Hamlet by William Shakespeare: The Aspects of Human Condition

Corruption, cruelty and uncertainty--three aspects of the human condition as perceived by Hamlet--are revealed in Hamlet's employment of a rich variety of imagery, such as science, the military, law, racing disease, etc...

Hamlet's way of employing imagery is to be identified as a unique artistic process. when he begins to speak, the images fairly stream to him with the slightest effort as immediate and spontaneous visions. They show us that whenever he thinks and speaks, he's at the same time a seer, for whom the living things of the world about him embody and symbolize thought.

This visionary and prophetical power results in his applying the general to the particular through the employment of imagery. the following lines from his soliloquy are relevant:

" How weary, stale, and unprofitable

seem to me all the uses of this world ..."

This world, in which he finds himself and towards which his attitude is defined, is expressed in terms of a most striking, central image of sickness, the "unweeded garden", that will permeate the whole play. The "unweeded garden" evokes an atmosphere of corruption, decay and unfaithfulness in an indirect, general way. Hamlet, in fact, is capable of transforming this awareness into symbols and then interpreting those symbols.

The "unweeded garden", already established as symbol of the corrupted world, Hamlet's garden goes on to explain it: "things rank and gross in nature" until they "possess it merely." Then there is a shift from the general to the particular: his family situation. This shift is revealed through a dramatic process in which we witness a succession of flashes produced by a comprehensive alert mind. There is a shift to the moral shock which has resulted from the sudden disclosure of Hamlet's true nature. all his life he had believed in her. He had seen her not merely devoted to his father, but also hanging on him, "as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on." This cluster of imagery reveals the spontaneity and acuteness of Hamlet's mind it has the power of observation, the capability of scanning reality, and of penetrating the veil of semblance to the very core of things.

Incest triggers Hamlet's mind to compare his mother to a beast, "A beast ... would have mourned longer ...," thus giving an entrance to cruelty, the second aspect of the human condition. Hamlet now longs for "self-slaughter", a violent act forbidden by the "everlasting". Later on, savagery and ferocity are expounded throughout the play by a poisonous motif. The description which the ghost of Hamlet's father gives of his poisoning by Claudius,

"And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leperous distilement",

is characterized by vividness with which the process of poisoning and the malicious spreading of the disease is portrayed, "... and curd like eager dropping into milk."The corruption of land and people throughout Denmark is evaluated by Hamlet as an irresistible process of poisoning. Finally, this motif reappears in the poisoning of all the major characters in the last act. Corruption, as represented through the poisonous motif, reveals Hamlet's power of transforming reality into imagery by his full awareness of the human nature and of the world around him.

The first appearance of the ghost, creating a sense of confusion for both Marcellus and Bernardo, introduces the notion of uncertainty to the play--the third and vital aspect of the human condition,"Horatio says 'tis our fantasy", until reality defeats uncertainty,"is not something more than fantasy".

Uncertainty reappears later with Hamlet's hesitation between contemplation and action--the tragic flaw that leads to his destruction. His hesitation is revealed stylistically through a succession of incomplete sentences,

" and yet, within a month-

Let me not think on't Frailty, thy name is woman ..."

This fragmentation reflects the fragmentation of his mental process. Here the style is reflecting the dilemma of his mind; it has been invaded by "frailty", a disturbing element from the human condition. Such fragments evoke not only his mental state but also his psychological conditioning, characterized as they are with bitterness and agony: "... like Niobe, all tears-why she, even she ..."

Hamlet's mental debate is concluded with the following couplets:

"The time is out of joint. O cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right!"

Hamlet doesn't have the active will to take revenge, so his mission seems to spring more from without than from within. In other words he seems to be more persuaded by the ghost than by his own conscience. Realizing that "conscience does make cowards of us all", Hamlet experiences deactivation of will. "... and lose the name of action", seems to be the proper description of the will's failure to assert itself.

Corruption, cruelty and uncertainty--three aspects of the human condition--are revealed genuinely through keen observations of reality embellished by various clusters of imagery, most prominent among which is poison imagery-animal and plant imagery being less effective in evoking the proper atmosphere of the human condition. Through their concreteness and preciseness, their simplicity and familiarity, Hamlet's nature is introduced with all its aspects: corruption and integrity, cruelty and mercy, uncertainty and assertion. We see a man, who in other circumstances might have exercised all the moral and social virtues, placed in a situation in which even the amiable qualities of his mind serve but to aggravate his distress and to perplex his conduct.

Othello: A Critical Analysis of Shakespeare's Tragic Characters

Othello's character:

The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but it is desirable to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with this character. Othello's description of himself as: 

 One not easily jealous, but, being wrought, 
Perplexed in the extreme, ..........  is perfectly just.

He is the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes, and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence-almost as if from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal siege; in his wandering in vast deserts and among marvelous people; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs, his being sold to slavery. Othello is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet. 

Dangers of Othello's character:

The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilized life, and is ignorant of the European Woman(venetians).

In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm, he is by nature full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasizes his self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:

Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate 
Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature
Whom passion could not shake? Whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither gaze nor pierce?

Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks:

    Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon 
      When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
And, like the devil, from his very arm
           Puffed his own brother-and can he be angry?

Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he must live or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable flood. He will press for immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain. This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his sufferings are so heart-rendering, that he stirs, I believe, in most readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare. 

Why Othello didn't suspect Iago?

Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his opinion of Iago was the opinion of everyone who knew him: and that opinion was that Iago was before all things 'honest', his very faults being those of excess in honesty. Therefore, it would be quite unnatural in him to be unmoved by the warnings of an honest friend, warnings offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a sense of a friend's duty,  any husband would have been troubled by them. 

Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his bosom-friend. But he was newly married; in the circumstances he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can give glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream. 

This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In Othello's case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an Italian, nor even European; that he is totally ignorant of the thoughts and the customary morality of venetian women; that he had himself seen in Desdemona's deception of her father how perfect an actress she could be. These suggestions are followed by a tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally temporary, preference for a black man. However, in spite all of those situations and suggestions, still he is not jealous, he furiously demands proof, ocular proof. When he gets the proof of the handkerchief; the "madness of revenge" is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never knew.

The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never complete in this act, but he is much changed. So, in the Fourth Act 'Chaos has come', for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on; his insight into othello's nature taught him that his plan was to deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the confusion of the first shock. When Othello forgot the handkerchief incident; he told him another lie that Cassio himself confessed to Iago his guilt (relation with Desdemona).

The delay till night is torture to him. Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words:

"It is the cause, it is the cause my soul,"

is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to is not a murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honor and in love. His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place.

"This sorrow's heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love."

Desdemona's character:

Innocence, gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the principal traits in Desdemona's character. Coleridge, and still more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his 'visage' offered to her romantic passion for a hero. Desdemona, the 'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint, radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about universal brotherhood, and no phrases about 'one blood in all the nations of the earth' or 'barbarian, Scythian, bond and free'; but when her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took part with it, and 'loved him with the love which was her doom.' It was not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.

There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to Shakespeare's meaning, and to realize how extraordinary and splendid a thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail fortune with such a 'downright violence and storm' as is expected only in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. She tends to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic of Shakespeare's women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola, yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears passive and defenseless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world.

Desdemona does not shrink before the senate; and her language to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter's loss. 

When she is murdered, she defended her lover Othello so when Emilia asked her: 

"O, who hath done this deed?" She answered her:
"Nobody, I myself. Farewell.
Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!"

Iago's evil character:

Evil has nowhere else been portrayed with such mastery as in the character of Iago. However, there is a false interpretation of his character which falls into two groups.

First group: 

1) Iago is simply a man who has been slighted and revenges himself.

2) A Husband who believes he has been wronged and will make his enemy suffer a jealousy worse than his own.

3) Ambitious man determined to ruin his successful rival.

4) A combination of these, endowed with unusual ability and cruelty.

This group contains the more popular views; however, the second group though much smaller it contains much weightier matter than the first.

Second group:

1) Iago is a being who hates good simply because it is good, and loves evil purely for itself.

2) Coleridge: His action is not prompted by any plain motive like revenge, jealousy or ambition. It springs from a "motiveless malignity", or a disinterested delight in the pain of others; and Othello, Cassia and Desdemona, are scarcely more than the material requisite for the full attainment of this delight.

Bradley opposed those criticisms and required two warnings before interpreting Iago's character:

Iago's nationality: it has been held that he is a study of that peculiarly Italian form of villainy which is considered both too diabolical for an Englishman.

Not to believe a syllable Iago utters: on any subject, including himself, until one has tested his statement by comparing it with known facts and with other statements of his own or of other people, and by considering whether he had his own or of other people, and by considering whether he had in the particular circumstances any reason for telling a lie or a truth.

Iago was a venetian soldier eight-and-twenty years of age, who had seen a good deal of service and had a high reputation for courage. We are ignorant of his origin, but he was not of gentle birth or breeding.

He was married to a wife who evidently lacked refinement, and who appears in the drama in the relation of a servant to Desdemona. His manner was that of a blunt, bluff soldier, who spoke his mind freely and plainly. Seeing that his satire was humorous, that on serious matters he did not speak lightly, and that the one thing perfectly  obvious about him was his honesty. "Honest' is the word that springs to the lips of everyone who knows him. It is applied to him some fifteen times in the play.

In fact, he was one of those sterling men who, in disgust at gush, say cynical things which they do not believe, and then, the moment you are in trouble, put in practice the very sentiment they had laughed at.

Even his wife doesn't suspect him, her nature was not very delicate or scrupulous about trifles. She never dreamed he was a villain, and there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of her belief that he was heartily sorry for Cassio's disgrace. Even when the idea strikes her that some scoundrel has poisoned Othello's mind, the tone of all her speeches and her mention of the rogue who (she believes) had stirred up Iago's jealousy of her, prove beyond doubt the thought Iago's being the scoundrel has not crossed her mind. Even if Iago had betrayed much more of his true self to his wife than to others, it would make no difference to the contrast between his true self and the self he presented to the world in general.

What further conclusion can be drawn from this contrast?

Iago was able to find a certain relief from the discomfort of hypocrisy in those caustic or cynical speeches which, being misinterpreted, only heightened confidence in his honesty. They acted as a safety-value, very much as hamlet's pretended insanity did. He was by no means a man of strong feelings and passions, but decidedly cold by temperament. Even so, his self-control was wonderful, but there never was in him any violent storm to be controlled. Although he was thoroughly selfish and unfeeling, was not by nature malignant nor even morose, but, on the contrary he had a superficial good-nature, the kind of good-nature that wins popularity and is often taken as the sign, of a good heart.

The tragedy of othello is his tragedy too. it shows us not a violent man, who spends his life in murder, but a bad cold man who is at last tempted to let loose the forces within him and is at once destroyed.

Iago's inner man:

He has very remarkable powers both of intellect and will.

Intellect:

- Iago's insight, within certain limits, into human nature.

- His ingenuity and address in working upon it.

- His quickness and versatility in dealing with sudden difficulties and unforeseen opportunities.

Will:

- He seems to be master of all the motions that might affect his will.

(Ex: In the most dangerous moments of his plot, when the least slip or accident would be fatal, he never shows a trace of nervousness).

(Ex:When Othello takes him by the throat he merely shifts his part with his usual instantaneous adroitness).

- He is equally unassailable by the temptations of indolence or of sensuality.

- It is difficult to imagine him inactive and though he has an obscene mind, and doubtless took his pleasures when and how he chose, he certainly took them by choice and not from weakness, and if pleasure interfered with his purposes the holiest of ascetics would not put it more resolutely by "What should I do?"

Roderigo: "I confess it is my shame to be so fond; but it is not in my virtue to amend it".

Iago answers: "Virtue! a fig! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus

                        I all depends on our will.

                  Love is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will"

- He is the lordship of the will, which is his practice as well as his doctrine, is great, almost sublime.

In intellect and in will Iago is great.

To what end does he use these great powers?

- He has a definite creed: absolute egoism is the only rational and proper attitude, and that conscience or honor or any kind of regard for others is an absurdity. He doesn't deny that it exists.

- He appears, when we meet him, to be almost destitute of humanity, of sympathetic or social feeling.

- He shows no trace of affection, and in presence of the most terrible suffering he shows either pleasure or an indifference.

- We shouldn't ignore the extraordinary deadness of feeling, but it is also important not to confuse it with a general positive ill-will. When Iago has no dislike or hostility to a person he does not show pleasure in the suffering of that person: he shows at most the absence of pain.

What is it that provokes his dislike or hostility?

Certainly he is devoted to himself. However, what is clear is that Iago is keenly sensitive to anything that touches his pride or self-esteem. He has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for others. Whatever disturbs or wounds his sense of superiority irritates him at once. This is the reason of his jealousy of Emilia. He doesn't care for his wife; but the fear of another man's getting the better of him, and exposing him to pity or derision as an unfortunate husband. He has a spite against goodness in men, not from any love of evil for evil's sake, but partly because it annoys his intellect as a stupidity; partly, because it weakens his satisfaction with himself, and disturbs his faith that egoism is the right and proper thing, partly because, the world being such a fool, goodness is popular and prospers. But he, a man ten times as able as Cassio or even Othello, does not greatly prosper. This wound his pride. Those feelings are constantly present in him.

The rise of Iago's tragedy:

Why did he act as we see him acting in the play?

He says more than once that he "hates" Othello. He gives two reasons for his hatred. The first reason is that Othello has made Cassio lieutenant. The second is that he suspects and heard it reported, that Othello has an intrigue with Emilia. There is Cassio, he never says he hates cassia, but he finds in him three causes of offense. First, Cassio has been preferred to him. Second, he suspects him too of an intrigue with Emilia. Third, Cassio has a daily beauty in his life which makes Iago ugly.

Is the account which Iago gives of the causes of his action the true account?

The answer of the popular view "yes". (Coleridge and Hazlitt)

Iago is impelled by passions, a passion of ambition and a passion of hatred.

Coleridge says: "it is a motive-hunting."

Hazlitt says: He is an amateur of tragedy in real life."

Bradley's view: The very honor of him he has less passion than an ordinary man, and yet he does these frightful things.Iago did not clearly understand what was moving his desire; though he tried to give himself reasons for his actions. Once he appears to see something of the truth when he uses the phrase "to plume up my will in double knavery", he means to heighten the sense of power or superiority.

This seems to be the unconscious motive of many acts of cruelty which evidently do not spring chiefly from ill-will. His thwarted sense of superiority wants satisfaction. "What fuller satisfaction could it find than the consciousness that he is the master of the generals who has undervalued him and of the rival who has been preferred to him; that these worthy people, who are so successful and popular and stupid are mere puppets in his hands, but living puppets, who at the motion of his finger must contort themselves in agony while all the time they believe that he is their one true friend and comforter?

Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is the strongest of the forces that drive him on. Moreover, Iago's pleasure in action is very difficult and perilous, and therefore intensely exciting. The fact that a single slip will cost him his life increases his pleasure. Pleasure and action makes the hours seen short:

"By the mass, 'tis morning."

Delight in the exercise of artistic skill: He is not simply a man of action; he is an artist. His action is a plot, the intricate plot of a drama, and in the conception and exception of it he experiences the tension and the joy of artistic creation. Such then, seem to be the chief ingredients of the force which liberated by his resentment at Cassio's promotion, drives Iago from inactivity into action and sustains him through it. This force completely possesses him; it is his fate. Which is himself has completely mastered him, in the later scene, where the improbability of the entire success of a design built on so many falsehoods forces itself on the reader, Iago appears as a man absolutely infatuated and delivered over to certain destruction.

In conclusion, Iago's failure in perception is closely connected with his badness. He was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the power of love. He was destroyed by this power because he could not understand it and was not in him. Iago never meant his plot to be so dangerous to himself. He knew that jealousy is painful, but the jealousy of a love like Othello's he could not imagine, and he found himself involved in murders which were no part of his original design.

Othello: Characteristics of the Shakespearean Tragedy

What is the peculiarity of Othello? What is the distinctive impression that it leaves?

A tragic figure, according to the classic definition, is a person of noble birth whose character is flawed by a weakness that causes his downfall. Othello's flaw is a passion he cannot control, he is slow to anger, but once he is angered, his passion overwhelms his good sense. He kills his wife as a result of his passion, and eventually himself. The waste of his life, full of promise and noble intentions, represents the tragedy of the play.

Othello is a tragedy of passion, for it is the most painfully exciting and most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader's heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation. 

Othello is not only the most masterly of the tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is unusual. And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension. 

In the second place, there is no subject more exciting than sexual jealousy rising to the pitch of passion and driven by it to a crime which is also a hideous blunder. Jealousy and specially sexual jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and humiliation. For this reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we ourselves are ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it commonly stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor this is all. Such jealousy as Othello's converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in man; and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also the most ideal of human feelings. What spectacle can be more painful than that of this feeling turned into a tortured mixture of longing and loathing, the 'golden purity' of passion split by poison into fragments, the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness in naked grossness, and he writhing before it but powerless to deny it entrance, gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a bestial thirst for blood? This is what we have to witness in one who was indeed 'great of heart' and no less pure and tender than he was great. And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona, and the scene where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far more painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special effect of the tragedy. 

The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all, the suffering of Desdemona. She is helplessly passive. She can do nothing whatever. She She can't retaliate even in speech; no, not even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute.

Turning from the hero and heroine to the third principal character, we observe that the action and catastrophe of Othello depend largely on intrigue. Iago's plot is Iago's character in action, and it is built on his knowledge of Othello's character where he could not otherwise have succeeded. Still it remains true that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the catastrophe; for Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to endanger such jealousy from itself. Accordingly Iago's intrigue occupies a position in the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other tragedies; the only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of Edmund in the secondary plot of King Lear. Now in any novel or play, even if the persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a skillfully-worked intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense. And where, as in Othello, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the source of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure. Nowhere else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so long a time as in the later Acts of Othello. 

One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that Othello is less unlike story of private life than any other of the great tragedies. And this impression is strengthened in in further ways. In the other great tragedies the action is placed in a distant period, so that its general significance is perceived through a thin veil which separates the persons from ourselves and our own world. But Othello is a drama of modern and contemporary life. The characters come close to us, and the application of the drama to ourselves is more immediate than it can be in Hamlet or Lear. It is less unlike story of private life than any other of the great tragedies. In great tragedies action is placed in distant period. 

The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce those feelings of oppression, of confinement to a comparatively narrow world, and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading Othello. In Macbeth the fate which works itself out alike in the external conflict and in the hero's soul, is obviously hostile to evil; and the imagination is dilated both by the consciousness of its presence and by the appearance of supernatural agencies. In Othello, after the temptation has begun, it is incessant and terrible. The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good fortune. Again and again a chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting of Othello and Casino, a question which starts to our lips and which anyone but Othello would have asked, would have destroyed Iago's plot and ended his life. In their stead, Desdemona drops her handkerchief at the moment most favorable to him, Cassino blunders into the presence of Othello only to find him in swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when she is wanted to complete Othello's deception and incense his anger into fury. When all the accident happens, there is no escape from fate, and even with a feeling, absent from that play, that fate has taken sides with villainy. It is not surprising, therefore, that Othello should affect us as Hamlet and Macbeth never do, and as King Lear does only in slighter measure. On the contrary, it is marvelous that, before the tragedy is over, Shakespeare should have succeeded in toning down this impression into harmony with others more solemn and serene.  

The Wings of the Dove By Henry James : A Study of the Point of View

Point of view signifies the way a story gets told-the mode (or modes) established by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events, which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction.

It is manifested in the person who tells the story a person who may be either the author himself speaking in his own voice or a fictional voice created by the author.

The analysis of point of view attempts to identify the voice to determine the qualities and characteristics of the speaker behind it, and also to determine the relationship between speaker and the narrative or argument: Henry James's Preface to his various novels made point of view of the most prominent and persistent concerns in modern treatment of the art of prose fiction: -James, who regarded the novel as a work of art and was therefore greatly concerned with questions of technique, always deplored the formlessness of omniscient narrative. Also, he rejected the first-person narrative because of "the terrible fluidity of self-relative" it entails.

Thus, he originated a new concept of narrative point of view which he called "The Central Consciousness." It is the perceiving mind and eye of one of the characters involved in the novel - Kate, Dencher, and especially Milly. The story is thus one of gradual revelation and the reader becomes involved not in the events themselves, but in the characters' consciousness of them.

In "The Wings of the Dove," the omniscient point of view dominates the characters' subjectives point of view and remains consistent till the end. This is because the characters themselves rarely speak and James has to do all the talking through his own persons. This omniscient point of view proves to be reliable since whatever we are told is revealed through the characters' verbal and physical actions.

This novel is the story of the European experience of America. The American side is represented by the character (Milly Theale) who is exposed to the European society with its shallow, superficial, and materialistic people. Milly can't be other than a unitary manifestation-a focal point. Her qualities are revealed clearly in interview, with Kate Croy, Lord, Mark, and finally with Merton Dencher.

To the narrator, as well as to the characters, Milly is a "poor American girl." She looms on the consciousness of the other persons as an image of the moral beauty, strikes them as conscience, and teaches them a new possible, impossible mode of love in which conscience and moral beauty are joined. Aunt Maud worships the very air she breathes, and is genuinely stricken when she hears of the death of the poor "mon-eyed darling".

Kate Croy is genuinely enchanted with Milly. According to Kate, Milly is identified primarily with her fortune. To Dencher, she is the "little American girl" and he treats her with the tenderest deference.

Lord Mark regards Milly at the dinner party as an American object to be taken"irreclaimably for granted." Milly Theale's English friends touch upon the subject of what they call her good luck. Her "good luck" is simply her money, which they desire, and this is one of the characteristic features of the English of that class. At the beginning Milly knows nothing of these material pressures: her innocence springs from a fatal ignorance of the complex world of Lancaster Gate. But as the story advances, she acquires her knowledge in the most incidental flashes.

In fact, the characters' point of view towards Milly can determine the metaphorical space which is an aspect of the style. For example, the word "Dove", which is a central metaphor, is a symbol. It is introduced not through an omniscient point of view, but through a subjective point of view, that of Dencher. This is his initial subjective perception of Milly, what James is doing that he is giving the chance to language to functioning this particular manner. The character who introduces the dove is capable of evaluating his perception of the world, and he is also capable of transforming perception of Metaphor. Also Kate, in her chats with Milly, goes so far in "her own shades of familiarity" as to use the endearment "duck". Under such pet's names, Milly is petted, patronized, and manipulated. In this case, Kate and Dencher become identical in their perception of Milly and their transformation of her into a symbol. However, Milly views her English friends with a look of intelligence despite their shallow and superficial appearance. Milly says that Kate "lets herself go, in irony, in confidence, in extravagance" on those qualities of the American Mind. Milly follows it, and participates in it, with intelligence, an appreciation of all Kate's finest shades of veracity. It seems that Milly's point of view determines the language she employs. Her description of Kate is her perception of her.

In fact, it is intended to illuminate the complexities of Kate's own nature (her boldness and audacity) and to show that she is Milly Theale's American ignorance and innocence that in the first instance expose her to the destructive power of Lancaster Gate.

Milly is also aware of Dencher's indifference to her. By the time Dencher returns from America, she meets him and recognizes both how much she "likes" him and how much she regrets that he should share "the view" of her: "she could have dreamed of his not having the view, of his having something or other of his own." Then Milly becomes fully conscious of her own ultimate solitude amidst the buzz of admiration and adulation of the Lancaster Gate circle. It is this knowledge that adds the last intolerable weight to the burden of her self-consciousness. From this terror of Milly Theale's condition, all the characters withdraw. They are intelligent, but not intelligent enough to know what such a condition means.

In conclusion, by employing a number of points of view, James gives us the chance to see revelations about characters and their motivations without making any personal claim, but rather leaving the subject under discussion to the reader's intelligence without disconcerting appeals to his emotion which enables him to achieve a certain degree of objectivity and to assert the importance of point of view in determining style and language. He desired to be absent from his creation, yet deep down he knows that he is present on every page. "The Wings of the Dove" holds a symbol of Jamesian consciousness, a symbol as moving as it is inclusive. When the dove dies, she is gathered up into James's own consciousness. Milly's fate and her forgiveness, hidden from us as they are, are deeply moving, but they remain humanly subject to what James called "variations of interpretation".

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce: A Critical Analysis

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man deals with the universal theme of the conflict of generations. It also deals with the growth of an artist who has to renounce social, moral and religious conventions. Briefly speaking, this novel examines not only the collapse of the family as a social basic unit, but also the Irish nation as a backward country.

A Portrait belongs to the province of the autobiography because the novelist has changed incidents and distorted characters in order to serve his fictive needs.

Initiation into adulthood: 

Stephen Dedalus as he appears in Portrait is far from being a hero. Groping painfully toward some understanding of himself and his place in the world, he is sometimes laughable, sometimes pathetic. Yet, despite his human failings he has the courage to face the world alone. Joyce's concern is with the associative patterns arising in Stephen's mind from infancy into adolescence. He is concerned with these only as they show the dialectical process by which a world-shape evolves in the mind. The process is conducted in the absolute solitude inside the skull, for Stephen has no trust worthy help from the environment. The technique of stream of consciousness is the formal representation of that mental solitude. We follow in the circumstances of the boy's life the stages of breakdown and increasing confusion in his external environment, as his home goes to pieces. Very early the child's mind beans to respond to that confusion by seeking in itself some unifying from that will show him the logic of things. His mental images are associations suggested by the words he hears, he struggles to make the associations fit into a coherent pattern. To the very young child adults seem to know what everything means and how one thing is related to another.

Hugh Kenner has pointed out "In the first, the deeper conflict is that between his implicit trust in the authority of his elders, his Jesuit teachers, the older boys in the school, his father and his actual sense of insecurity. His elders, since they apparently know the meaning of things, must therefore incarnate perfect justice and moral consistency. But the child's real experience is of mad quarrels at home over Parnell and the priests, and at school the frivolous cruelty of the boys."

There is a shadowy guilty thing the boy has done for which he must apologize, else eagles will pull out his eyes? In this extremely short sequence at the beginning of the book, the child's sense of insecurity is established, and with insecurity, guilt and fear. Immediately there is a transition to the children's playground at Clongowes Wood, the child earliest experience of a community other than that of the home.

In the episode in which Stephen is beaten for heresy, the immediate community of his school fellows shows itself as false stupid and sadistic. On the visit to the Cork, Stephen early dim apprehension of sin and guilt is raised into horrible prominence by the word "Foetus" which he sees inscribed on the desk at Queens College and which symbols for him all his adolescent monstrosity. Meanwhile, his idealistic longings for beauty and purity have concentrated in a vaguely erotic fantasy of the dream girl Mercedes in her rose cottage.

As Stephen matures there is, mounted on the early association between the virgin and Eileen; an identification between his dream Mercedes and a whore. By extension, this association holds in it much of Stephen's struggle between other-worldliness and this worldliness, for it has identified in his imagination flesh and spirit, while his intellect, developing under education, rebels against the identification.

Chapter 4 shows him absorbed in a dream of a saintly career, but his previous emotional affirmation has been wasted away in the performance of formal acts of piety, and he is afflicted with insecurities, and rebellions. Release from conflict comes with a clear refusal of a vocation in the church, objectified by his decision to enter the university. And again it is on a walk that he realizes the measure of the new reality and the new destiny.

After his first successful self assertion, his protest against the injustice of father Dolan, he is described "alone", "happy and free". This series of associations shows that the religious life is ultimately as hostile to Stephens's needs as is the life of worldly self-indulgence exemplified by his brief career in the brothels and also by the equally self-indulgent career of his father. The kinds of life associated with the images of stagnation has one characteristic in common: they seem to Stephen to threaten his freedom of spirit.

Hugh Kenner says, "ultimately, as the insistent climax of the overture shows, its central theme is sin: the development of Stephen Dedalus from a bundle of sensations to a matured, self conscious, dedicated being. In Stephen's aesthetic formulation, the names he borrows from Aquinas are names for those aspects of reality-wholeness, harmoniousness that he has been seeking all his life, from earliest childhood.

The technical devices:

In a time of cultural crisis, when traditional values no longer seem to match with the actualities of experience, and when all reality is thrown into questions, the mind turns inward on itself to seek the shape of reality there. Joyce's Portrait is an investigation of the creative effects of language upon life, for the artist at the end to find his vocation in language. The auditory impression is predominant in the novel, sounds heard, words spoken - and the life directed attempt of the young mind is to understand their meaning in relation to each other and in relation to a governing design. Through words the world comes to Stephen, through the words he hears he gropes his way into other people's images of reality. Doubts and anxieties arise because the words and phrases are disassociated, their context frequently arbitrary.

The technique of the stream of consciousness is a formal aspect of the book which reflects the boy's extreme spiritual isolation. There is a logical suitability in the fact that this type of technique should arise at a time when society failed to give objective validation to inherited belief, and when all meanings, values, and sanctions have to be built up from scratch in the loneliness of the individual mind. Joyce's concern is with the associative patterns arising in Stephen's mind from infancy into adolescence. He is concerned with these only as they show the dialectical process by which a world-shape evolve in the mind. The process is conducted in the absolute solitude of the inside of the skull, for Stephen has no trust worthy help from the environment. This technique is the formal representation of that mental solitude.

Those moments in the dialectical process when certain phrases or sensations suddenly cohere and a meaning shines forth from the whole, Joyce called epiphanies. They are showing forth of the nature of reality as the boy is prepared to grasp it. Minor epiphanies mark all the stages of Stephen's understanding, as when the feel of Eileen's hands show him. What tower of ivory means, or as when the word "foetus", suddenly focuses for him his monstrous way of life. Major epiphanies mark the chief revelations of the nature of his environment and of his destiny in it. The story Davin tells Steve about stopping at night at the cottage of a peasant woman, and Stephen's image of the woman is for him an epiphany of the soul of Ireland, "a bat like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and in secrecy and loneliness".

The artist is a midwife of epiphanies. Joyce's doctrine of the epiphany assumes that reality does have wholeness and harmony, and that it will radiantly show forth its meaning to the prepared consciousness, for it is only in the body of reality that meaning can occur and only there that the artist can find it.

Twelfth Night: William Shakespeare's Comedy of Love

Twelfth Night, comedy by William Shakespeare, which was probably written around 1600. As an example of a play written during Shakespeare's second period, which included his English history plays and so-called joyous comedies, Twelfth Night presents a happy balance of plot, characterization, and diction. The main plot is derived from an Italian novella and deals with the hapless love of Viola, disguised as a page, for her master, who at once falls in love with her. When Viola's twin brother Sebastian appears, Olivia mistakes him for the page and marries him. The tangled situation is cleared up when brother and sister meet and recognize each other; the Duke rewards Viola's devotion by his offer of marriage, and all ends happily. 

This romantic story is set against a background of daily life in Olivia's household, crowded with realistic figures: Olivia's conceited steward, Malvolio; into believing that Olivia loves him, and his absurd behavior results in his temporary confinement as a madman. Feste, a singing fool, wanders back and forth between the households of Olivia and the Duke, observing the comical confusion with a cynical eye. Twelfth Night begins with music and ends with a song. 

Criticism on Twelfth Night: 

In Twelfth Night each individual is locked in his own private understanding and his ability to escape from himself and share experiences with others is limited. The sense of community is weaker than in Midsummer Night's Dream & As you Like It. We are aware of each character as an individual, out on his own, the lovers trying to make contact, but with limited success, and the comic figures either openly hostile or forming relationships based on temporary expediency. 

The solitude of the lovers results from their experience of unrequited love, an experience that leaves them frustrated and restless. Throughout Shakespeare, the sea suggests both destruction and new life; in Orsino's mind, however, the ideas are held not in balance but in confusion. 

Language:
The foibles of the characters are shown through the way they misuse words, and are trapped by words. Orsino turns everything into verbal fantasies, to feed his desire for sensation. For Orsino, all activities (including love) are swallowed up by the language that expresses them, and the result is a life of words alone, with no hope of action. Malvolio also creates a fantasy world, and bends language to this purpose. When convinced of Olivia's love, he takes even "fellow" as a term of endearment. Feste and Viola, who both depend on words-one as a professional wit, the other as a messenger of love-see the dangers of the medium on which they rely.

For all these characters, language is not a means of escaping from the private self, and making contact with others; it is rather a means of defining the self and confirming its privateness-one more barrier erected against the reality of the world outside. When Viola is sent to Olivia by Orsino to tell his love and adoration, she asks her "how does he love me?" the last question suggests, for all her joking about the conventional language of love, Olivia has become fascinated by Viola's eloquence and wants to hear more.

Comic figures:

The comic figures operates in quite a different way, and their scenes are dramatically simpler. There is no subtext, for there are no hidden depths of feeling: the self-indulgence, pretension and the mutual hostility are out in the open. In addition, while the lovers struggle with misunderstandings, they have not created and cannot solve themselves, the misunderstandings of the comic plot, centered on Malvolio, are deliberately manufactured by Maria and her cohorts. The barriers that separate people are actually fortified and the hostility bet. Malvolio and the rest of the household has a sharpness unusual among shakes comic figures.

Plot:
However, the final crucial difference between the two plots lies in the manner of their respective endings. The deception of the love plot are partly the result of chance, and chance can take a hand in resolving them. But the deceptions of the comic plot are manmade, the result of fixed, antagonistic, personalities. And there is no easy or satisfying solution for this plot. After our initial amusement, we become aware of the inherent cruelty of the jokes against Malvolio. When Malvolio is shut in a dark room, begging for light, we see the victim's sufferings a little too clearly, and our laughter acquires an edge of distaste. The jokers reaction when their victim is down is to hit him again.

Malvolio in his dark room is the play's most vivid image of the trapped, isolated self. Egotism and loveless solitude are a kind of damnation, and the imprisoned Malvolio is our clearest image of this. The two characters are mirror opposites. Malvolio, assured of Olivia's love, is the victim of a conventional comic deception in which his senses betray him; Sebastian, actually presented with Olivia's love, wonders if it is a fantastic illusion. Malvolio insists, vainly, that he is not mad. Sebastian thinks too, but with greater hesitation wondering whether to trust his senses or not.

The comic plot: is conventionally full of false images: Maria's letter, Feste's disguise, Sir Toby's description of Sir Andrew as a dangerous swordsman. Thus, when Malvolio adopts the external shows of love, in yellow stockings, cross-gartered and relentlessly smiling, the result is simply absurd.

The romantic plot: operates by a different set of rules. Throughout the romantic plot, a trust in appearances, though it may lead to temporary confusion, is justified in the long run. To Orsino, Cesario looks like a woman; he is a woman. To Olivia, he looks like a man; he is a man. This trust in images is made possible by the special handling of the figure of Cesario, in which the extension of personality implied in disguise is taken further, and exploited in a more daring way, than in any previous comedy of Shakespeare's.

Clifford Leech describes the ending as "and exposure of the triviality of human desire."

Philip Edwards concludes that the union of the lovers is treated sardonically, Shakespeare having become tired of such endings.

Sebastian, the agent of release for the lovers, has given the knight nothing but a sound beating. Sir Toby's false friendship for Sir Andrew has collapsed.

Malvolio, like Viola, has seen himself in the hands of a benevolent fate:

'Well, Jove, not I, is the doer of this, and he is to be thanked.

To Feste's "thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges," Malvolio replies I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you."

This kind of tension is basic to Shakespearian comedy: it is at bottom a tension between stylized and realistic art. The lovers, having engaged our feelings as human beings, are now fixed in a harmony we can believe in only by trusting the power of fantasy; the clowns, stylized in their own way at first, have lost some of the immunity of comedy and now present an image of defeat that is uncomfortably real.

The tension is resolved, unexpectedly, in Feste's last song. It seems at first to belong to the vision of the comic plot. Feste sings of our decay through time, from the folly of childhood to the knavery of manhood to a drunken collapse in old age. The lovers have disappeared, and there is a solitary figure on stage. His experience, as often in the comedies, is linked to ours through the medium of nature-this time the wind and the rain. Yet before we sink too easily into melancholy, the song concludes:'But that's all one, our play is done, And we'll strive to please you every day.'

In Twelfth Night the triumph of love is put at a distance as a strange and special miracle that cannot touch everyone, but the vision of decay that opposes it is also, in the last analysis, one more illusion, part of a play. The one thing that is permanent is the work of art itself.