Journal 9
When Freud did his psychological analysis of people, he took on the task of interviewing people, and trying to understand what they really thought. From everything that our book presents to us, and even moreso from our limited required reading, there is no possible way to understand someone's true thoughts. The Norton version claims that these sonnets were likely produced unauthorized. They very well might have been fictional, glimpses into thoughts that Shakes had for a moment or two (very Freudian concept) that reveal his true tendencies, or they could be edited misinterpretations of Shakespeare. To analyze literature that has so many questions around it isn't too much of a problem, it is when you expect to find Shakes' personality within the literature that you run into problems. Freud was looking to discover people and the only person you will discover through your Shakespeare reading is yourself. "Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of other people." (Tolstoy's War and Peace)
We have been reading to discover Shakespeare, but have been using him as a means to justify ourselves.
Thus, when I read "That I may not be so, nor thou belied,
Bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart go wide." I see through my eyes that this lines up so perfectly with the idea of the "straight and narrow path," and see Shakespeare in the same struggle I face to not fall into depression at the way our miserable world works, but to keep my eyes on something different.
"Do I not think on thee, when I forgot
Am of myself, all tyrant, for thy sake?" Just read that Tolstoy quote again. Shakes is facing the same thing I read after reading that quote. Have I become a terrible person with the excuse that it is for others?
"But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjured most;"
I feel you, bro. Shakes me and you are both monsters realizing how terrible we are compared to the few troubles most people have.
Hmm... (AKA I can't think of a better title)
The idea of a biased perspective is certainly a valid one; we all approach things from different angles dependent on who we are as a person, our upbringing and life experiences, etc. That interested me a lot; it was my perception that Shakespeare was a very id-oriented and sexual person...but as I type this, I am listening to (and ok, dancing too as well), Lady GaGa's "LoveGame". Maybe it is my own sexuality that makes me see him in such a light, while your perspective of struggling to live based on a "straight and narrow" path was completely foreign to me and I had not thought of that before.
Obviously we will never know, but it's fun to speculate, and even more fun to find a way to relate to one of the world's most renowned literary geniuses.
I liked the Tolstoy quote in conjunction with Shakespeare; a good mixture, I think.
-Hilary
I love Tolstoy
We should have a class on Leo Tolstoy offered at school.
It's tough to analyze Shakespeare because considering how much I think I am effected by my surroundings (my super ego or ego maybe), Shakes would have been too. Since we haven't looked much into what was going on around him when he was writing these, it is hard to tell what is id and what isn't. Crazy history. One of my biggest questions with life is: at what point do we forget (lose) history?
Ryan K Bishop
Awesome!
I really enjoyed your take on the Freudian analysis. The sonnets do take on entirely different meanings when we take them one by one or even line by line and relate them to our lives. Although, I do wonder, if you had to say one thing you can tell about Shakes from these poems... what would you say you can tell about him?
-Renee Ward
One thing
I have a lot of different theories. I think the one thing we can certainly deduce is that Shakes is just as human as all of us. He has had glimpses into thoughts good and bad. The thing is Shakes had a life before the first quatrain of sonnet one and had a life after the very last couplet.
Ryan K Bishop