Shakespeare Paper - unedited

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been, Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door, Who is it for? - Eleanor Rigby, the Beatles

In the world of patriarchal authority, the world of man, laws, regulations, and boundaries, the world of Theseus, King Lear, Hamlet, Cymbeline, and Leontes—a person becomes aware of the self. Raised from a very early age to become cognizant of where the body ends and the rest of the world begins, where the carnal, mental, and spiritual beings preside. Society demarcates, splitting a person from the rest of existence, so much that they actually start to believe they are completely independent of everything. Reality is, in truth, a series of games we play with ourselves--a play, a theatre, and we are all on stage. Prospero, the great magician of the island in Shakespeare's The Tempest, was quite aware of this. He sets the pieces on the board, he moves them like pawns, he is aware of the beginning, middle, and ending. He is like the bard himself, a master of the universe. Perhaps, this is one of the many things Shakespeare was trying to get at: the power of us all to create worlds. Who is to say we are all not in Plato's cave, watching shadows on the wall? Shakespeare may have been alluding to this in his A Midsummer's Night's Dream. Throughout the play, characters often refer to "shadows", the most notorious of all these references is in Puck's final speech—he goes as far to call himself a "shadow". Suddenly, the audience sees before them echoes of their own reality, a world they just escaped into for a few hours. Puck, perhaps, is reminding them that like the prisoner's in the cave watching the mirages dance along the wall, that this was merely fancy, that life lay before them still. "You dreamed this play, and now you shall awake". Was he alluding to something more? That this life we pretend to live is just another play which we are escaping into? In this paper, I would like to delve deeper into Shakespeare's view of identity and the roles we perform for others.

Jacques, in As You Like It, says, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely plays" (Act II.7, 138-9). We all act our different roles throughout life, and Shakespeare lists through seven--the mewling infant, the whining schoolboy, the sighing lover, the oath-speaking soldier, the justice, the old whistling man, and then the second childhood. Alan Watts says Hinduism has a similar concept in Shiva, who has ten arms, or "the Buddhist Avalokiteshvara with one thousand arms. Their image of the divine is of a sort of centipede. A centipede can move a hundred legs without having to think about it, and Shiva can move ten arms very dexterously without having to think about them" (Watts 79, Myth and Religion). The multi-armed god is a representation of every person who has ever lived. We are his arms, we are all Shiva and just don't know it, pretending to be someone we are not. Watts continues, comparing theater to the Hindu god. He says:

"There are actors coming on the stage, but they are real people like you. In order for you not to see them in that way, they are going to put on their costumes and makeup, and then they are going to come out in front here and pretend to various roles. And you know you want to be half convinced that what they are doing on the stage is real. The work of a great actor is to get you sitting on the edge of your chair, anxious, or weeping, or roaring with laughter, because he has almost persuaded you that what is on the stage is really happening. That is the greatness of his art, to take the audience in. In the same way, the Hindu feels that the Godhead acts his part so well that he takes himself in completely. And each of you is the godhead, wonderfully fooled by your own act. And although you won't admit it to yourself, you are enjoying it like anything. (Watts 82)

Story and myth are the closest we can ever get to truth. They represent the plays which have been occurring since the big bang exploded and ballooned across the nothingness (we have creation myths) and until the end of everything (Apocalyptic myths). Shakespeare understood this (not the scientific myths obviously). He reminds us that we too are taking ourselves too seriously, that we too fear death, we too love, go insane, and can barely function some days. He reminds us that we are all actors.

Antony and Cleopatra are two the most iconic characters of the Shakespeare canon. Northrop Frye calls Antony a force of nature and a romantic legend. By draping a mythos over himself, Antony starts to become more than a man, he almost transforms into a demigod, to be remembered for ages past his death. In his hedonism, his devastating flyting with Cleopatra, his magnetic personality which means "that any army following him feels drawn together into a fighting community" (Frye 133), Antony is a man caught between the stale, stagnant, cool-headed Rome, and the fertile, fluid, passionate Egypt. Cleopatra pulls him one way, and Octavian another—the Egyptian wants him to be a pagan god, a tragic hero, while the Roman wants to white-out his name from history. In the end, Hercules abandons Antony, meaning that he "has failed to become a pagan incarnation, a Hercules or Dionysus walking the earth" (Frye 135). Antony may have denied the world a new golden age of paganism, but Cleopatra wins. Both she and Antony become immortalized across the western world--great tragic heroes with their fates written in blood and glory, a great endeavor to be a part of such a lost cause. Cleopatra herself is, according to Northrop Frye, yet another incarnation of the Mother Goddess, Isis, "in whose 'habiliments,' according to Ceasar, she publicly appeared. She is also described by Enobarbus as enthroned on her 'barge' on the water, as though she were a kind of Venus surrounded by love spirits" (Frye 134). Cleopatra's Egypt is a land of theater, overflowing and constantly changing, a world of women and completeness. Octavian's Rome is the land of IT in A Wrinkle in Time, an Apollonian kingdom of formalities and rules. It is fitting that Antony is tied to Dionysus, the opposite of Apollo according to Nietzsche. Apollonian is described as thinking, self-controlled, rational, and logical, human order and culture--essentially, it represents civilization. Dionysian, on the other hand, represents feeling, passion, intoxication, wholeness of existence, and chaos. The sensual god of many masks, he is tied to the mother Goddess as her lover/son who dies every winter and the ancient mystery schools, and is the god of theater. He shares several links with both Jesus, who was to be born in just a few more years in the play's timeline, and horned devil, Satan. All this makes an intriguing comparison, but in the end I want to tie this back to the roles (the Dionysian masks) which Cleopatra seems to be so aware. Neither Antony nor Cleopatra appears alone; they are always flanked by others—this shows how important theatrics really are to the Egyptian pharaoh. Kurt Vonnegut says in the introduction of Mother Night, "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be careful about who we pretend to be" (v). It is really not who we perceive ourselves to be, but what others see. They become as they appear to others, no matter who they believed they were.

The key to all this is the changing nature of identity. Rome and Octavian are associated with geometry and solidity, while Cleopatra is "the 'serpent of old Nile,' as Antony calls her, is constantly associated with seas and with two rivers, the Nile and the Cydnus" (Frye 137). Cleopatra, the woman of the sea, is the one who suggests fighting Caesar on the open sea. Both of the eponymous heroes of this play are dynamic and therefore magnetic. The whole world revolves around them, the whole universe if Cleopatra is to be believed. And this is Egypt, represented by the overflowing Nile and the winding serpent. A place without borders. A place of blurred lines. A place where women rules, like Albia in the mythical British past. It is also similar to woods in A Midsummer's Night Dream and As You Like It. Cleopatra wanted to obtain the mythic so she could live forever, Titania, the mother goddess, has already done this. She is a fairy queen, the true ruler of the forest, and Oberon is her Antony. Both represent a certain completeness—Titania's is a forest, a place which simply exists free of man's world. It also has a sense order, though you couldn't explain it. Again, Ted Hughe's concept of the "Goddess of Complete Being" echoes. The goddess' husband/son will die every year, only to be resurrected the next. We see this repeated over and over again across Western mythology: Demeter/Dionysus, Venus/Adonis, Cybele/Attis, Isis/Osiris, even the virgin Mary and Jesus. Antony is the sacrificial god. By dying, he ensures the continued cycle of nature. All the dying gods are firmly rooted in the Goddess' world, and the world she represents is everything, the good and the bad, the black and the white, the whole of existence is wrapped up in her visage. When anyone escapes into the "green world", they are leaving behind the world the Patriarchal God in Genesis split apart. They are entering the realm of Gaia. Identity breaks down here. Worlds, hierarchies, people, animals begin to merge together and become blurry. Here the Green Man roams the forest, dying year after year. Satyrs and Nymphs play. Fairies sing in the trees. Magic and mystery become real again. There is no bowing to a self-appointed ruling family, only honoring the trees, flowers, and toadstools. The forest as paradise is seen throughout mythology—specifically orchards: the Garden of Eden, Hesperides, Avalon, in the Eddas, it the beautiful god Idun who keeps the immortality-granting apples safe for the gods of Asgard. Robert Graves, in Mushrooms and Religion, claims it is related to psychedelic mushrooms, but I am not ready to go quite that far. At any rate, Shakespeare's forest is home to the mother goddess in several of his plays and poems. It is a place of identities collapsing. He ends A Midsummer's Night Dream, with a play inside a play, bringing to light the roles we all play.

One of the chief things Shakespeare does in his work is poke holes in people's masks. He makes his audience question themselves and the face they put on for the world. Women dress as men. Men dress as women. Mechanics become asses. Kings lose everything and re-find it anew. Lovers change who they lust for. Characters get beat down into a mush, a pladoh for future molding by the bard. Shakespeare composes worlds of collapsing boundaries, of changing language and rhythms. He smashes the societal lens we see through--a cultural trap only we can escape from, and he does this by demolishing walls of identity. Judith Butler, for one, suggested gender is merely a cultural play we perform for others. There is no "true" woman role, only the role we choose to perform. Hence, cross dressing reveals the illusion of gender types. When a man dresses as a woman, or a woman as a man, they clearly perform something which is often hidden to us by our own culture, bringing light to the illusion we live every day. Butler states, in her "Gender Trouble":

Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established? Does being female constitute a 'natural fact' or a cultural performance, or is 'naturalness' constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex? Divine notwithstanding, gender practices within the gay and lesbian cultures often thematize 'the natural' in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex. What other foundational categories of identity--the binary of sex, gender, and the body--can be shown as productions that create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable?

Often, when authors use cross-dressing as a thematic point, it is to illuminate the unfixed identity. Shakespeare uses it in A Midsummer's Night Dream when Francis Flute dresses as Thisbe and in As You Like It when Rosalind puts on the mask of Ganymede. But even before any line is spoken, there is still the fact that all the female roles are performed by men. There is much confusion and it is very pertinent that often this gender anarchy takes place in the forest or Northrop Frye's "Green World"--a realm without designators, walls, or borders, of Dionysus, the god of masks, chaos, and the theater, of the Mother Goddess, Titania, Demeter, Venus, and Isis. The Green World's wholeness reveals the made-up games we play in the masculine world. It is the obelisk versus the dome. Emotion versus rationality. Rome versus Egypt. The Federation versus the Borg. The Doctor versus the Dalek. Meg Murry versus IT.

The lives we lead are dreams that we ourselves construct. Prospero, in The Tempest, is a master of dream, myth, and story. According to Caliban, he derives his power from books, saying "thou mayest brain him, having first seized his books; [...] for without them, he's but a sot" (ACT III.2, 87-8, 91-2). However, Prospero already knows how this tale plays out, and he weaves one of forgiveness for all involved. Everyone is trapped inside a particular story or dream, and that is the power of myth, to enlighten us on which one we are in. The more we read the more power we begin to accumulate. We begin to see the stories around us, and most importantly, the story which we are playing in. Prospero would know if you were to ask him. He is the master magician, everything and nothing, and in ACT IV.1, says sublimely, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep" (156-8). To the Hindus, we are the multi-armed dreaming god--tentacle points poking into "reality". Who are we really? That is a question even the great bard cannot answer, though he tried to the best of his ability.