Oh wait, you just reminded me we did Macbeth in high school, so I have read two of Shakespeare's works - Macbeth and Hamlet. Thank you for explaining this. I have never had it in mind that that there is "one feeling per work." Never entered my mind. What did I say that made you think this? How could I possibly think that War and Peace contains one feeling???
I love this, the way you have expressed it, but those were never my words (nor Tolstoy's) =- that art is a single emotion encoded by the artist and transmitted with perfect clarity
I seem to recall you several times saying something to the effect of "The artist has an emotion, then he encodes it in the art and when the viewer sees the art he experiences that same emotion." Quite likely you meant this happens many times in a work of art, but it seemed like you were saying one work of art equals one feeling. For some paintings that might be the case, or nearly anyway, but a story is far too big and complex for that, even a short story. As I've said before, a story is like huge parts of a world with the lives of many people interwoven into it, whereas a drawing or painting is like a snapshot of one moment in a small corner of that world, maybe in one room or a field.
Then I haven't expressed myself very well and I apologize for that. Within one work, the writer creates many characters and many experiences the characters live through. If the writer feels what his characters feel (and expresses it), the reader will, too.
I think it is important to remember, too, that Shakespeare only created his characters for the stage. He has them do and say whatever will make an impact on a public audience. A different undertaking than a book.
From Ch. 3 of Tolstoy on Shakespeare (and no, you need not have read King Lear to understand what he is saying): The takeaway points: - in struggle, characters should display their inherent qualities - character strife must flow from the natural course of events and their own characters
That's true for any kind of fiction though, including movies, books, short stories etc. It isn't possible to put anything as complex or irrational as a real person in a work of art. It couldn't possibly contain one, and if it could they would seem just as strange and unpredictable as people so often are in real life. One of the biggest differences between fiction and life is that in fiction things need to make some kind of sense, and in life they don't. Hence the phrase: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.” ― Mark Twain Where he says it's obliged to stick to possibilites, I think he means things that seem possible—maybe believable is a better term. In life of course there's no such necessity. Just when you think you know how somebody would react, they do something that seems completely out of character. You have to be very careful about doing that in a story, unless that out-of-character moment is the main thrust of the story, and the rest of it explores their reasons, or it's postmodernism or absurdism. Characters are never people, and they can't be. They're simplified simulacrums, designed to fit into the story in ways that fit the themes or the ideas. It's just as true in a book as a play, why wouldn't it be? If you run across some strange statement like that you need to think about what it means. I have no idea what Tolstoy was trying to say there, and it doesn't make sense to me. Does it to you? More and more it seems he has some ulterior reasoning for his theory.
Hey, man, what did the swan of Avon ever do to you “I think it’s important to remember too that Tolstoy only created his characters and situations for the page, he didn’t have to make sure that they would hold up in a real-life performance. He had them do and say whatever would have met the approval of his aristocratic and bourgeois audience. The realist novel: a different undertaking than drama.” George Orwell wrote an essay on Tolstoy’s Shakespeare tract. He speculated whether Tolstoy’s later life was a little too close to King Lear’s for comfort. It’s a good essay. https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf I don't think that it’s out of place to point out that Tolstoy was not without philosophical motives when he wrote this stuff later in life. He gave up literature for a long time after his conversion and embrace of pacifism, sexlessness, etc. That should be considered.
Thanks for posting that, it was a very good read. I knew almost nothing about Tolstoy, except that he was that other great Russian writer, besides Dostoyevsky and Nabokov, and had written something called The Idiot. His opinion of Shakespeare certainly does reek of bitterness.
And if you want to read a more admiring Russian take on King Lear, Turgenev wrote a great novella called King Lear of the Steppes. I read it recently and loved it. I think he preserved the key contours of the Shakespeare story in a really admirable way but put his own stamp on it. Nesterov could have done paintings from it.
Because a play and a book are written from different points-of-view. The dramatic POV can be described as "the fly on the wall" POV, but in a novel, the internal thoughts and emotions of the character can be shared. This rebuttal depends on a fallacious assumption - that characters only "say and do." This is true for a play. The playwriter can only share what the characters "say and do." This is not true for a novel, which affords the opportunity for deep POV, the opportunity to share internal thoughts and emotions. You can enter a mind in a novel. The same is not true for a play.
Ah, there it is. I had a feeling there was some actual difference but I wasn't figuring it out. But POV in novels and short stories has been getting deeper and more internal gradually by stages. If you go back a hundred years almost everything was written in omniscient and only went very shallowly into any character's thoughts and feelings. Plus to some extent a playwright can have characters express their thoughts and emotions through monologue or dialogue as well as through their actions and reactions. So it isn't really a hard separation between two totally different things, there's always been a good deal of overlap. Plays also often use what's called a Chorus, which can be a group of characters who sing or talk and can explain things very much in the manner of an omniscient narrator. They're not supposed to be intrinsic to the play, but exist extraneous to it, like an omniscient narrator telling the readers things they couldn't otherwise know. I believe Shakespeare used choruses a lot, or sometimes a single character who functioned as one. Maybe that would be the fool in King Lear for instance? I'm guessing.
Disagree. When Hamlet says "Alas, poor Yorrick. I knew him, Horatio." he is sharing his thoughts by vocalising them. That's how you do it in a play. The methodology may be different, but the result is similar.
I'm reading the Sample on Amazon for Anna Karenina (which surprisingly doesn't consist entirely of Forewards to the Fifteenth Translation and etc, but actually starts straight off with the story). It's in a very old-fashioned type of omniscient where it goes very shallowly into people's thoughts and only obliquely mentions feelings. There is a little narration along those lines, but very little. Most of what's said is in inner monologue or dialogue, and the monologue could easily be spoken aloud on stage. Plus what's revealed in the inner narration could be expressed by adding a character so it could be done in dialogue, or just left to the imagination of the audience. Or even spoken by an external omniscient narrator character. In many ways the writing style is reminiscent of play writing, though of course there's more than just lines of dialogue. The book was published in 1878, by which time perhaps the earliest silent movies were being made, but those of course were done like plays with a stationary camera set up in the center of the front row. It was largely movies that began to show us how to approach things differently from plays, and that coincided with the deepening of POV in written stories.
You haven’t chosen a very good example to make your point and rebut mine. That bit of dialogue is nothing more than a simple statement of fact and tells the reader nothing about the psychological forces at work in his mind to make him who he is. This is the difference I was pointing to when I said a deep POV in a novel allows the reader to enter a character’s mind. Not to find out the facts that may lurk there, but to gain a deep understanding of all the motivations, fears and forces at work that compel the character’s actions and reactions.
Some may point to Shakespeare’s soliloquies as entering the minds of the characters, but even those are more philosophy than revealing the psychology of the speaker. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, Macbeth soliloquy, spoken by Macbeth, act 5 scene 5 ‘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.’ ‘To be or not to be’, Hamlet soliloquy, spoken by Hamlet, act 3, scene 1 ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.–Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d.’
Deep POV is very new—the term didn't come into existence, at least as the name for a particular approach to writing POV, until the 1980s.
In places though Shakespeare definitely showed inner motivations and reactions beyond what most playwrights had done up to his time. He was one of the early progenitors of what would come to be known as psychology centuries later. You can't expect him to have studied discourses on it, he was one of the artists developing it little by little.
As an example: LADY MACBETH Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why, Then, 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my Lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we Fear who knows it, when none can call our power to Account?—Yet who would have thought the old man To have had so much blood in him. DOCTOR Do you mark that? LADY MACBETH The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?— What, will these hands ne'er be clean?—No more o' That, my lord, no more o' that: you mar all with This starting. DOCTOR Go to, go to; you have known what you should not. GENTLEWOMAN She has spoke what she should not, I am sure of that: heaven knows what she has known. LADY MACBETH Here's the smell of the blood still: All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little Hand. Oh, oh, oh! Here it's clear she's trapped in paranoia and desperation. The blood represents her guilt, that she can never wash off no matter how hard she tries, because it's inside of her. Even if it can't be seen, she can still smell it, and imagines everyone can. This is a very powerful and perceptive depiction of a psychological state, well before Freud entered stage right. This part right here: What need we Fear who knows it, when none can call our power to Account?—Yet who would have thought the old man To have had so much blood in him. It pretty much encapsulates the entire concept of the play. She thought nobody could hold her or her husband responsible for the murders they committed because they have power now as the new Lord and Lady. But she didn't reckon with her own sense of guilt, she thought her power would reign even over that.
Think about what he's saying in context, especially what he says next, and then you'll understand. There is a reason I chose that particular example.
Below are quotes from Anna Karenina. What POV would you say they are in? “He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “Sometimes she did not know what she feared, what she desired: whether she feared or desired what had been or what would be, and precisely what she desired, she did not know.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “All the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included all the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human feelings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class -herself alone- had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.” ― Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires gave him only one grain of the mountain of happiness he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the eternal error men make in imagining that their happiness depends on the realization of their desires.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “Doctoring her seemed to her as absurd as putting together the pieces of a broken vase. Her heart was broken. Why would they try to cure her with pills and powders?” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.” ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Okay, let's talk about the psychology of Lady Macbeth. Where did this guilt come from? She's a psychopath, gung-ho for murder, and psychopaths don't feel remorse. So, I don't believe hers. Perhaps if Shakespeare had drawn her with some ambivalence, her guilt might have made sense. But it does not follow from the psychopathic Lady Macbeth that had been painted. But it made for a good show.
Okay, here's the quote: Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. It seems to me this is an ode to the futility of life and then its inevitable end. Thoughts we have all had. For me, it provides no insight into Hamlet's particular psyche - his motivations, fears and psychological forces.
