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WILLING TO CHOOSE
Volition & Storytelling
in Shakespeare’s Major Plays
essays by Robert Pack
Nonfiction ISBN 978-0-9762114-4-0 $18.00
US 6 x 9 220 pp
PRAISE FOR ROBERT PACK
Robert Brustein says of Pack’s new book of close readings of Shakespeare’s plays,
Willing To Choose: Volition & Storytelling in Shakespeare’s Major Plays,
that “the whole book is filled with insight and intuition.” This book is intended
for the reader and theater-goer who loves Shakespeare’s plays and enjoys contemplating
them in their complexity: their recurrent themes, the richness of their metaphorical
language, the characters’ psychological depths and dimensions, the philosophical
implications of the plays as organic dramatic entities that testify to the nature
of human limitation and to human freedom.
Pack, a distinguished poet with eighteen books to his credit, makes the assumption that the reader has the patience to delight in the minute details of Shakespeare’s patterns of imagery as well as to admire the overall structure of the plays. What especially interests Pack is how these plays cohere and how they can be read from different perspectives that nevertheless complement each other. Pack has not adopted any single critical approach, but has responded to each play’s individual identity from various interpretative points of view.
Ultimately, Pack finds everywhere in Shakespeare’s incomparable plays—a vision empathetic to human suffering and moral aspiration, tempered by the Bard’s acute awareness of human frailty.
Robert Pack’s study of Shakespeare is a poignant and mature meditation on the world’s greatest writer.
—Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Willing to Choose struck me as something utterly fresh and compelling,
a book about Shakespeare that ought to inspire a wide range of readers. Robert
Pack, himself a poet, understands Shakespeare's art in ways that seem both comprehensible
and satisfying. Pack shows again and again what art has added to nature itself,
making it somehow bearable. The willful choice to examine to face reality boldly,
and to accept the balm of its beauty without resorting to fantasy, was the wise
and noble choice that Shakespeare himself made. Readers will be grateful to Pack
for making this plain, for adding so much to nature himself in this strong, sensible,
and artful book.
—Jay Parini, Robert Frost, A Life
I write to express my strong endorsement for the publication of Robert Pack's
excellent new book on Shakespeare. This promises to be a work not only of scrupulous
scholarship but, more importantly, of poetic imagination that promises to be a
genuine contribution to Shakespeare criticism. His chapters on The Tempest,
Macbeth, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night's Dream are particularly powerful,
but the whole book is filled with insight and intuition, written in a style that
makes it a delight to read, for academic and lay person alike. The fact that Pack
is a poet himself gives him a particular entree into the mind of Shakespeare,
and his philosophical and psychological reading enhances his literary approach
immensely.
—Robert Brustein, The Theater of Revolt
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author of twenty books of his own poetry, the most recent being Elk in Winter and Composing Voices, and five books of literary criticism, Robert Pack finds everywhere in Shakespeare’s incomparable plays a vision empathetic to human suffering and moral aspiration, tempered by the Bard’s acute awareness of human frailty. Currently, Robert Pack teaches in the Honors College of the University of Montana.
Author’s Note to the Reader
This book is intended for the reader and theatergoer who loves Shakespeare’s plays and enjoys contemplating them in their complexity: the richness of metaphorical language, the characters’ psychological depths and dimensions, the philosophical implications of the plays as organic dramatic entities that testify to the nature of human limitation and human freedom.
I assume that the reader has the patience to delight in the minute details of Shakespeare’s patterns of imagery as well as to admire the overall structure of the plays. What most interests me is how these plays cohere and how they can be read from different perspectives which nevertheless complement each other. Thus, I have not adopted any single critical approach, but have responded to each play’s individual identity with what seem to me appropriate and fruitful interpretative points of view.
Blessed in having been enfranchised by my profession to teach Shakespeare for half a century, I wish to share with my readers the humane vision I find everywhere in Shakespeare’s incomparable plays—a vision empathetic to human suffering and moral aspiration, tempered by his acute awareness of human frailty, which has immeasurably enriched my own life.
CHAPTER ONE
Introduction: Will, Choice & Storytelling
I Motivation & Inevitability
Shakespeare’s representation of human character usually assumes that each person’s behavior is comprehensible in terms of his or her individual psychological motivation. In this sense, Shakespeare is primarily a determinist: a character’s actions follow from that character’s given or inherited nature as manifested through some form of appetite or desire, which Shakespeare often calls “will.” A direct causal connection can be seen between the desires of Shakespeare’s characters and the domestic, social, or political manifestation of those desires. It follows that Shakespeare’s representation of human nature is open to analysis which, even when complex, is reductive in that it is informed by laws that are, in modern terms, biologically grounded or genetically programmed; so, too, is the behavior of Shakespearean characters conducive to psychological analysis in that Oedipal conflicts, particularly between son and father, abound in Shakespeare’s plays. When we see a character caught up in a fundamental passion that determines a particular relationship, as Hamlet’s obsessive hatred of Claudius or Othello’s jealousy of Desdemona, an apparent inevitability of behavior becomes manifest that will lead this character to what we, the audience, are likely to regard as a fated conclusion.
While the necessities of their natures drive Shakespeare’s characters to their seemingly inevitable fates according to psychological laws, nevertheless, either in action or in attitude, they sometimes appear to leap out of their behavioral molds, to will themselves to be other than what their earlier behavior revealed about them, and, in so doing, they demonstrate a capacity for radical freedom or transcendence based on a surprising choice. The moments in which these characters make manifest the freedom of their wills, in which they choose their actions or their attitudes within the circumstances or conditions in which they find themselves, are beyond predictability precisely because they are in some ultimate sense free of the psychological and behavioral laws that seem to determine their actions. Shakespeare, with his uncanny ability to make even extreme forms of behavior believable, is able to convince us of the credibility of these astonishing transformations, these discontinuities between what a character has been and what he or she suddenly chooses to be. In these circumstances, the word “will” takes on an opposite meaning from that of compelling desire; here the word connotes responsible and self-generated choice. Even if this choice does not take place until the moment before death—as if the certain knowledge of death had a miraculously liberating effect—the choice of a renewed self-identity reveals a power that somehow had been latent in the character all along. To present his characters as essentially determined yet capable of breaking free of the apparently fixed aspect of their natures, Shakespeare must find some paradoxical way of portraying the reality of both necessity and freedom, of behavioral determinism and the assertions of radical will that allow determinism to be transcended, even if only fleetingly in the moments before death, and even if this transcendence cannot change anything other than the attitude with which the character confronts his or her fate.
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