Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
-The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
-Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5(Hegel = Shakespeare = tragic recognition)
There is no gentle foray into recognition. I will make the case that Shakespeare’s use of Anagnorisis in his Jacobean plays is in fact a structural commentary on theatric genre, performance, and an ironic glance into dramatic transience that culminates in historical transcendence of vanishing acts in literary recognition. Preliminarily, I will first outline the ways in which the anagoratic moment insofar as they each function in their own narrative contexts. After which, Shakespeare’s construction of this delivery will highlight two key elements of structural irony whereby the ostensible object of transience, the stage and the theatre, shows itself not as a theatrical concern at all, but rather one of critical human consciousness reflected in dramatic construction.
In Macbeth’s soliloquy, tragic recognition occurs strictly within the dramatic frame, wherein Macbeth realizes that he is neither the hero not the anti-hero, but a mere device around which the larger sound and fury of history, politics, and preternatural devices have teased his human drives to the abyssal limit. Once Macbeth reaches this limit, his recognition confirms an impossibility of retribution, or even of remaining human. Knowledge of self in act 5, scene 5 of this play, amounts to the loss of the imagined self-for-itself. In the phrase, “life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more,” Macbeth offers a comment that unlocks the field of the audience’s potential comprehension of the play. The walking shadow in the first and most general analysis, is Macbeth-the-character’s shadow, since he recognizes that his motives were not at all in-and-for-himself, but were dictated according to the general hysteria of phenomenological forces that he resisted since the first act. In fact, at this moment of critically-reflexive recognition, self-knowledge is only possible for Macbeth because the structural motor of the play (i.e. resisting the inevitability of the fates) has begun to break down for once and for all. When Macbeth receives news that Lady Macbeth has died, the illusion that drove the actions of the play grind to a screeching halt, and the audience/reader is keenly aware that Macbeth will die from the confirmation of his own transience rather than violence. Although Macduff kills Macbeth with his sword, Macduff should be understood rather as the dramatic vehicle of anagnorisis than a killer born of caesarian section. To be clear, the character that the audience/reader names “Macduff” is really the dramatic force that rounds out Macbeth’s final self-recognition so that he no longer has a current to run against as a protagonist or an antagonist. Thus, the wyrd sisters’ prophecy remains intact, no man born of a womb killed Macbeth, it was knowledge.
At this point, I must turn back to the line that I quoted, when Macbeth names (ostensibly himself) as the shadow across the stage, and consider the soliloquy from a different vantage point. The shadow that Macbeth alludes to is also in line with a certain ironic conception of literary characters. Macbeth the character is himself a shadow, an illusion of the play’s ephemeral quality propped up against the more morbid recognition of human transience in general. Here, tragic recognition is tragic because it connotes an illusion that is fully understood as an illusion, whereas it could only function if its motors were left uncovered.
Anagnorisis in Macbeth , then, is presented as the failure of critical and self-reflexive knowledge to linger at the core of human consciousness. The core of knowledge is precisely the abyssal limit that cloaked it in all instances before, and it revokes the right to spiritual persistence because it collapses motives and drives to point of destruction.
Switching gears brusquely, I turn to the second of Shakespeare’s examples of recognition. Here, however, I must defend my characterization of this part of the Romantic play as an episode of anagorisis from the outset, and in a bulky way that doesn’t do the piece justice. The term “anagnorisis” is a literary conception, and I am firmly aware of the fact that its use here will strike discordantly from within the dramatic structure of The Tempest,but I will insist that the locus of recognition shifts during Prospero’s fourth act from the implicitly human (characters who represent forms of humans) to the explicitly theatrical. Here is the soliloquy once again:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: and, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve and, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
This speech comes after the mini-masque wherein the gods descend and the spirits dance to mystical music. Prospero’s speech is an obvious invitation for the audience to contemplate the mysterious and seemingly omnipotent power of the author. Prospero’s motives are to Shakespeare what the narrator of free-indirect-discourse is to Flaubert: he is the function around which the most profound structural organization occurs. The cultivation of dramatic plot, recognition, and distilling human breaks in historical and social consciousness into dramatic form are the driving forces for Prospero. Therefore, dramatic recognition cannot occur on the terrain of “the character” since the character is the definition force behind the play’s narrative: the audience, however, is not beyond the scope of dramatic recognition. The actors who are all melted into spirits are ostensibly those in the mini-masque, as well as the dominant characters in The Tempest, as well.
None of these, however, indicate anagornisis; if anything, they contract tragic recognition. However, if Propero’s role in Tempest is understood as an ironic figure whose significant purpose is to induce the reader/audience’s dramatic recognition that literary “transience” and shadows on a stage are the most profound ways that history, hapless in shape and form, is reflected and transformed into the object of human knowledge (recognition)….
exam at 8am tomorrow have to go study but I want to talk about this more!
