Meta-Chaos
Shake-Speare and Games
Geoffrey Hamilton
March 23, 1997
An endless and unofficial war of taste between camps of realists and
meta fictionalists which surfaces today over programs like The Simpsons and movies
like Brazil, seems to have begun with Aristotle and Plato, but within the plays of
Shakespeare, a kind of peace between the camps was made. Shakespeare's art within
Midsummer-Night's Dream and King Lear is a marriage between self-referential and
self-transcendent forms which both acknowledges its own artifice and attempts
to transcend itself to show, among other things, how artifice reflects the real
world in order to make chaos meaningful.
Playing with all the attendant associations of the above task forms the backbone of that
assertion, and the genres of comedy and tragedy function to
expose the absurdity of life
and the also the purposelessness of life, respectively.
Meta-artifice
in drama has a long history and it was Plato's attempt to find something
essential and edifying in drama which may be the first theory of meta-drama.
He argued that drama is something which should draw attention to itself
because it is potentially more perfect than nature. Aristotle responded
that drama should be imitative of nature and then claims the experience is about catharsis, and this began
the realist tradition. However, neither concept excludes the other if
the unifying frame of 'play' is used to make sense of drama and this
is what I believe forms the key to making sense of the seeming
contradiction in Shakespeare's art.
Within the concept of 'play' drama is primarily an action which
is what it is, an 'essence' itself -- play, not a reflection of reality but something real. Secondly
it is an experience which is edifying to some degree -- for even if a drama is dull we learn
not to see it again. Thirdly a playing with reality by mimicking the mind's interpretations
of reality
-- finally it is an actual experience which causes emotions.
Through the use of game playing as an analytical tool the two paradigms
can seem compatible.
Playing is an ancient and cross-species behavior,
but meta-playing is a fairly new kind of game, and a search for the origins of
meta-play will help demonstrate how Shakespeare's drama is a combination of something
self-referential and transcendent.
Play, as a serious concept with which
to view the world, began to gain respectability with J. Huizinga's
Homo Ludens in the 1930s. He posited and attempted to demonstrate that all
culture is purposeless play. He argued that as play is within a deterministic
universe, and yet just happens to mean something that is not deterministic,
then play must be outside nature: "In play there is something 'at play'
which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to
the action. All play means something".
However, Huizinga makes several mistakes. Among them he confuses universal
purposes and limited purposes. He doesn't see the limited purposes in play
and the role such limits could 'play' in the universe. Secondly he believed
in a determinism for a universe which is demonstrably chaotic. As a result
of his confusions he failed to see play as being only within games (limited
purposes) which creates the incidental meaning he describes. Meaning may not
match the universe, but chaos can be tamed through the meaning which play
creates. Thus the meaning play creates is not superfluous but essential to humanity
in a chaotic and irrational universe. This clarification becomes useful when I
come to Lear especially.
Huizinga's confusions allowed him
to position himself against Shakespeare's period in an attempt to prioritize his
own discovery: "...in the 17th century.... in a glittering succession of figures
ranging from Shakespeare and Calderon to Racine.... It was the fashion to liken
the world to a stage on which every man plays his part. Does this mean that the
play-element in civilization was openly acknowledged? Not at all. On closer
examination this fashionable comparison of
life to the stage proves to be little more than an echo of Neo-platonism"..
Though Huizinga may have been mistaken in other ways, Platonism was indeed
fashionable in this period.
And no one seems more fashionable to the
English of the period then Shakespeare's rival, Sir Philip Sidney. In his The Defense of English Posie
the echo of Platonism is made clear -- but so is the bridge to Aristotle: "There is no
art delivered unto mankind that hath not the works of nature as his principal
object .... Only the Poet disdaining to be tied to
any such subjection ... doth grow in effect into another nature: in making things
either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite new..." . With this book
Sidney makes it plain that coexistence is possible between the two paradigms, but that
he leans towards Plato's side.
So it is perhaps in response to Sidney's position
that Shakespeare paradoxically uses the metadrama opportunity which Sidney allows and
says as King Lear that "Nature's above art" in one respect: we are moved more by what
happens in our lives than what happens on stage (IV,vi,86).
It is this kind of positioning of Shakespeare's metadramatic commentary which
makes apparent that what he is doing with King Lear, and also with The
Midsummer-Night's Dream , is arguing that the chaos, which makes Sidney see nature
as inferior artistically, is what makes the whole of nature more significant than that
part of nature we call art.
Additionally, what Shakespeare does is explain the
uses of artifice in relation to the rest of nature. On a basic level the texts claim
that the relationship of the artifice of comedy to the chaos is to explain, within
illusion, the absurdity of the human relationship to nature.
In MSND Theseus clarifies the abilities of artifice, or the game, to
make what it wants out of the chaos. He complains about the players while referring to
Wall's speech: "Would you desire lime and hair to speak better" (V,i,167). And
about Quince Theseus says, "His speech was like a tangled chain; nothing impaired,
but all disordered" (V,i,126). Eventually Theseus makes a conclusion that it is
better to pretend that disorder is order: "If we imagine no worse of them than they
of themselves, they may pass for excellent men. Here come two noble beasts in, a man
and a lion" (V,i,220). Theseus has been complaining continually, but finally he has
willingly accepted the falsity of the lion (who is but a man) as natural -- this to
'make the most of a bad situation'. By this stroke he reorders the chaotic performance
in his own mind in a way that is both recognizing the disorder and also how artifice
can make chaos meaningful and useful.
Though he concludes that it is better
to have artifice then to not have it, he knows he is playing a game all along. He
demonstrates this earlier by choosing the worst players offered him then exclaiming:
"Our sport shall be to take what they mistake" (V,i,90). Theseus's game was the
complaining. In these passages Shakespeare has demonstrated, and explained metadramatically,
how and why games function within this genre, comedy, to offer both illusion and to
explain the use of illusion under which the absurdity of everything is the point.
However, this absurdity has the potential to become problematic and tragic if the
concept is extended into a revelation that it is purposeless to endure that chaos.
The tragedy in Lear is not the absurdity alone, as that only perplexes
the audience into something like laughter. Where the tragedy arrives is through the
argument of a purposelessness in the actions taken within or against that absurdity.
While Huizinga dismissed Neo-Platonism as not akin to play, such offerings
as the following passage explains why there is more to Neo-Platonism than he seems
to have perceived: Lear. "When we are born, we cry that we are come / To
this great stage of fools" (IV,vi,187). The passage is reflecting nature by commenting
on how what we do is a pointless game. This is hardly a Neo-Platonic bettering of
nature, though it is referring to its own artifice as having more in common with
nature than Sidney would allow.
More evidence for these positions comes
later. Egan explains the passage this way: "If our lives can be formalized in
art, then our parts are those of fools . . . ." . If our lives are indistinguishable
from art we are indeed fools to take life so seriously; and fools in this case would
be people who fail to see the absurdity and the lack of purpose, until those
illusions fail and, as with Lear, the failure becomes the only illusion left
to cling to: Cor. " How fares your majesty?" Lear. "You do me wrong
to take me out of the grave; Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molton lead. ! " (IV,vii,44)
His failure to maintain the illusion of order has left him the illusion of self
pity and little else.
In contrast to Lear's failure is Edgar's successful
game with his father. Edgar plays out the suicide game of Gloucester and Gloucester
plays along.
Shakespeare acknowledges the healing power of illusion by having Edgar
motivated by a desire to heal: Edgar "Why I do trifle thus with his despair
Is done to cure it" (IV,vi,35).
An experiment carried out in the
seventies called the Stanford prison experiment (Zimbardo -- a two week role playing
experiment was called off in six days because no one could distinguish their prison
roles from reality) showed that an illusion can be consciously played and yet still
become indistinguishable from 'reality'. This human ability shows, not so much that
we are being foolish to take illusions as real, but that the real may be illusion.
Also whatever meaning is adopted need not be real or true for it to function as real
(Quirks and Quarks, CBC March 22, 97); all that matters is that the purposelessness
is not recognized. Egan makes this point in regard to the mock trial scene (III,vi):
When Sidney said that art is better then nature he may have had this
idea behind his pretension, art consciously makes an imperfect world seem perfect.
However art is not always above nature's power. When Cordelia is brought
to the stage dead, and Lear has gone mad again, Kent and Edgar comment respectively:
"Is this the promis'd end?" / "Or image of that horror?"(V,iii,265). They are
referring not only to the apocalypse, but to the promise and horror of the chaos
all around their existence during the play.
By this speech they talk through a
crack in this non-comic 'wall' of illusion and act as though they never really
believed in anything else. They talk as though they had only been waiting for
nature to demonstrate its mastery over illusion.
How artifice fails is from the result of a battle of contexts. Whereas
in the Stanford case there was a strong enough game context to succeed in
convincing the participants that it was worth playing as real, the participants
in Lear are not cradled enough by the game for the game to succeed
completely as illusion. The way the play's survivors devalue the game and then
try to abandon their inheritance makes this evident:
Albany ." . . .
you twain Rule in this realm, and the gor'd state sustain." Kent.
"I have a journey, sir, shortly to go. My master calls me, I must not say no." (V,iii,322)
It seems intentional that Shakespeare has them not entirely
convinced that there was a just and ordered ending, for this seems to be the
'reason' for Lear : to make sure there is no illusion for the characters,
nor for the audience, to cling on to at the end. If the character's cannot cling,
and the audience knows why they cannot cling through the metadrama, then the
audience is made less able to identify with any illusion.
The metadrama gives a reason why the audience should be denied the
illusion -- denied purpose at the end -- for as Hamlet calls fortune a
strumpet, so Gloucester demonstrates that we all are to. First he claims we are
flies killed by gods for sport, then, when he is seduced by fortune's
coin -- morality, he calls to the "ever-gentle gods" for continuing
comfort.
In the last of his lines, just as his ever-gentle gods
begin to disappear from his life, he acknowledges that nature's illusion is
a necessary seduction: "Better I were distract: / So should my thoughts be
sever'd from my griefs, / And woes by wrong imaginations lose the knowledge
of themselves".
The illusions are juxtaposed with
the chaos of daughters, sons, storms, failed battles, accidental slaughters,
and chance meetings, and doing so makes the illusions pathetic and purposeless.
Additionally, Lear's growth toward's empathy and reconciliation is made pointless,
as is the whole play, by Cordelia's death, his own death, and especially by the non
sequitur moral at the very end of the play: that we should say what we feel
not what we ought to say, and other glib phrases.
The power of human illusions
in nature is made superfluous, and so, as nature is above art, and artifice is
indistinguishable from the natural, it seems that when nature is crushing human
artifice and ineffective cliche is all that is left of the illusion, it is nature
who is made to be the greater artist. What could be called the bathos of
King Lear is instead the triumph of chaos, the rack of this tough world.
Finally, while the literary turf war between meta and transcendant forms
seems an important area of literary study and Shakespeare is made the trophy in
this custody case, it seems likely that, like Theseus, there is sport being made
of what they mistake.
GRH
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