Final Paper

It's safe to say, I'm sad to see this class end. But considering the depths reached and connections made in everyone's final presentations, I guess it is time. I feel like I've made some pretty big leaps this semester, major leaps, actually, considering I didn't even know the plot of King Lear before I took this class. Shameful, I know. But shameful no more.

Shakespeare, you're no longer a big ol' fancy-speaking meanie. I know your tricks. I'm on to you. And we will meet again. Mark my words. There's still a lot of unfinished business between us.

On another note, here's my final paper:

                                                  Shakespeare and the Sublime

The beauty, complexity, and mimetic capability of Shakespeare’s language and associations lend to what it is we find so fascinating and unending in his work. We may measure the worth of a text, and indeed all of art, through its ability to elevate our senses and to signify universal truths. Though all of Shakespeare’s work exemplifies the aesthetic, it is in his final plays where he creates the greatest sensation of the sublime and elevation of the intellect. This is achieved through his juxtaposition of the aesthetically dignified to that which we find displeasing, painful, and even grotesque. As we are experiencing this sublimity we are simultaneously engaging our negative capabilities and accepting the beauty created in the space of our own imaginations.

In his chapter regarding Cymbeline in The Invention of the Human, Bloom speaks of aesthetic dignity “as the only consolation we should seek or find in Shakespeare” (631). He is absolutely right. If we take nothing else away from Shakespeare, let it be an appreciation for his command of language and the space it creates for his readers to imagine and invent ourselves. Aesthetic dignity is indicative of the space exists between a readily comprehensible and available reality, and that of higher truth and greater existence (which we sense but cannot grasp through any means other than the aesthetic). As I see it, aesthetic dignity very much depends upon the mimetic capabilities of an author, to produce in his readers those visceral recognitions that speak to universal nature and human experience.

Beauty is what we would typically associate with something regarded as exceptionally aesthetic or aesthetically pleasing. In his theory of negative capability, Keats suggests “that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration”. Many of us are content reciting and appreciating Shakespeare’s exceptionally poetic verse, but he wishes to provide us not only a with glimpse of beauty, but to experience it for ourselves—in the realm of the sublime.  

We might not view these somewhat incongruous final plays as aesthetically pleasing in their entirety, but they all contain aesthetically dignified elements and do entice our sensibilities and ultimately conjure the sublime. Drawing from Eighteenth century British philosophy, it is important to view the sublime as an aesthetic quality not separate from or indifferent to beauty, but as an extension of beauty into a higher realm. The sublime is not solely constituted in awe-inspiring, sensual entities, but also mingles with horror, fear, and vastness. The sublime is not only born, in part, out of greatness and abyss, but propagates it.

We find the sublime in the juxtaposition between the elevated aesthetic and the absurd, the beautiful and the grotesque. In Pericles this opposition is embodied in Imogen who, according to Bloom, “ought to be in a play worthier of her aesthetic dignity”. She alone represents the inwardness that exemplified Shakespeare’s strengths, in a play that is muddled with a tiresomely complex plot and unredeemable characters. In contrast, Caliban is a highly grotesque character acting within a succinct plot, whose speech in ACT III.2 perhaps constitutes the pinnacle of sublimity in the whole play. Not only is this speech “Be not afeared: the isle is full of noises” exceptionally aesthetic in itself, but is compounded by the fact it is spoken from the most base, detestable character in all of Shakespeare.  

From the union of these dual qualities of repulsion and attraction, the sublime is achieved. The process of reaching the sublime is incalculable and evades imitation, and therefore our understanding of it constitutes an abyss between the reality of the sublime and the language that is invoked to create it. It would appear that Shakespeare mimics this abyss in the confusion and disbelief he generates with the sudden introduction of recognition scenes and outlandish resurrections in the four late romances we studied. The reader is forced to confront the absence of reason in those instances and inject faith in the mysterious and unknowable.

Keats suggests that a great poet (and I would like to extend this to a great reader as well) accepts that not everything can be resolved. Ironically, this idea combats the abundance of recognition and resolution that formulates at the end of all Shakespeare’s late romances. Perhaps, though, that resolve is not so literal as we may initially read it. He leads us through ridiculous plots wrought with tragedy and loss, simply so we experience the ‘negative pain’ as Edmund Burke terms it, or the delight we experience at the removal of pain. It is almost as if we experience kenosis and plerosis all in one play. At the end of King Lear there is no ‘filling’ that occurs, because everyone is dead (or overwhelmed by it)! All we are left with is the redemption, and that’s a tough consolation for tragedy. However, in The Winter’s Tale when Leontes snaps back into reality and realizes what he’s lost, the deux ex machina timely descends and alleviates his pain; flooding the play with delight. Shakespeare consciously mixes the absurd with the plerosis of emotion creating a rational disconnect and in turn a space for us to exercise our negative capability.

To experience the sublime we must accept the mingling of the tragic with the suddenly comedic and romantic. It is difficult for the unwashed masses to admire the later of Shakespeare’s plays, because they are not conventional or familiar, so therefore ambiguous and difficult to digest. But if we can suspend our impulse to seek pleasure in cohesion and familiarity and accept the unknown as an intentional convention, we may thrive in its darkness and ambiguity. Though there is resolve at the end, all of the forces are not explained, and therefore lies the ambiguity that we must embrace.

The sublime in Shakespeare is not merely achieved through the aesthetics of his verse, but by his manipulation of our sensibilities and intellect through juxtapositions of the aesthetically dignified with the grotesque or problematic. People say that Shakespeare tired of form and convention, which is evident, but not to the degree that he sacrificed his masterful aesthetics. Rather, he transformed them to create even more complex sensations, for nowhere else is the potential for our imaginations to conjure truths and challenge our notions of the aesthetic more accessible than in his final plays. Riddled with ambiguities, Shakespeare does not challenge his readers to search for resolve or finite answers, but to revel in the infinite capacity of their own intellect and human emotions.

Thanks everyone for a great semester!