The importance of shakespeare’s sonnets in english literature plan

CONCLUSION

Shakespeare’s contribution to the theatre is immense. He brought a new psychological realism and depth to drama, and created hundreds of living, believable characters, all of them different individuals showing the rich diversity of humanity. Four centuries later, we can still identify with their aspirations, their strengths and their failings, and sympathise with their moral dilemmas. It is this truth to human experience that gives rise to comments like that of actress Janet Suzman: “Shakespeare was a humanist in everything he wrote.” In an era preoccupied with religion, Shakespeare’s plays and poetry are remarkably secular in subject matter and outlook, and Shakespeare seems to have been influenced by classical and Renaissance ideas about the importance of reason and of mankind and human individualism. “To thine own self be true,” advises Polonius in Hamlet, a view of personal integrity that is essentially humanist in its stress on individualism rather than on conformity.

Little is known about Shakespeare’s life or personal opinions, and there are dangers in attempting to deduce a writer’s outlook from those of his dramatic creations. It is unlikely that Shakespeare was a humanist in the modern sense of the word – that is, someone who believes that this is the only life we have and that there are good reasons for living a moral life that do not depend on a belief in gods or life after death. Shakespeare’s characters have an almost automatic belief, typical of his time, in “a divinity that shapes our ends”, “flights of angels”, and “the Everlasting” who, for example, opposes “self slaughter”. They tend to believe in devils and ghosts and witches. But religion is rarely a major force or motivation in their lives; moral choices are made for human – rather than religious – reasons, and characters such as Macbeth reap the human and social consequences of bad actions in the loss of the love and respect of their fellow human beings, and other earthly punishments.

Shakespeare often portrays attitudes in his plays that are remote from the conventional Christianity of the day. Life on earth is not seen as simply a preparation for an after-life of reward or punishment, and death is often seen as very final. At the end of his life Macbeth reflects that human life is:

“…but a walking shadow; a poor player

Who 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.”

Hamlet speaks of death as:

“The undiscovered country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns.”

Prospero, at the end of The Tempest, Shakespeares’s last play, says:

“We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded by a sleep.”

But this is not the consistent view of all his characters, and some, like Claudius in Hamlet, agonise over their likely punishment after death.

Some overtly religious characters, like the ironically named Angelo in Measure for Measure, who sentences Claudio to death for “fornication” (something that the more humane characters in the play see as “a fault alone”), are seen as hypocritically harsh on others, and misguided. The nun-like Isabella, who in the same play chooses to preserve her chastity rather than her brother’s life, is not shown as an entirely likeable character.