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Viola’s Telemachy
- Edited by Emma Smith, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey 75
- Published online:
- 24 August 2022
- Print publication:
- 08 September 2022, pp 281-286
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Summary
From the earliest days, the Homeric poems have been read as educative models, and in particular the Telemachy of the Odyssey has offered a version of paideia (education, learning) in the moral education of Telemachus, as he is prepared, and prepares himself, to aid his father on Odysseus’ return and, over all, to be a fitting heir. In varying degrees, that theme of educative growth continued through the romance tradition that descended from the Odyssey.1 We teachers of literature have often thought of ourselves as imitating the pedagogical role of Athene and her mortal disguises in the shapes of Mentes and, especially, Mentor, as she provides an educative guide for Telemachus during his process of maturation. Shakespeare the dramatist in some ways participates in this broadly didactic tradition of literature, and indeed he repeatedly studies youth in the process of maturation, from his extended portrayal of Prince Hal in the history plays through his greatly foreshortened but vivid picture of Miranda in The Tempest, although his Mentor figures are perhaps harder to take seriously than his youths. One thinks of such inept pedagogical guides as Holofernes, Falstaff, Polonius and Volumnia. If there is any historicity at all in the legend of Shakespeare as country schoolmaster who turned to playwrighting, that early experience must have left him with considerable scepticism about the pedagogical role of moral guide, to judge from his dramatic portrayals of mentors.
Mapping King Lear
- Edited by Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame, Indiana
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 November 2009
- Print publication:
- 22 October 2009, pp 308-316
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An older generation of critics frequently talked about the world of King Lear as a sort of framework within which the characters and events of the play exist. By drawing on early modern conventions of constructing and using maps, John Gillies's commentary in Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference offers a new vocabulary for talking about this creation of a space within which the tragedy is worked out. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a great age of map-making, in part as they dealt with the discovery, exploration and colonization of the New World. Gillies argues that the Globe Theatre itself, in which King Lear had its early productions, was 'a kind of map: a quasi-cartographic product of the same type of cosmographic imagination which produced the world maps of Ortelius and Mercator'. Gillies justifies calling the Globe a map by applying J. B. Harley's definition of maps as 'graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world'. It is sometimes assumed that the movement toward new, more accurate modes of geographic representation in early modern map-making entailed a movement away from expressive representation, as in older maps, toward an objective, scientific kind of map; but Gillies argues persuasively that maps down even to the present remain full of expressive content, though precisely what is expressed may change in different maps with different social roles. What then is it that was mapped for an audience in 1607 or 2007 as they attended to King Lear?
Shakespeare and the Ten Modes of Scepticism
- Edited by Stanley Wells, University of Birmingham
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
- Published online:
- 28 March 2007
- Print publication:
- 16 December 1993, pp 145-158
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Shakespeare as a thinker is notoriously hard to pin down. One can use the critical pronouncements of Ben Jonson or John Milton to interpret their works with some confidence, but for Shakespeare such pronouncements are hard to come by, and equivalent ideas within the plays and poems are veiled in dramatic irony or else tantalizingly incomplete. One could argue, as Bernard Shaw does, that Shakespeare's ideas are conventional and trivial, not worth recovering, even that he is hopelessly confused about the abstractions of philosophical thought and perhaps not very much interested in them. However, that is not a position to be taken without at least considering alternatives.
One school of thought that was in part rediscovered in Shakespeare's day shares this ironic elusiveness and taint of anti-intellectualism in the eyes of its opponents: the radical scepticism associated with the name Pyrrho of Elis. This philosophy as set forth in the manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus inspired Montaigne and others to take very seriously the teachings of Pyrrhonism as a means of living through an age of doubt and controversy about basic issues of philosophy and religion. Irony comes naturally to the Pyrrhonist, who uses the tools of rational analysis to undermine the claims of reason. My aim is to demonstrate some striking parallels with Pyrrhonist thought in Shakespeare's plays and poems and then to speculate (with more boldness than sceptical restraint) on the significance of those parallels. This is to associate Shakespeare with scepticism as many critics have done, but in a more specific way, aiming at what is distinctively Pyrrhonist.
‘Very like a whale’: Scepticism and Seeing in The Tempest
- Edited by Stanley Wells
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- Book:
- Shakespeare Survey
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- 28 March 2007
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- 09 January 1986, pp 167-174
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Even among Shakespeare's plays The Tempest inspires an unusual amount of confusion and multiple interpretation. Mark Van Doren finds his way through all the commentary to a less than helpful conclusion:' Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field. Its meaning, in other words, is precisely as rich as the human mind, and it says that the world is what it is.' Rather than offer still another reading, I want to look at the confusion as a phenomenon in the play itself, though some implications about meaning are likely to emerge despite my self-restraint.
One might consider the difficulty of The Tempest a non-problem, invented by modern hyper-ingenuity, but after all our difficulties of understanding are shared by the characters in the play. On looking from the critics back to the text, we may recognize ourselves in Prospero's diagnosis of Alonso's state: 'thy brains, / Now useless, boil'd within thy skull!' Alonso is not alone. Repeatedly characters do not know what to make of what they see, and when they think they understand something, they are frequently wrong. In the Renaissance the locus dassicus for analysing this kind of confusion in human affairs is Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebond, and it is a truism of modern criticism that Montaigne is one of the inspiring figures behind The Tempest.