sologdin’s Reviews > The Complete Works > Status Update

Sonnets, 'The Lover's Complaint,' &c.

No. 126 marks the end of the sonnets addressed to the idealized youth, and then we get grotesque realism regarding the 'dark lady.' 126 itself is incomplete, a disruption of the form that matches the content, say. It's tempting to read the paired 'Lover's Complaint' back into the sonnets as a sort of key, insofar as it is nuanced and the sonnets are laden with grievance.

Troilus & Cressida

Menippean satire in the theatre, maybe. Pandarus is a director, stage-managing the central affair--but he is also erotically involved as a spectator of that affair. Bequeathing his 'diseases' to the audience is to critique the mechanism by which an audience spies on the intimacy of others on stage.

Twelfth Night

I love this one, but on rereading again here, it seems like it's just pieces of other plays snipped out and switched around. The twinfoolery linked to madness is pure COE, and the cruel exclusion of Malvolio has a piece of MOV, even if it lacks a plain axis of oppression, as opposed to how Shylock is handled. Cross-dressing is MOV and AYL, whereas mass marriage is those plus MAN and MND.

Hamlet

A consideration of the opacity of another's interior. Despite the protagonist's certainty and incidental correctness, the epistemological problem is not resolved by the play-within-the-play. That the ghost's testimony itself is rooted in the normal problem of a history play's moral universe being determined by the arbitrary point of theatrical intervention does nothing to enhance interpretive clarity.

As You Like It

Superficially similar to MND, with its forest setting, erotic misrecognitions, and mass marriage, the structural analogue here is really Richard III, focusing on fraternal conflict. Richard famously murders his brother, but this one avoids that result by virtue of reconciliations, achieved perhaps impossibly, but provides a window on how fratricidal tragedy is averted.

Julius Caesar

Against the backdrop of mass slavery, apprehended directly herein only in moments of death scene manumission, the optimate faction proclaims to be defending 'liberty' whereas the populares faction instrumentalize even their own aristocrats and issue proscription bills by fiat. The normal problem of history plays obtains here: the intervention elides much to focus precariously on ethics.

Henry V

Sovereignty as theatre--the corporate personhood of Talbot is here rendered by the prologue as a creature of theatrical imagination, a matter of ideology as disseminated to an audience. Thereafter the ecclesiastics persuade a willing Hal to war so as to avoid a proto-dissolution act in parliament. NB also the concordance of Falstaff with the traitors, plus the liquidation of Falstaff's gang.

Much Ado About Nothing

Tragedy in the vein of Othello is averted when the illegitimate son, a loser in war, seeks revenge through the staging of a play-within-the-play of a protagonist's akrasia but is refuted by a counterplay-wthin-the-play staging her decease. That her interiority is never staged (silence again, a la Bianca and Silvia, et al.) fits the notion that grief is private as noted herein.

2 Henry IV

Different levels of converting disorder into order, maybe. Falstaff must be excluded, not because he is some sort of proto-lumpen who parasites off crime and credit, but because his form of disorder, which speaks some sort of truth to power, may not be permitted to exist after the monarchy assimilates what it needs from him.

Merry Wives of Windsor

Falstaff seeks to seduce two married women to access their households' property (cf. Bassanio) and almost becomes a sort of villainous remainder (like Shylock or Malvolio)--but is reincorporated into society after his gemeinschaft humiliations are complete. His actual rendering as homo sacer can't happen as the only authority here is unmasked as fraudulent, and thus he's safe, for now.