Rachel’s Reviews > Shakespeare After All > Status Update

Two Noble Kinsmen. “This play, written by two authors, seems to have as its ideal the melting of two (kinsmen, authors) into one. This would eliminate friction and rivalry but at the price of a death. It is fitting that the final tableau displays both the triangle of rivalry and, in the end, the death that thus anchors union.”

Henry VIII. “What ties these falls together, beyond their inevitability and remorseless dramatic succession (exacerbated by the play's severe truncation of historical events), is the word ‘divorce,’ which appears, like an uncanny specter, linking the tragical plot of ‘falls of greatness’ to the romantic plot of masque, courtship, marriage, and birth.”

The Tempest. “[the isle] eludes location and becomes a space for poetry, and for dream. It is not found on any map. Prospero’s enchanted island, while drawn from real explorations and published accounts, is ultimately a country of the mind. And this is made clear by the very structure of the play, which starts out in medias res, in clamor, in shipwreck, and in darkness.”

The Winter’s Tale. “This is one reason why silence occupies the two extreme poles of Shakespearean dramaturgy. It characterizes both those who refuse humanity, like
lago, and those who transcend it, like the ‘statue’ of Hermione in this play's final scene, and like all those characters, in this play and other romances, who are struck dumb by ‘wonder’ or ‘amazement.’”

Cymbeline. “If, instead of seeking the play's meaning from the plot, one seeks it instead in a logic of repetition, layering, and dream, there is a surprising unity in the persistence of
• the image of boxes and trunks;
• the question of sacrifice;
• the loss, and later recovery, of children by parents; and
• the adoption, and later loss, of children by parents.”

Coriolanus. “[he] has structural affinities with other doomed Shakespearean ‘innocents,’ like Desdemona and Duncan, whose trust in other people led to their downfall. Coriolanus trusts a code, not an individual, but his trust is similarly misplaced and outdated. He is purer than the world that contains him, a lonely dragon, the repository—for all his faults and flaws—of a lost set of Roman virtues.”

Pericles. “Like Hermia and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marina is a creator whose arts rival those of Nature. […] Marina stands at the play’s imaginative center, as the doer of magical deeds, the performer of resurrections, bringing both father and mother back to life—like the spring and the sea, with which she is linked by name and spirit.”

A&C. “And at the same time, Cleopatra is human weakness, pettiness, and frailty, ‘hopping’ in undignified steps through the public street, panting with loss of breath. Her humanity, like her pettiness and her changeability, somehow increases rather than decreases her astonishing erotic power. She is paradox and contradiction, the incarnation of desire—fire, water, and air, dazzling a man of earth.”

Macbeth. “Duncan is linked with light, day, and stars; Macbeth, with darkness, night, and a ‘brief candle.’ The pattern is elegant, pervasive, and cumulatively powerful, these language clusters offering an almost subliminal imagistic counterpoint to the ongoing dramatic action, as if the play’s unconscious were pushing events forward beyond, as well as through, the conscious agony of the protagonists.”

King Lear. “The symmetries provided by these two plots, the Lear plot and the Gloucester plot, are not merely dynastic or structural. Lear, whose error is a mental error, the error of misjudgment in dismembering his kingdom, is punished in the play by a mental affliction, madness. Gloucester, whose sun is a physical sun, lechery, is punished in the play by a physical affliction, blindness.”