Eleutheria A.cl’s Reviews > Northrop Frye on Shakespeare > Status Update

"The old dispensation, as the theologians call it, has rolled by, carrying its symbols of the skin-shedding serpent, the sea, the dying and renewing life of the earth. And whatever happens to human fortunes in the next thirty years, it is still there, ready to roll again."
....beautiful.

All happened 30 yrs b4 the birth of Christ. "It'd have been strange if Christ born into a world whose temporal master was a protege of Hercules ruling the world probably from Egypt. It is partly in this context that the upper limits of Antony and Cleopatra become so significant: of Antony as a failed pagan or heroic incarnation, of Cleopatra as a goddess of love, of the sea, of the overflowing Nile."

Augustus Caesar becomes the master of the world bcs he knows exactly the limit, substance and location of the world that can be mastered. Antony is looking into a world of process and metamorphosis, a far greater world than Ceasar's but can never be conquered unless he controls death itself. Cleopatra chooses Antony instead of Ceasar for C is "but Fortune's knave" unable to dream of transcending world (and divinity).

The fall of Antony, "the chaos is social as well as cosmic bcs with the loss of such a leader the hierarchy on which all existence depends collapses, as Lear's world after his abdication collapses into the world symbolized by the storm."

The desertion of Antony by Hercules means that Antony has failed to become a pagan incarnation (while Cleopatra is the incarnation of Venus...ish). "Such heroic incarnation always fail", gods give flaws to keep them the human level.
But, they are just human, all is just their intensity of humanity no matter how hard they strive.

"...speaking of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom got closer than any other to the central experience of the play even if he didn't altogether know it...It takes a fool or clown to see into the heart of comedy. Perhaps it takes a madman to see into the heart of tragedy, the dark tower of Lear's fury and tenderness, rage and sympathy, scorn and courtesy, and finally his broken heart."

"Edgar...is holding a mirror up to Lear's growing madness, somewhat as, to refer to a very different play, Petruchio tries to cure Katharina's shrewishness by showing her in his own behaviour what it looks like."

"Nothing":
1. King's two bodies: a dead king is a king, a living king without kingship (identity) is nothing, annihilation is worse than death.
That's the point about Lear's knights and why Regan wants him impotent.
2.The essence of human virtue, the love, loyalty, good faith, have no cause. There's no "why" about them.

The nature theme relates to the hierarchy idea of Shakespeare's time:
1. God above world - World of impotent or non-exist God tends to collapse under the personification of nature power;
2. Nature Level I, stars, Garden of Eden, man supposed to be - the essence of human virtue, a world rep by Cordelia's and Edgar's love, etc.;
3. Nature Level II, the physical nature, a world of predator-prey law
4. Hell - madness

The "Nature" in King Lear:
1. Lear - The nature for upper human level, for man of amenities of civilization, with love, loyalty and authority and being social, etc.;
2. Edmund - The nature that indifference to human, live to follow the animal pattern of existence, according to the law of predator and prey.