A Bard's Story
macLean, aaron
A Bard's Story How Shakespeare dramatized man's fate. by Aaron MacLean The deathbed conversion can be a moment of comedy, grandeur, or disgrace, depending on who is describing it. One can...
...Those hammy moments of the Elizabethan stage when a character has a few words to share between the first spurt of theatrical blood and the last spotlit gasp are, according to Pack, charged with one of Shakespeare's principal insights into the human condition: that one's attitude toward fate—as opposed to one's attempts at altering it—may be the only true province of human volition...
...And when the dying Hamlet cries out to Horatio not to drink the poison, asking instead that he "in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story" and Horatio accepts, we encounter the essential literary act—the act of storytelling—which is William Shakespeare's legacy to us...
...There are also cases in which the author and his readers can differ: Many are the devoted fans of Evelyn Waugh who roll their eyes when Lord Marchmain dramatically concedes, very much at the last hour, that the Church of Rome shall be his salvation...
...It is this theme, and Shakespeare's repeated treatment of it, that is the principal concern of an interesting volume of Aaron MacLean, a Marshall scholar at Oxford during 2003-06, is a writer in Virginia...
...This being the case, one can forgive the fact that, for a widely published poet, Pack's essays have an academic steadiness that makes a serious interest in the matter at hand something of a necessity...
...One can encounter literary cases which are all three: Chaucer's epilogue to the Canterbury Tales, in which he seeks forgiveness not only for the sin of producing that raucous masterpiece, but for having written most of his life's work (save a translation of Boethius)—not to mention for "many a song and many a lec-cherous lay...
...Whether or not this somewhat determin-ist vision is creditable, either as a feature of nature or a point of Shakespeare's—and Pack's arguments are reasonably persuasive for the latter—these essays leave one with a desire to return to the plays, a little bit richer with insight than before...
...What a relief...
...Imminent mortality threatens to alter the attitudes of all nature's rebels and fighters, whose causes and battles may or may not show up to be truly significant in light of the great approaching darkness...
...The treatment of the dimensions of Roman history in Hamlet and the Book of Job in King Lear is deft...
...A character's epiphany, his acceptance of his life, in the face of the great wordless mystery approaching him, and his achievement of a sort of transcendental peace, becomes our intellectual possession with a little bit of time left still to struggle...
...That is a basic but important point of praise, given how much literary criticism has exactly the opposite effect: Just ask any English major of the last half-century...
...Pack has no drum to beat, no politics to advance, no theory to impose, other than those points of interest which spring from Shakespeare's plays themselves...
...There is nothing terribly wrong with this, for there is an elegance of thought drifting through the often dissertational prose...
...Go on, check line six for yourself...
...essays by the poet and literary critic Robert Pack...
...The inclusion of insight from reliable sources of literary theory like Darwin and Freud is not heavy-handed, and serves to illuminate rather than overexpose the texts...
...On a related note, Pack himself warns that he assumes "the reader has the patience to delight in the minute details of Shakespeare's patterns of imagery...
...So if you are not inclined to read a thorough unpacking of these sorts of things, then consider yourself duly warned...
...And of course there are moments when the very lack of conversion—Socrates, philosophical all the way to the bottom of his hemlock in Plato's Phaedo—is the whole point...
...This pregnant cohabitation of different meanings in "will" is, for Pack, representative of a tension present throughout the plays: That though our desires may not be met, we still possess the power to alter our attitude to our conditions, thus nobly holding on to one sort of will, in face of the failure to satisfy another...
...If, however, you are, then there will be profit in Pack's treatments of Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet (especially Hamlet, actually), A Midsummer Night's Dream, and others...
...Most worthwhile is the development of Pack's central thesis on Will's attitude toward will, a punning employed by the Bard himself in Sonnet 136, where he "egregiously" (in Pack's just description) plays on the meanings of the word, which in the course of the sonnet means Shakespeare's name, an inheritance, human desire, freedom of choice, and, if I might add one to Pack's list, spermatozoa...
...The absence of any history plays is a bit curious, but it is Pack's book, and he gets to pick which plays he wants...
...The conversion, as in Socrates' case, need not principally concern confessional allegiance...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 43
