>At 10:21 PM -0600 1/25/03, seiferle wrote:
>So in a sense, mercy is like an embrace which holds within its arms
>a multitude of faults. It is not so much the worst binding as the
>binding of the worst. The prayer which pierces so that it assaults
>mercy and frees all faults is not really a plea, or an invocation of
>a plea, it is a kind of command of being, a desire for being so
>intense that it would pierce heaven itself, mercy itself, and set
>all fault, and all idea of fault, free.
Yes - there is suggested in that phrase the kind of pitilessness you
find in, for example, Beckett (here I'm making an arbitrary division
between mercy and compassion, because I think Beckett's cruel
intractibilities reveal an enormous compassion). Not a nihilism, the
reverse rather - Beckett's work has always had on me a perverse
effect of exhilaration - but a refusal nevertheless. Perhaps a
generosity (even ferocity) which refuses to allow mercy - which
assumes a higher and a lower, one who gives mercy and one who
receives, and with that a distortion of relationship, a sickening of
potencies and therefore vision - to temper truth. Coupled with its
insistence that Prospero, who has enchanted the audience with his
illusions both within the plots of the play and by the fact of the
play itself, is merely an actor on a stage, a human being before
other human beings, I find that final speech very moving - its
dismantling of the manipulations of illusion forces the movement of
thought off the stage, into the audience, out of the artificial
realities of the play into the actual realities of the people who
have just shared this experience.
At 11:03 PM -0600 1/25/03, seiferle wrote:
>I have the same view about imposing these later psychological
>definitions upon a work that I do of imposing later definitions of
>the political.
I think there is some justification for looking at the political in
his work, given that he was such a political animal; though as I
suggested, perhaps the code should be Machiavelli. Psychology
doesn't work with Shakespeare, it is always a diminution - which is
why for example so many people have had problems with Iago. A
measure of Shakespeare's greatness is indeed the way his work can
withstand so many and constant interpretations and reinterpretations,
and Kott's view revivified and freed the texts in new and surprising
ways. That is in fact what the texts were made for - they were
written for performance, for actors to say firstly and then for
audiences to enjoy.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
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