveness, ignoring the fact that ‘genres are in a
constant state of transmutation’. 3
There is,
how-ever, a simple argument to be made in defence of genre criticism, namely
that full understanding and appreciation of any piece of literature requires
knowledge of its contexts, literary as well as intellectual and
socio-political: in its relation to the author and his work, context informs,
assists, stimu-lates, provokes.Thus knowledge of generic context helps us
recognize not only what authors inherit but also what they invent and
intend.So, too, familiarity with Shakespeare’s tragedies as a whole enhances
understanding of the meanings and the special nature of any one of them. As
practised in Renaissance England and in classical Greece and Rome, tragedy is
an intense exploration of suffering and evil focused on the ex-perience of an
exceptional individual, distinguished by rank or character or both.Typically,
it presents a steep fall from prosperity to misery and untimely death, a great
change occasioned or accompanied by conflict between the tragic character and
some superior power.It might be said, therefore, that conflict and change – the
first intense if not violent, the second extreme –together constitute the
essence of tragedy. In his seminal account of the subject, Aristotle (fourth
century bc) said that the success of a tragedy depends on its capacity to
excite pity and fear, thereby effecting a catharsis of these emotions Twentieth-century
commentators have interpreted this as referring to the contrary responses of
attraction and repulsion: pity draws us sympatheti-cally to the protagonist,
regretting his or her suffering as unjust or dispro-portionate; fear denotes an
attitude to the protagonist of dissociation and judgement and acknowledges the
rightness of what has happened. What Aristotle meant by catharsis has been the
subject of much disagreement, but in contemporary usage the term usually implies
a state of mind in which the powerful and conflicting emotions generated by the
spectacle of great suffering are reconciled and transcended through artistic
representation, so that a condition of exultant but grave understanding
remains. This rephrasing of Aristotle in conflictual terms may be ascribed to
the fact that since the nineteenth century, when the nature of tragedy began to
be studied as never before, the overriding emphasis has been on conflict, and
the concomitant notions of contradiction, ambivalence, and paradox, as the
genre’s major characteristic.It is an emphasis which has been due entirely to
the philosophers G.W.Hegel (1770–1831) and F.Nietzsche (1844–1900). According
to Hegel, the characteristic conflict in tragedy is not between eth-ical right
and wrong but between the personal embodiments of a universal ethical power,
both of whom push their rightful claim to the point where it encroaches on the
other’s right and so becomes wrongful.The (usually violent) resolution of this
conflict restores a condition of natural justice and confirms the existence of
a just and divine world order.4 Nietzsche rejected the idea of such an order,
but he too saw ‘contrariety at the center of the universe’ and tragedy as a
process involving the conflict and reconciliation of opposites: for him, these
opposites are Apollo and Dionysus, the first sym- bolizing reason, control, and
art, the second, passionate destructive energy, orgiastic abandon, and the
self-renewing force of life itself. 5 Both thinkers were inspired by the
pre-Socratic philosophers (sixth to fifth centuries bc) who held that the
natural world is a system of ‘concordant discord’ ani- mated by sympathetic and
antipathetic forces personified as Love and Strife (War). 6 Despite substantial
differences between their theories of tragedy, both Hegel and Nietzsche were
prompted by their attraction to pre-Socratic cosmology to locate tragic events
in a natural dialectic of destruction and renewal, and so to emphasize an
ultimately positive dimension to tragedy. Perhaps, however, because they were
so obsessed with Greek tragedy and Greek culture generally, both philosophers
failed to discover that the essen- tially paradoxical view of nature fathered
by the pre-Socratics was embedded in all Shakespeare’s tragedies and was
central to the intellectual inheritance of his contemporaries. A.C.Bradley
(1851–1935) rightly criticized Hegel for underestimating theaction of moral
evil and the final sense of waste evident in most tragedies; 7 but he concurred
with him by making conflict a major theme in his own hugely in-fluential
account of Shakespearean tragedy.He contended, however, that the distinguishing
feature of Shakespearean tragedy is not conflict between the tragic hero and
someone else, or even between contending groups, but rather conflict within the
hero, who is a man divided against himself.Bradley also adapted Hegel’s dualist
metaphysics, arguing that Shakespearean tragedy demonstrates the existence of
an ultimate power which reacts violently against evil but in the process
contradictorily and mysteriously destroys much that is good as well.8 In later
versions of the conflict theory, tragedy (both Shakespearean and
non-Shakespearean) has been identified as a genre which projects mutually
incompatible world views or value systems; 9 and then again as one which
ex-poses ‘the eternal contradiction between man’s weakness and his courage, his
stupidity and his magnificence, his frailty and his strength’.10 Shakespeare’s
tragedies have been seen as characterized by a disturbing conjunction of the
lofty and the comic–grotesque, something which emphasizes the coexis- tence in
the hero of nobility and pettiness and reinforces a largely pessimistic view of
the way in which nature produces and destroys greatness.11The tragedies of both
Shakespeare and his contemporaries have also been read in the light of Marx’s
materialist Hegelianism as embodying the contradictions and incipient collapse
of feudalism and heralding the bourgeois revolution of the seventeenth century.
12 The models of tragedy which influenced Shakespeare and
his contemporaries were not Greek (the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides) but Roman and late-medieval: that is, the sensational and highly
rhetorical plays of Seneca (apparently written for recitation), and the
narrative verse tragedies popularized in England by John Lydgate’s
fifteenth-century The Fall of Princes and by the sixteenth-century,
multi-authored collection known asThe Mirror for Magistrates (1559).Written in
the shadow of the emperor Nero, Seneca’s tragedies are characterized by a
preoccupation with horrific crimes and the tyrannical abuse of power.His
protagonists are driven to mur-der by inordinate passions such as vengeful
rage, lust, and sexual jealousy; most of them, too, unlike most of
Shakespeare’s heroes, are conscious wrong-doers.But they are driven by passions
which seem humanly uncontrollable (ghosts, Furies, and meddlesome divinities
spur them on) and are often cursed by the consequences of evils rooted in the
past; thus despite their energies and their wilfulness they seem more the
victims than the responsible agents of their fate.Another common characteristic
is their compellingly assertive sense of selfhood; this may exemplify the Stoic
notion of an indestructiblepersonal identity (as in Hercules Oetaeus) but more
often it is a perversion of that ideal (as in Thyestes and Medea).Seneca’s
tragic heroes and heroines see their crimes as defiant expressions of self and
unfold this impassioned selfhood in long and rhetorically elaborate monologues
and soliloquies.Like their victims, they regularly hyperbolize their feelings
by projecting them on to the ‘sympathetic universe’ and by calling in rage,
grief, or despair for nature to revolt against earth, for primal Chaos to come
again.13The Fall of Princes narratives shared Seneca’s fascination with power
and its abuse.Like him too, but far more insistently, they emphasized the
inse-curity of high places and the rule of fortune or mutability in worldly
affairs: indeed, in these narratives the notion of tragedy is almost reducible
to that of catastrophic change.Moreover, fortune and its capricious turns are
now explained in Christian terms as a consequence of the Adamic Fall, which
brought change and misery into the world.Thus the treacheries of fortune are
afflictions which everyone is liable to, irrespective of his or her moral
condition.The main concern of the Mirror authors, however, was political as
well as ethical: to show that fortune is an instrument of divine justice
exacting retribution for the crimes of tyrannical rulers and over-ambitious or
rebellious subjects. Tragic theory in the sixteenth century consisted mainly of
a set of prescrip- tive rules derived from Senecan and Fall of Princes
practice.Critics such as Puttenham and Sidney emphasized that tragedy is ‘high
and excellent’ in subject and style, does not meddle with base (i.e., domestic
and plebeian) matters or mingle kings and clowns.It uncovers hidden corruption
and shows the characteristic conduct and the deserved punishments of tyrants.Dealing
with ‘the dolefull falls of infortunate
& afflicted Princes’, it ‘teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon
how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded’.It excites feelings of
‘admiration and commiseration’, wonder and pity.14 Shakespeare’s affinities
with Senecan and Fall of Princes tragedy, and with sixteenth-century tragic
theory, will be apparent as we proceed. But we must begin by emphasizing
difference.Like almost all contemporary playwrights who wrote tragedies for the
public stage, Shakespeare departed strikingly from classical practice and
Elizabethan theory by his inclusion of comic el-ements and plebeian
characters.This characteristic was due to the influence of the native dramatic
tradition (the mysteries and the moralities), which habitually conjoined the
sublime and the homely and made its devils and villains either ludicrous fools
or mocking comedians.It seems unlikely, how- ever, that Shakespeare’s inclusion
of the comic in his tragedies signifies a reluctant pandering to popular taste;
although he never overtly justi fies this practice, the self-reflexive aspects
of his art show that early in his career he reflected deeply on the nature of
tragedy and evolved a sound rationale for his mixed practice. A Midsummer
Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet written at approximately the same time, and
strikingly similar in style and plot (young love rebelling against patriarchal
control), insinuate that in real life the comic is always on the verge of the
tragic, and vice versa, and that comedy and tragedy must acknowledge that fact
by the controlled inclusion of their generic opposite.Theseus’s reaction to
Bottom’s comical tragedy – ‘How shall we find the concord of this discord?’
(5.1.60) – draws atten-tion to the extraordinarily mixed nature of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream itself and implies by its phrasing that justification for the
mixed mode will be found in the correspondence of the play’s art to nature –
that unstable order of concordant discord (or discordant concord) constituted
of opposites (the four elements, qualities, and humours) whose changing
relationships are governed by Love and Strife.In Romeo and Juliet , what seems
like a roman-tic comedy in the making suddenly hurtles towards tragedy with the
violent death of the great jester, Mercutio; for this defiantly unclassical
procedure Friar Lawrence’s discourse on the contrarious and paradoxical
dynamics of nature offers a lengthy if indirect justification (2.2.1–30). As
well as serving to extend the scope of tragedy beyond anything at-tempted in
Greece or Rome, Shakespeare’s comic element functions as a safety valve
forestalling the kind of inappropriate laughter that scenes ofgreat tension and
high passion are likely to provoke.15 Comedy is woven into the fabric of the
drama, too, being psychologically consistent with the satiric, mocking, or
deranged aspects of the tragic and villainous characters, and 5tom
mc alindon functioning always as thematic variation and ironic counterpoint in relation
to the tragic narrative.It may even (as in King Lear) intensify the effect of heroic
suffering. A comic safety-valve was particularly desirable, for Shakespeare not
only followed Senecan tradition by focusing on passion-driven protagonists but also
departed from classical practice by presenting scenes of violent passion onstage
instead of confining them to narrative report in the classical manner. Comic
incident provided much needed relief from the kind of spectacular scenes in
which his plays abound, scenes where rage and hatred, long fester-ing or
suddenly erupting, explode in physical conflict and bloodshed.From the
beginning (in Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar), Shakespeare
sought to present in the opening scene a state of conflict either between the
protagonist and his community, or between two sections of the community (one
associated with the protagonist, the other with his chief antagonist); and as
Bradley intimated, these conflicts relate to a conflict of loyalties, values,
or conscience within the protagonist himself. Where Shakespearean tragedy seems
most obviously related to the Fall of Princes tradition, and to Elizabethan
theorizing on the genre, is in the intensity with which it focuses on the
phenomenon of change.But change here is not just one of worldly fortunes; it is
above all else interpersonal, moral, and psychological change.An essential part
of the hero’s experience is the horrified discovery that the world he knows and
values, the people he loves and trusts, are changing or have changed utterly.He
feels cheated and betrayed ‘to the very heart of loss’. Hamlet expresses his
sense of overwhelming change in eloquently cosmic terms: ‘[T]his goodly frame,
the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the
air, look you ...this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it
appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours’
(2.2282–6). Based on the four elements, the imagistic pattern here shows that
Hamlet construes change in terms of the premodern model of contrarious nature;
in consequence, he tends to see change antithetically, from one extreme to the
other.And this mode of thinking is entirely characteristic of the tragedies.The
great storm passages in Julius Caesar , Othello , and King Lear , where ‘the
conflicting elements’ ( Tim. 4.3.231) are thrown into wild disorder, function
as central symbols fora pervasive sense of violent change and confusion, a
technique reinforced by sustained use of elemental imagery elsewhere in each
play.Whereas Seneca’stragedies invoked a general correspondence between
disorder in the human and the natural world, in Shakespeare’s tragedies the
instabilities, ambigui-ties, and contradictions (as well as the fruitful
harmonies) of human natureand history are precisely coextensive with those of
nature.16
The extent to which the principle of
polarized transformation affects Shakespeare’s tragedies can be gauged if we
consider the link and paral-lels between his first and his last tragedy.In
Titus Andronicus (4.4.62–8) a comparison is made with the historical hero of
Coriolanus , and for obvious reasons.In each case Rome suddenly becomes so
hateful to its great cham-pion that he joins forces with its enemies.Identified
during the Renaissance as the archetypal city of order and civility, and
associated specifically with law and oratory, Rome becomes in Titus a
‘wilderness of tigers’ where jus-tice is mocked and the pleading tongue ignored
or brutally silenced; and this decline into barbarism is symbolized by the
marriage of the Roman emperor to Tamora, queen of the Goths.As in Coriolanus ,
too, it is apparent that
the disaster which befalls Rome
stems from the fact that its respect for the humane qualities which underpin
its civility is no greater than – is in fact dependent on – its famed regard
for martial valour.Each play depicts the collapse of an order in which these
ethical opposites have hitherto been kept in balance; in the elemental terms
used throughoutCoriolanus , fire, signi- fying martial rage, eclipses water,
signifying pity: ‘I tell you, he doth sit in gold, his eye / Red as ’twould
burn Rome’ (5.1.64–5). Transformation of the community and its representative
hero are inti-mately and causally connected.But the overriding emphasis is on
that of the hero: it is the primary source of that ‘woe and wonder’ which
Shakespeare acknowledges at the close of Hamlet to be the characteristic
emotional ef- fect of tragedy.In play after play, the extreme and unexpected
nature of the change which overtakes the hero is underlined by the bewildered
com-
ments of those who know him best.And
even the unreflective Coriolanus identifies this personal transformation as a
universal propensity in nature. In a world of ‘slippery turns’, he muses,
‘Friends now fast sworn, / Whose double
bosoms seem to wear one heart ...break out / To bitterest enmity’,
while ‘fellest foes ...by some
chance, / Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends’: So with me. My
birthplace hate I, and my love’s uponThis enemy town.(4.4.12–24). Because the
transformed hero is driven to act with the utmost brutality against one or more
of those to whom he is bound by the closest ties, some are inclined nowadays to
conclude that his alleged nobility is being exposed as superficial or in some
sense inauthentic.Such a conclusion implies that the pity, wonder, and fear
which the plays provoke in performance are symp- toms of sentimental
misapprehension on the part of the audience; it rulesout the possibility of seeing
the fall of the hero as genuinely tragic.7tom mc alindon Behind
Shakespeare’s delineation of the hero’s moral fall lies a conviction that ‘In
men as in a rough-grown grove remain / Cave-keeping evils that obscurely sleep’
(Luc .1249–50).One might regard this conviction as anessentialist evasion of
such questions as historical contingency and the effects of cultural
conditioning on character.Othello’s murder of Desdemona, for example, might be
explained solely in terms of his own particular make-up and unusual situation:
a proud, middle-aged African warrior, married to a
beautiful young Venetian lady,
socially and sexually insecure, and terri fied by the humiliating thought of
cuckoldry.But there is quiet play in Othello on the relation between the words ‘general’
and ‘particular’, and it has the effect of hinting that ‘the General’ is not
just a uniquely flawed stranger (‘an erring barbarian’) but a representative
human being as well; such hints are reinforced by Iago’s reminder that ‘there’s
many a beast in a populous city, / And many a civil monster’ (4.1.61–2).When
the mad Ophelia says, ‘Weknow what we are, but know not what we may be’
(4.5.44), she is recallingnot only the baker’s daughter who became an owl but
also the refined prince of noble mind who killed her father and contemptuously
lugged his guts into the neighbour room; and who himself had reminded her
father that ‘it was a brute part’ (Ham.3.2.101) of the ‘gentle Brutus’ (JC 1.2.71)
that killed his friend in the Capitol.The notion of cave-keeping evils in every
human being was one which Shakespeare clearly took for granted.
And the cave-keeping evil can emerge
with shocking abruptness.The sheer speed with which Othello’s love and nobility
are turned to hatred and base-ness is sometimes taken as incontrovertible proof
that both (if genuine at all) were exceptionally fragile.But with Shakespeare
the speed of the hero’s transformation is a theatrical device emphasizing both
the extremity of the change and the vulnerable nature of all love and all nobility,
indeed of all human worth.
CIVILIZATION
What is a Civilization?
Without going through the variety of
concepts and terminologies on the subject,
civilization simply means: the
comprehensive development of the human potentialinall its dimensions: physical,
intellectual, spiritual, moral and psychological. To achieve this potential,
civilizations strive to develop, utilize, and conserve the natural resources,
the benefits of which should fairly reach the whole society, and bring about
positive effects on the whole world. Given this definition, it is obvious that
a civilization has certain requirements to deserve its name. After all,
civilization is a collective effort by the whole society, and its benefits
cannot be restricted to few individuals or be limited to certain groups.
Civilization has to bear fruits to all members of society. Besides although civilization
development may not affect all sides of society at the same level, it
nonetheless, remains inclusive and comprehensive. Civilization there fore has
tomaintain continuation and duration, and it cannot be considered as such if it
just emerged to disappear. Another merit of civilization is that it has the
potential of spreading to other societies, and that it can be adapted when it
influences others. This civilization merit is
being felt enormously in our times
of amazingly speedy transportation of persons and goods, and communication of
information everywhere in the world. A Muslim civilization, therefore, should
not mean in any way a civilization restricted to the Muslim
s alone. What had been called a
Muslim civilization in the past was developed and enjoyed by Muslims and
non-Muslims all over the world, Arabs and non Arabs. It spread beyond the areas
of Muslim peoples and lands wherever and whenever this was possible. Its
contribution reached non-MuslimEuropethrough Spain and Sicily, and influenced
the European Crusaders, who in medieval times, thought that they would meet
savage barbarians in Jerusalem and its neighborhood. Totheir surprise they soon
came to realize they were witnessing a civilization far better than what they
had been seen in feudal Europe. More important, Muslim civilization was not
always connected with military power. It continued to work onew ay or another
in Muslim societies during times of military strengthor military and political weakness.
What is Muslim Civilization?
Muslim civilization is characterized
with certain moral values which are accepted and supported universally by hum anity
at large,and which are considered by Muslims
and other
believers in God to be divine command ments that ought to be respected and followed
by such believers. In fact, these believers feel that the conduct of good goes
beyond observance of the law, or the expectation of practical short-term
benefits. They do so because they believe it is right and just. They believe in
developingthe individual’ssocial habit of doing the good things in life. These,
in return, will result in individual peace, social harmony, welfare, and
spiritual strength. The believer is sure about his/her commitmentto God and is
also accountable before Himin this life and in the eternal life there after.
Such an understanding of the value of what is “good” reaches an unmatchable
depth in the heart and mind of the believer in God. The reason is that it is
connected with and guarded by the faith. It also reachesan unmatchable width in
its range,for it addresses whatever good for all people and all creations in
this universe. The believer is keen and persistent to do the good, whether its
results are soon felt or not,since he/she is looking always beyond the short
termresults of this life. What is “good” or “right” or “just” may have more
extensive dimensions for the believer, but it is shared by all human minds in
different ways and at different levels. In the past, Muslimcivilizationwas
appreciated for these common dimensions and all its efforts in developing the
universal moral values, not because it was related to those who had a certain
belief systemor follow a certain prophet. The Quran significantly calls “the
good”: “what is known by all people to be acceptable (al-ma’ruf)”, and calls
“the evil”: “what is known by all people to be rejectable (al-munkar)”. Both
are related to the universal common sense and sound judgment. Peoples, Muslims
and non-Muslims, have enjoyed the benefits of the Muslim endowments “awqaf”
system which has been known to include hospitals, clean water, education,
residence, food, bathrooms, and financial aid for all those in need of any
assistance. Those who cannot afford the cost of marriage- bachelor-male or
female- maybe helped to get married through awqaf. The benefits of awqaf have
also reached the abandoned animals, especially those old and sick among them. Through
the institution of “hisba”,instant justice reached workers who had been
unfairly treated with regard to the work ass ignments or unfair wages. It had
even reached animals, regarding over-load carriage or mistreatment. All hisba
or justice-related cases were administered by a qualified person called the
“muhtasib”. The institution of “mazalim” was established to secure justice at
the highest level of authority and operated as a supreme court. Muslim jurists
used a variety of methods to reach their legal percepts beside basic reliance
on the Quran and the Sunna, including analogy, preference and consideration of
the common good. In principle, everything is viewed as legal or lawful in
Shari’a unless proven otherwise. Any wise or just conduct is welcomed by the
Shari’a, because wisdom and justice are the ultimate goals of faith and belief
in the One God by all believers.
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.
RITUAL
THE RITUAL is
part of the Law of the Fraternity. The Ritual has equal force and validity in
all respects with the Constitution of the Fraternity.The matter contained in
the Constitution, however, is not secret in character while that contained in
the Ritual is inviolably secret, except the special services as therein
specified. The further laws of the Fraternity applying to the Ritual and Ritualistic
Statutes, including their force and validity, their safekeep-ing, their
secrecy, and the methods of their amendment, are in the
Governing Laws of the Fraternity. Although
the Ritual and Ritualistic Statutes are closely related
parts of our Governing Laws, each is
a separate entity. Each has its own procedure for amendment. Material from the
two documents is integrated throughout this book but is clearly identified as
Ritual or
Ritualistic Statutes. Ritualistic
Statutes material is in small type and enclosed in bor-ders. Ritual material is
on the pages with larger type and is notenclosed in borders.
Ritual and language
What natural language and ritual have in common is that
both, even more so than religion, are universal phenomena of human culture. As
for theoretical attention, however, there is an enormous difference between
these two realms of human activity. Linguistics has been a rich and relatively
successful field, especially after the revolutionary transformations it
underwent since the 1950s. In comparison, the study of ritual has dramatically
lagged behind. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. First of all,
ritual is intrinsically interesting as a rich area of human self-expression.
Since it also is universal, a deeper understanding of it might, just as
linguistics did, clarify something fundamental about human nature. Furthermore,
ritual differs from language in that it primarily relates to human emotions,
some of them alarming, particular in political contexts. It is for this reason,
I believe, that the study of ritual has a certain urgency.
This has to do with the
main thesis of this article, namely that ritual is about the human
experience of identity in
relation to territory and therefore involves severe ethical risks under
certain circumstances.
SOURCES
A. Shakespear’s Dramas
1. Kenneth Muir,1972, Shakespears’s tragic sequence, Pdf,12.
2. Dieter Mehli,1986,Shakespear’s tragedies, Pdf,29.
3. Friedrich Nietsche,296,The birt of tragedy,Pdf,19.
B. Civilization
1.
1. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
2.
Scammell, G. V. The First Imperial Age: European Overseas
Expansion 1400-1715. London: Harper Collins Academic, 1989.
c. European
1. Dennis
Kennedy, “Shakespeare and the Cold War”, in Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe
2.
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. RITUAL
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