Antony and Cleopatra

I'm reading all of Shakespeare's plays in a year: this is the third.

Reader-response
Reader-response theory recognizes that when encountering a work of literature, the individual brings with him or her all sorts of experiences with life and literature. An honest approach recognizes this, and may find insight in the text.

I'm a junky for watching good TV series on DVD. And after seeing Rome, my visualization for characters like Mark Antony and Cleopatra is still stuck on James Purefoy (not, oddly enough, Charlton Heston) and Lyndsey Marshal. Sometimes an actor's appearance and representation sticks in the mind, forming the character. I expect that for my entire life, James Purefoy's Mark Antony will be my Mark Antony. Purefoy's movements, facial expressions, voice, and speech rhythms will always linger in my memory.

My question is whether this connection of a literary character to a actor's portrayal is based on my own memory, or on the strength or weakness of the text. I encountered Hamlet before I had seen any actor portray him, and so when I read Hamlet, my mental visualization is independent of any actor. So too with memorable characters like Macbeth and Lear. But I expect that Kenneth Branaugh will always be Henry V for me. Is this solely because of the chronological order I encountered the work, or because of the strength of the work itself? After all, at this point I can occasionally read a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest without seeing Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy.

Or it could be in the quality of the play. For whatever reason, Shakespeare's literary Antony couldn't shake Purefoy's Antony from my memory.

Suicide
Perhaps only Dostoevsky made suicide more a prominent element of his work than Shakespeare. I can see why suicide is such a pressing theme for literature. It is the place where human will confronts nature, chance, or fate. It is the direct confrontation of free will and death. It is the ultimate show of despair at the cosmos or mere circumstance. In Dostoevsky, I think it is the rejection of the belief that human beings are machine-like animals, preprogrammed creatures without will concerned only with survival: in Dostoevsky, suicide shows that there are other motivations (like ideas) that guide human behavior.

Shakespeare's plays are littered with murders and suicides, and eloquent characters capable of insight into just what suicide may mean.

Free Will: two suggestions

We can not prove free will, but perhaps we can find suggestions for it.

Suicide
Animals don't do it. Humans do it. Sometimes, for whatever reason, human beings end their own biological existences. Some do so not out of mental disorder, but for reasons of principle, rationally, with purpose. With will.

Christianity
I'm talking about the Christian value of non-resistance, the ethic which teaches to put aside urges like pride, hate, revenge, violence, and teaches us to forgive those that wrong us, respond to violence with something other than retaliation, to love even our enemies. There is something in such an ethic that tends to go against both reason and biology. And yet it is.

Norma Marsh's "'Night, Mother"

In twentieth century literature, the concept of waiting becomes a focal point. We see it in Fowles' The Magus, in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, in Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, and to a smaller extent in Sartre's The Age of Reason and Camus' The Plague.

We see a little of it in Marsh's "'Night, Mother":

"Mama: ...You wait.
Jessie: You do something else. You don't just wait.
Mama: Whatever else you find to do, you're just still mainly waiting. The waiting's the worst part of it."

You might recall this conversation later when Mama, frantic to stop Jessie's suicide, says:

"But something might happen. Something that could change everything. Who knows what it might be, but it might be worth waiting for!"

This reminds me explicitly of the last chapter of The Magus, where Fowles talks about the existential waiting for something to happen to you. And Jessie's response later reminds me of The Age of Reason, when Jessie refers to her lost self:

"Somebody I waited for and never came. And never will....I'm what was worth waiting for and I didn't make it."

But that's all I really have to say about this rather mediocre play. I have had an interest in the meaning of suicide in literature, but I'm not sure there was a great deal added to discussion of suicide in this play.

A Doll's House

I've made a vow to read 25 plays and 200 poems before reading any fiction (the exception is during snippets of waiting time), and I'll try to comment on every play I read.

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House makes me feel bad for being a husband. It's also a masterfully written drama.

If I ever write an academic book, it might be on suicide in literature. It seems to come up fairly frequently in literature with various meanings. Some of my academic work has involved suicide in literature (in a grad school class on the Holocaust I focused two papers on suicide in the Holocaust, there's a failed suicide attempt in The Magus that I talk about in my thesis on John Fowles, I teach Hamlet, yada yada yada. Then again, suicide is such a prevalent theme in a lot of canonical literature that every English prof could probably say taht his/her academic work involves suicide in literature.