The ministry of higer and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan karshi state university

2.2 The main character of ’’ Carp Diem Poetry’’ in Literary Context
At the height of his powers, Shakespeare revealed a tragic vision that comprehended the totality of possibilities for good and evil as nearly as the human imagination ever has. His heroes are the vehicles of psychological, societal, and cosmic forces that tend to ennoble and glorify humanity or infect it and destroy it. The logic of tragedy that possessed him demanded an insistence upon the latter.
Initially, his heroes make free choices and are free time after time to turn back, but they move toward their doom as relentlessly as did Oedipus. The total tragic statement, however, is not limited to the fate of the hero. He is but the centre of an action that takes place in a context involving many other characters, each contributing a point of view, a set of values or antivalues to the complex dialectic of the play. In Macbeth’s demon-ridden Scotland, where weird things happen to men and horses turn cannibal, there is the virtuous Malcolm, and society survives. Hamlet had the trustworthy friend Horatio, and, for all the bloodletting, what was “rotten” was purged.
In the tragedies, most notably Lear, the Aeschylean notion of “knowledge through suffering” is powerfully dramatized; it is most obvious in the hero, but it is also shared by the society of which he is the focal figure. The flaw in the hero may be a moral failing or, sometimes, an excess of virtue; the flaw in society may be the rottenness of the Danish court in Hamlet or the corruption of the Roman world in Antony and Cleopatra; the flaw or fault or dislocation may be in the very universe itself, as dramatized by Lear’s raving at the heavens or the ghosts that walk the plays or the witches that prophesy. All these faults, Shakespeare seems to be saying, are inevitabilities of the human condition. But they do not spell rejection, nihilism, or despair. The hero may die, but, in the words of the novelist E.M. Forster to describe the redeeming power of tragedy, “he has given us life.”Such is the precarious balance a tragedian must maintain: the cold, clear vision that sees the evil but is not maddened by it, a sense of the good that is equally clear but refuses the blandishments of optimism or sentimentalism.
Few have ever sustained the balance for long. Aeschylus tended to slide off to the right, Euripides to the left, and even Sophocles had his hero transfigured at Colonus. Marlowe’s early death should perhaps spare him the criticism his first plays warrant. Shakespeare’s last two tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, are close to the edge of a valueless void. The atmosphere of Macbeth is murky with evil; the action moves with almost melodramatic speed from horror to horror. The forces for good rally at last, but Macbeth himself steadily deteriorates into the most nihilistic of all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, saved in nothing except the sense of a great nature, like Medea, gone wrong. Antony and Cleopatra, in its ambiguities and irony, has been considered close to the Euripidean line of bitterness and detachment.
Shakespeare himself soon modulated into another mood in his last plays, Cymbeline (c. 1608–10), The Winter’s Tale (c. 1609–11), and The Tempest . Each is based on a situation that could have been developed into major tragedy had Shakespeare followed out its logic as he had done with earlier plays. For whatever reason, however, he chose not to. The great tragic questions are not pressed. The Tempest, especially, for all Prospero’s charm and magnanimity, gives a sense of brooding melancholy over the ineradicable evil in humankind, a patient but sad acquiescence. All of these plays end in varying degrees of harmony and reconciliation. Shakespeare willed it so.Decline in 17th-century EnglandFrom Shakespeare’s tragedies to the closing of the theatres in England by the Puritans in 1642, the quality of tragedy is steadily worse, if the best of the Greek and Shakespearean tragedies are taken as a standard.
Among the leading dramatists of the period—John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Cyril Tourneur, and John Ford—there were some excellent craftsmen and brilliant poets. Though each of them has a rightful place in the history of English drama, tragedy suffered a transmutation in their hands.The Jacobean dramatists—those who flourished in England during the reign of James I—failed to transcend the negative tendencies they inherited from Elizabethan tragedy: a sense of defeat, a mood of spiritual despair implicit in Marlowe’s tragic thought; in the nihilistic broodings of some of Shakespeare’s characters in their worst moods—Hamlet, Gloucester in Lear, Macbeth; in the metaphoric implication of the theme of insanity, of man pressed beyond the limit of endurance, that runs through many of these tragedies; most importantly, perhaps, in the moral confusion (“fair is foul and foul is fair”) that threatens to unbalance even the staunchest of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. This sinister tendency came to a climax about 1605 and was in part a consequence of the anxiety surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the accession of James I. Despite their negative tendencies, the Elizabethans, in general, had affirmed life and celebrated it; Shakespeare’s moral balance, throughout even his darkest plays, remained firm. The Jacobeans, on the other hand, were possessed by death. They became superb analysts of moral confusion and of the darkened vision of humanity at cross purposes, preying upon itself; of lust, hate, and intrigue engulfing what is left of beauty, love, and integrity. There is little that is redemptive or that suggests, as had Aeschylus, that evil might be resolved by the enlightenment gained from suffering. As in the tragedies of Euripides, the protagonist’s margin of freedom grows ever smaller. “You are the deed’s creature,” cries a murderer to his unwitting lady accomplice in Middleton’s Changeling (1622), and a prisoner of her deed she remains. Many of the plays maintained a pose of ironic, detached reportage, without the sense of sympathetic involvement that the greatest tragedians have conveyed from the beginning.Some of the qualities of the highest tragedians have been claimed for John Webster. One critic points to his search for a moral order as a link to Shakespeare and sees in his moral vision a basis for renewal. Webster’s Duchess of Malfi (c. 1612–13) has been interpreted as a final triumph of life over death.
Overwhelmed by final unleashed terror, the Duchess affirms the essential dignity of man. Despite such vestiges of greatness, however, the trend of tragedy was downward. High moral sensitivity and steady conviction are required to resist the temptation to resolve the intolerable tensions of tragedy into either the comfort of optimism or the relaxed apathy of despair. Periods of the creation of high tragedy are therefore few and short-lived. The demands on artist and audience alike are very great. Forms wear out, and public taste seems destined to go through inevitable cycles of health and disease. What is to one generation powerful and persuasive rhetoric becomes bombast and bathos to the next. The inevitable materials of tragedy—violence, madness, hate, and lust—soon lose their symbolic role and become perverted to the uses of melodrama and sensationalism, mixed, for relief, with the broadest comedy or farceThese corruptions had gone too far when John Milton, 29 years after the closing of the theatres, attempted to bring back the true spirit and tone of tragedy, which he called “the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems.” His Samson Agonistes (1671), however, is magnificent “closet tragedy”—drama more suitable for reading than for popular performance. Modeled on the Prometheus, it recalls Aeschylus’s tragedy both in its form, in which the immobilized hero receives a sequence of visitors, and in its theme, in which there is a resurgence of the hero’s spirit under stress.
With Restoration comedy in full swing, however, and with the “heroic play” (an overly moralized version of tragedy) about to reach its crowning achievement in John Dryden’s All for Love only seven years later (published 1678), Samson Agonistes was an anachronism.Another attempt to bring back the ancient form had been going on for some time across the English Channel, in France. The French Classical tragedy, whose monuments are Pierre Corneille’s Cid (1637) and Jean Racine’s Bérénice (1670) and Phèdre (1677), made no attempt to be popular in the way of the Elizabethan theatre. The plays were written by and for intellectual aristocrats, who came together in an elite theatre, patronized by royalty and nobility. Gone were the bustle and pageantry of the Elizabethan tragedies, with their admixtures of whatever modes and moods the dramatists thought would work. The French playwrights submitted themselves to the severe discipline they derived from the Greek models and especially the “rules,” as they interpreted them, laid down by Aristotle. The unities of place, time, and action were strictly observed.
One theme, the conflict between Passion and Reason, was uppermost. The path of Reason was the path of Duty and Obligation (noblesse oblige), and that path had been clearly plotted by moralists and philosophers, both ancient and modern. In this sense there was nothing exploratory in the French tragedy; existing moral and spiritual norms were insisted upon. The norms are never criticized or tested as Aeschylus challenged the Olympians or as Marlowe presented, with startling sympathy, the Renaissance overreacher. Corneille’s Cid shows Duty triumphant over Passion, and, as a reward, hero and heroine are happily united.By the time of Phèdre, Corneille’s proud affirmation of the power of the will and the reason over passion had given way to what Racine called “stately sorrow,” with which he asks the audience to contemplate Phèdre’s heroic, but losing, moral struggle. Her passion for her stepson, Hippolyte, bears her down relentlessly. Her fine principles and heroic will are of no avail. Both she and Hippolyte are destroyed. The action is limited to one terrible day; there is no change of scene; there is neither comic digression nor relief—the focus on the process by which a great nature goes down is sharp and intense. Such is the power of Racine’s poetry (it is untranslatable), his conception of character, and his penetrating analysis of it, that it suggests the presence of Sophoclean “heroic humanism.” In this sense it could be said that Racine tested the norms, that he uncovered a cruel injustice in the nature of a code that could destroy such a person as Phèdre. Once again, here is a world of tragic ambiguity, in which no precept or prescription can answer complicated human questions.This ambiguity was all but eliminated in the “heroic play” that vied with the comedy of the Restoration stage in England in the latter part of the 17th century.
After the vicissitudes of the Civil War, the age was hungry for heroism. An English philosopher of the time, Thomas Hobbes, defined the purpose of the type: “The work of an heroic poem is to raise admiration, principally for three virtues, valour, beauty, and love.” Moral concern, beginning with Aeschylus, has always been central in tragedy, but in the works of the great tragedians this concern was exploratory and inductive. The moral concern of the heroic play is the reverse. It is deductive and dogmatic. The first rule, writes Dryden (following the contemporary French critic, René Le Bossu) in his preface to his Troilus and Cressida (1679), is “to make the moral of the work; that is, to lay down to yourself what that precept of morality shall be, which you would insinuate into the people.” In All for Love the moral is all too clear: Antony must choose between the path of honour and his illicit passion for Cleopatra. He chooses Cleopatra, and they are both destroyed. Only Dryden’s poetry, with its air of emotional argumentation, manages to convey human complexities in spite of his moral bias and saves the play from artificiality—makes it, in fact, the finest near-tragic production of its age.The eclipse of tragedAlthough the annals of the drama from Dryden onward are filled with plays called tragedies by their authors, the form as it has been defined here went into an eclipse during the late 17th, the 18th, and the early 19th centuries. Reasons that have been suggested for the decline include the politics of the Restoration in England; the rise of science and, with it, the optimism of the Enlightenment throughout Europe; the developing middle-class economy; the trend toward reassuring Deism in theology; and, in literature, the rise of the novel and the vogue of satire. The genius of the age was discursive and rationalistic. In France and later in England, belief in Evil was reduced to the perception of evils, which were looked upon as institutional and therefore remediable.
The nature of man was no longer the problem; rather, it was the better organization and management of men. The old haunting fear and mystery, the sense of ambiguity at the centre of human nature and of dark forces working against humankind in the universe, were replaced by a new and confident dogma.Tragedy never lost its high prestige in the minds of the leading spirits. Theorizing upon it were men of letters as diverse as Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley and German philosophers from Gotthold Lessing in the 18th century to Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th.Revivals of Shakespeare’s tragedies were often bowdlerized or altered, as in the happy ending for Lear in a production of 1681. Those who felt themselves called upon to write tragedies produced little but weak imitations. Shelley tried it once, in The Cenci (1819), but, as his wife wrote, “the bent of his mind went the other way”—which way may be seen in his Prometheus Unbound (1820), in which Zeus is overthrown and a golden age, ruled by the power of love, is born.
Goethe had the sense to stay away from tragedy: “The mere attempt to write tragedy,” he said, “might be my undoing.” He concluded his two-part Faust (1808, 1832) in the spirit of the 19th-century optimistic humanitarianism. It was not until the latter part of the 19th century, with the plays of a Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen, a Russian, Anton Chekhov, a Swede, August Strindberg, and, later, an American, Eugene O’Neill, that something of the original vision returned to inspire the tragic theatre.A new vehicle: the novelThe theme and spirit of tragedy, meanwhile, found a new vehicle in the novel. This development is important, however far afield it may seem from the work of the formal dramatists. The English novelist Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights , in its grim Yorkshire setting, reflects the original concerns of tragedy: i.e., the terrifying divisions in nature and human nature, love that creates and destroys, character at once fierce and pitiable, destructive actions that are willed yet seemingly destined, as if by a malicious fate, yet the whole controlled by an imagination that learns as it goes.
Another English novelist, Thomas Hardy, in the preface to The Woodlanders speaks of the rural setting of this and other of his novels as being comparable to the stark and simple setting of the Greek theatre, giving his novels something of that drama’s intensity and sharpness of focus. His grimly pessimistic view of human nature and destiny and of the futility of human striving, as reflected in his novels The Return of the Native , Tess of the d’Urbervilles , and Jude the Obscure, is barely redeemed for tragedy by his sense of the beauty of nature and of the beauty and dignity of human character and effort, however unavailing.