Febiana Halawa

Ritual Aspect in Shakespeare's Drama is Related to European Civilization

Compiled

BY :

Name          : Febianna Halawa

NPM           : 116224013

Major         : English of Literature

Faculty of Letters

University of Muslim Nusantara

Al- Washliyah

Medan

TP. 2014- 2015

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

1.1.  The Background of the Research

In some societies, ritual is one of the procedures that worship should be done so that we avoid the danger. In the Catholic religion, ritual is the procession of human repentance to God.

According to Ritualistic Statutes (1983),” 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”.  (pages :1)

The aim of the above concept is the ritual is a tool to establish a fraternity and has a sacred power in its implementation.

   In the book called My Irrelevant Defence being Meditations Inside Gaol and Out on Jewish Ritual Murder written by ARNOLD S. LEESE explained that in the Jewish community, there is a well-known ritual is a ritual murder. The subject of Ritual Murder has always been one that the Jewish Money Power, which controls this country as well as most others, has taken all possible steps to suppress. The reason is that Ritual Murder was the dynamite which finally blew the Jew out of England in 1290, out of Spain in 1492, and out of Germany in our time.

This is related to the ritual aspect in Shakespeare’s dramas. Each play written by William Shakespeare always ends with death and worship of the gods, such as the drama of A Midsummer Night's Dream. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six mechanicals, who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world. The play opens with Hermia, who is in love with Lysander, refusing to submit to her father Egeus  demand that she wed Demetrius, who he has arranged for her to marry. Helena meanwhile pines unrequitedly for Demetrius. Enraged, Egeus invokes an ancient Athenian law before Duke Theseus, whereby a daughter must marry the suitor chosen by her father, or else face death. Theseus offers her another choice: lifelong chastity while worshiping the goddess Diana as a nun.

In addition, William Shakespeare wrote a play that genre tragedy, one of the famous work is The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare at an uncertain date between 1599 and 1602. Set in the Kingdom of Denmark  , the play dramatises the revenge Prince Hamlet is instructed to enact on his uncle Claudius. Claudius had murdered his own brother, Hamlet's father King Hamlet, and subsequently seized the throne, marrying his deceased brother's widow, Hamlet's mother  Gertrude. Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play and among the most powerful and influential tragedies in English literature. Hamlet has a protagonist. The story of Hamlet ultimately derives from the legend of  Amleth. Amleth is a figure in Scandianavian romance and an inspiration for Prince Hamlet, the hero of Shakespare’s  tragedy, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Hamlet is the history of European civilization. Hamlet is the Viking expedition.  The history of Amleth is Gervendill, governor of Jutland, was succeeded by his sons Horvendill and Feng. Horvendill, on his return from a Viking expedition in which he had slain Koll, king of Norway, married Gerutha, daughter of Rorik Slyngebond, king of Denmark ; she bore him a son, Amleth.  But Feng, out of jealousy, murdered Horvendill, and persuaded Gerutha to become his wife, on the plea that he had committed the crime for no other reason than to avenge her of a husband who had hated her. Amleth, afraid of sharing his father's fate, pretended to be an imbecile, but the suspicion of Feng put him to various tests which are related in detail. Among other things they sought to entangle him with a young girl, his foster-sister (the prototype of Ophelia ), but his cunning saved him. When, Amleth slew the eavesdropper hidden (like Polonius in Shakespeare's play), in his mother's room, and destroyed all trace of the deed, Feng was assured that the young man's madness was feigned. Accordingly he dispatched him to Britain in company with two attendants, who bore a letter enjoining the king of the country to put him to death. Amleth surmised the purport of their instructions, and secretly altered the message on their wooden tablets to the effect that the king should put the attendants to death and give Amleth his daughter in marriage. After marrying the princess, Amleth returned at the end of a year to Denmark.

1.2.  The Formulation of the Problems

Research problem formulated in the following questions     :

1.      What is the ritual?

2.      What is Shakespeare’s dramas?

3.      What is European?

4.      What is civilization?

1.3.  The Purpose of the Research

The research is aimed to find the answer of the research problems. The research is purposed to describe     :

1.      The ritual.

2.      Shakespeare’s dramas

3.      The European

4.      The civilization

CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

2.1. The Ritual

First, the writer will discuss about in the ritual. Ritual is a ceremony conducted according to tradition or religious communities within a particular group of people.

   In the entry on ritual by Elizabeth S. Evans In The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology, it is noted that “ ritual “ has slipped its original moorings in the elaboration of religious practice such that its contemporary usage in anthropology identifies “ formal, patterned, and stereotyped public performances”. (p. 1)

   However defining ritual as” formal, patterned, and stereotyped public performances” does not help us to identify what might make ritual distinctive as distinguished from rotine repetitive acts to which subjects attach no heightened significance.

   Robert Hertz in his study of the rituals associated with death presents explanations of death rituals based on two elements out of a possible three in each case. The three elements by which he structures the first section of contribution a une etude sur la representation collective de la mort are the body, the soul and the living. Thus an explanation for rituals deriving from fear of the corpse could be adduced from consideration of the kinds of relationshipbeing severed by death. Considering the living and the corpse, the death of an individual rents the social fabric and if the personheld a position of power may destabilise society. Considering the soul and the corpse, the physical remainder of the decaying body is an unresolved and threatening intimation of further death that serves to characterise the transition of the soul to the afterlife as gradual rather than complete and thereby implies a contagion. Considering the soul and the living, the contradiction which must be resolved is that the social personhood of the deceased still exist in the self- conceptions of the living and in the configuration of relationship networks. (p.86)

2.2. Shakespeare’s Dramas

Shakespeare’s Dramas has three genres is tragedy, history and comedy. When Shakespeare first arrived in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s, dramatists writing for London's new commercial playhouses (such as The Curtain) were combining two different strands of dramatic tradition into a new and distinctively Elizabethan synthesis. Shakespeare's Elizabethan tragedies (including the history plays with tragic designs, such as Richard II ) demonstrate his relative independence from classical models. He takes from Aristotle and Horace the notion of decorum; with few exceptions, he focuses on high-born characters and national affairs as the subject of tragedy. In most other respects, though, the early tragedies are far closer to the spirit and style of moralities. They are episodic, packed with character and incident; they are loosely unified by a theme or character.  In this respect, they reflect clearly the influence of Marlowe, particularly of Tamburlaine. Even in his early work, however, Shakespeare generally shows more restraint than Marlowe; he resorts to grandiloquent rhetoric less frequently, and his attitude towards his heroes is more nuanced, and sometimes more sceptical, than Marlowe's. By the turn of the century, the bombast of Titus Andronicus had vanished, replaced by the subtlety of Hamlet. Shakespeare's plays are also notable for their use of soliloquies, in which a character makes a speech to him- or herself so the audience can understand the character's inner motivations and conflict.

Shakespeare's plays, listed by genre   :

COMEDIES	HISTORIES	TRAGEDIES
All’s Well That Ends Well	Henry IV, Part I	Antony and Cleopatra
As You Like It	Henry IV, Part II	Coriolanus
Love’s Labour’s Lost	Henry V	Cymbeline
Measure for Measure	Henry VI, Part I	Hamlet
Merchant of Venice	Henry VI, Part II	Julius Caesar
Merry Wives of Windsor	Henry VI, Part III	King Lear
Midsummer Night’s Dream	Henry VIII	Macbeth
Much Ado about nothing	King John	Othello
Taming of the Shrew	Pericles	Romeo and Juliet
Tempest	Richard II	Timon of Athens
Twelefth Night	Richard III	Titus Andronicus
Two Gentlemen of Verona		Troilus and Cressida
Winter’s Tale

2.3. The European

The history of Europe is the begining in 1945- 1952. The idea of creating a unified Europe was not a new one. In the 9^th century, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne dominated much of europe. At the begining of the 19^th century, Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to control most of Europe. In the 1930’s, Adolph hitler intended to conquer all of Europe. The key words here are dominated, control, and conquer. Throughout history, wars were fought in Europe over land, religion, and resources—all with devastating results. At the end of World War II, it finally became apparent that violence and hatred could not unify Europe. In 1945, many European cities lay in ruins and people were homeless. Factories were destroyed, and bridges and railroads were bombed out. Without their homes and livelihoods, many Europeans were left in despair, not knowing how their lives could ever be normal again. It was going to take an entirely new way of thinking to rebuild Europe and help the Europeans rebuild their lives: people were going to have to work together peacefully. The ancient rivalries and prejudices had to be put aside and a new spirit of cooperation had to take their place. And cooperate they did in ways that were nothing short of miraculous! The Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift were just two examples of how allied nations worked together to help, instead of punish, the vanquished nations of World War II. They marked the dawn of a new era of European history, and set the stage for a peaceful unification of Europe.

In the work of Shakespeare’s Hamlet which tells the story of the kingdom of Denmark. Denmark is the country located in Northern Europe. From the 8th to the 10th century, the Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were known as Vikings. They colonized, raided, and traded in all parts of Europe. Viking explorers first discovered Iceland by accident in the 9th century, on the way towards the Faroe Islands and eventually came across " Vinland " (Land of wine), also known today as Newfoundland, a province in Canada. The Danish Vikings were most active in the British Isles and Western Europe. They conquered and settled parts of England (known as the Danelaw ) under King Sweyn Forkbeard in 1013, Ireland, and France where they founded Normandy.

2.4. The Civilization

The civilization is the state of condition of persons living and functioning together, jointly, cooperatively so that they produce and experience the benefits of so living and functioning jointly and cooperatively. The word "civilization" derives from the Roman word for "city". It implies a society involving cities, and cities involve people living and acting together, jointly, cooperatively, interactively.

That as counter-posed to people living singly or in very small units, on their own, individually, independently.

Thus civilization involves social cooperation, that is the opposite of individualism's "rugged independence" with its competitive survival of the fittest. Civilization involves joint survival via joint action. Only civilization is capable of providing improved quality of life: security, material abundance, the arts, culture, the possibility of individual fulfillment and of happiness.

Individualism pursues return to the original state, the opposite of civilization, the consequent survival competition, the state of the animals unable to function in any mode other than the competition for survival.

The future of mankind is civilization. Civilization builds on our only real biological advantage -- intelligence and rationality. Civilization implies, means, requires: society, communal action, social sharing, "socialism" and, ultimately, communism, the full cooperative sharing with our fellow persons. Human society must, and it therefore will, so become or we will regress to the animals from which we came.

To support the development of civilization is to be a civilized person. To oppose it is to be primitive, barbarian, essentially an animal.

The purpose of civilization must be to promote and achieve that goal, like :

Ø  The society exists for its individual members -- not the individual members existing for the society.

Ø  The economy exists for society's individual members -- not the members existing for the economy.

Ø  The government exists for the members of society -- not the members existing for the government.

CHAPTER III

CONCLUSION

1.    Ritual is a ceremony conducted according to tradition or religious communities within a particular group of people.

2.    Shakespeare’s Dramas has three genres is tragedy, history and comedy. Everyone tells about the continent of Europe, such as the UK and Denmark.

3.    The history of Europe is the begining in 1945- 1952.

4.    The civilization is the state of condition of persons living and functioning together, jointly, cooperatively so that they produce and experience the benefits of so living and functioning jointly and cooperatively.

REFERENCES

ARNOLD S. LEESE (1938), My Irrelevant Defence being Meditations Inside Gaol and Out on Jewish Ritual Murder, The IFL Printing & Publishing Co. : London, Retrieved November 22, 2014, from  http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDFs/Jewish Ritual Murder JR.pdf

Bevington, David, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 1965, passim.

Elizabeth S. Evans, ‘Ritual’, The Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology,ed. David Levinson, Melvin Ember (New York, Henry Holt and Company, Inc, 1996), p.1, Retrieved November 23, 2014, from http://www.ayling.com/content/documents/Academic/University of Oxford/What use is ritual.pdf

Introduction to The European Union; Scenes from Europe at the end of World War II, p.2, Retrieved November 23, 2014, from http://www.indiana.edu/~west/documents/Curriculum/EU/EU_Intro/IntroEU_update.pdf

Ritualistic Statutes (1983), p. 1, Retrieved November 22, 2014, from  http://download.cabledrum.net/wikileaks_archive/file/sigma-chi-ritual-2002.pdf

Robert B. Pierce, 1971, Shakespeare’s History Plays; The Family and The State,Ohio State University Press: United States of America.

Robert Hertz, ‘ A contribution to the study of collective representation of death’, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Aberdeen: Cohen and West, 1960), p.86.

Shakespeare's Marlowe by Robert A. Logan, Ashgate Publishing, 2006, page 156.

Shakespeare's Soliloquies by Wolfgang H. Clemen, translated by Charity S. Stokes, Routledge, 1987, page 11.

The Philosophic Principles of Rational Being, p.1-2, Retrieved November 24, 2014, from http://www.the-origin.org/6 - What is Civilization.pdf

Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, page 34.