Monday, January 26, 2009
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Merely an empty circus?
from today's notes:
"...pulls them out of an ordered universe and sets them apart and alone in an empty world to fend for themselves. ..freedom to make choices, but very little stimulus and almost no will to do so...moved about by forces they cannot resist and do not understand. Their suffering is the product of loneliness, alienation, and incomprehension. Their dying is ... a disappearance ... a loss of substance. The protagonists' heroism takes the form of acceptance. He will in varying tones -- whining, complaining, questioning, criticizing, philosophizing -- protest his condition. But in the end ... the existential hero says, "So be it," and dropping protest submits. His quiet submission in the face of powerful forces that annihilate him gives him nobility and heroism ... leads [him] to bizarre and clownish performances ... a comic figure, very often a puppet or mechanical figure, whose gestures and bhavior he cannot control ... amusing ... all human beings are clowns and that the world is either an empty stage or an empty circus. The laughter is fraught with sadness..."
How does this existential view apply to the play?
"...pulls them out of an ordered universe and sets them apart and alone in an empty world to fend for themselves. ..freedom to make choices, but very little stimulus and almost no will to do so...moved about by forces they cannot resist and do not understand. Their suffering is the product of loneliness, alienation, and incomprehension. Their dying is ... a disappearance ... a loss of substance. The protagonists' heroism takes the form of acceptance. He will in varying tones -- whining, complaining, questioning, criticizing, philosophizing -- protest his condition. But in the end ... the existential hero says, "So be it," and dropping protest submits. His quiet submission in the face of powerful forces that annihilate him gives him nobility and heroism ... leads [him] to bizarre and clownish performances ... a comic figure, very often a puppet or mechanical figure, whose gestures and bhavior he cannot control ... amusing ... all human beings are clowns and that the world is either an empty stage or an empty circus. The laughter is fraught with sadness..."
How does this existential view apply to the play?
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Existentialism
Here's the journal entry you were responding to in class earlier...
Explore the idea of fate and man's inability to control his destiny using the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Guildenstern: Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, and exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact-- that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England.
...
Guildenstern: There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it.
...
Player: There comes a point when everyone who is marked to die, die.
Guildenstern: Who decides?
Player: Decides? It is written.
Explore the idea of fate and man's inability to control his destiny using the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Guildenstern: Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, and exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact-- that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England.
...
Guildenstern: There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it.
...
Player: There comes a point when everyone who is marked to die, die.
Guildenstern: Who decides?
Player: Decides? It is written.
Monday, November 3, 2008
"In the beginning was the Word..."
Welcome to the very first post!
It's hard to know where to begin? Do we start with the best lines from Hamlet? - "not where he eats but where he is eaten"? or "ay, there's the rub, / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / when we have shuffled off that mortal coil must give us pause" or "The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" or "Tho this be madness / Yet there is method in it"? We could go on and on and on, but we've learned from Polonius that "brevity is the soul of wit," so we'll cease here.
Perhaps we should start with our new friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (or is it Guildenstern and Rosencrantz?) who find themselves in a delicate position "fit for a king's remembrance." Does the word "remembrance" make you a little uneasy? This is a tragedy after all. But then "Life in a box is better than no life at all" so they say.
So what do you think of Stoppard's version of the play? Absurd? Existential? Tragicomedy? Just downright weird?
It's hard to know where to begin? Do we start with the best lines from Hamlet? - "not where he eats but where he is eaten"? or "ay, there's the rub, / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / when we have shuffled off that mortal coil must give us pause" or "The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" or "Tho this be madness / Yet there is method in it"? We could go on and on and on, but we've learned from Polonius that "brevity is the soul of wit," so we'll cease here.
Perhaps we should start with our new friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (or is it Guildenstern and Rosencrantz?) who find themselves in a delicate position "fit for a king's remembrance." Does the word "remembrance" make you a little uneasy? This is a tragedy after all. But then "Life in a box is better than no life at all" so they say.
So what do you think of Stoppard's version of the play? Absurd? Existential? Tragicomedy? Just downright weird?
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