I don't have much on the organ grinder but I wanted to say something about your overall blog. Just last night I ran into the passage in Macbeth which your blog is based off: "To-morrows...a poor player that struts...Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying Nothing." Hecht, in Doubt: A History, uses this passage to illustrate that "there is something dryly secular and loosely skeptical about Shakespeare's whole project." She goes on to ask if God is not the idiot in this line "or is there not God?"
She then cites The Tempest:"Our revels now are ended.../Are melted into air, into thin air.../We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded witih a sleep." Shakespeare is a doubter.
Well, I thought you'd appreciate *your* passage from Macbeth being used to discuss doubt. I'm loving this book.
Well ultimately if you look at Shakespeare, he often puts the most provocative speeches in the mouths of unsavory characters. Macbeth is opining the seeming nothingness of the world at that point, precisely when (in the world of the play) he is facing the fate that was predicted from the beginning. Basically he seems to be a character that doesn't get it: he was fated to be what he was and that is that. At this point he is most blind to that, however, and sees nothingness abound in the universe.
I chose the moniker for the blog because of the irony it represents: is life a tale told by an idiot (a pun on the blogger) or does it hold meaning. Does life, indeed signifying something?
i'm totally creeped out...
ReplyDeleteI don't have much on the organ grinder but I wanted to say something about your overall blog. Just last night I ran into the passage in Macbeth which your blog is based off: "To-morrows...a poor player that struts...Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying Nothing." Hecht, in Doubt: A History, uses this passage to illustrate that "there is something dryly secular and loosely skeptical about Shakespeare's whole project." She goes on to ask if God is not the idiot in this line "or is there not God?"
ReplyDeleteShe then cites The Tempest:"Our revels now are ended.../Are melted into air, into thin air.../We are such stuff/ As dreams are made on, and our little life/ Is rounded witih a sleep." Shakespeare is a doubter.
Well, I thought you'd appreciate *your* passage from Macbeth being used to discuss doubt. I'm loving this book.
Well ultimately if you look at Shakespeare, he often puts the most provocative speeches in the mouths of unsavory characters. Macbeth is opining the seeming nothingness of the world at that point, precisely when (in the world of the play) he is facing the fate that was predicted from the beginning. Basically he seems to be a character that doesn't get it: he was fated to be what he was and that is that. At this point he is most blind to that, however, and sees nothingness abound in the universe.
ReplyDeleteI chose the moniker for the blog because of the irony it represents: is life a tale told by an idiot (a pun on the blogger) or does it hold meaning. Does life, indeed signifying something?